Dear LeTSGEPs friends,
What a time we are living in! Last year, in our first Newsletter, we welcomed the 2021 full of ideas and projects for the hoped forthcoming recovery from the pandemic. Still, here we are again, after the second year of Covid-19.
A very tough challenge indeed! Nevertheless, we all did our best to carry on,
facing obstacles, solving problems, fulfilling our tasks, with even more commitment and determination, if possible. At LeTSGEPs’ we also displayed all our will to implement the project, by adapting procedures and methodologies to another unexpected situation.
After the LeTSGEPs’ results of the first half of 2021, which we presented in our previous Newsletter, let’s here focus then on our second half of 2021, in view of the 2022 challenges.
As you will remember, in June 2021 we completed two main steps of the project, that are the Context and Gender Auditing Analysis and the Gender Equality Plans for each of the six implementing partners. The end of the first reporting period and the successful Commission review marked an important turning point for us:
Analysis and plans were done, now the big sea of implementation was in front of us to sail.
That’s what we mainly did from July to December 2021: a daily, constant, hammering and tenacious effort to develop and achieve the Gender Equality measures that we had studied, planned and negotiated for about one year before.
No doubt it was a hard work, unsatisfactory and stressful, since partners had to overcome obstacles, objections, criticisms. On the other hand this is the real core of the fight for a transformative gender-equal change at RPOs: we were prepared for this!
It was important, in this phase, to gather strengths, share experiences and ideas among partners, and, why not, to give courage to each other.
We decided to intensify online partners’ meetings, we structured a very detailed dashboard to monitor the GEPs’ advancements as well as slowdowns. We also held bilateral online meetings with each partner, in order to examine specifically each GEP state-of-the-art with the due attention and care.
We will see the results of this first round of the implementation phase in the deliverable (D4.2) due in April 2022, but we can already spoil that.. we are succeeding!
Slowly but constantly our RPOs are changing and paying more attention and developing a stronger will to achieve Gender Equality.
We are aware that, besides the commitment to research and methodologies to develop contents, the training and dissemination activities also play a big role in these results, and we are determined and truly willing to insist and develop them further.
As for the training activities,
we started by the end of 2021 to prepare the second round of online lessons, which is expected to be at a more advanced and skilling level and will take place between January and April 2022, both on Gender Equality Plans and Gender Budgeting, in the meanwhile we had two introductory lessons in December.
The dissemination activities
continued also in the second part of 2021: we updated our accounts on the social media (Twitter and Linkedin), and we reported on the project news on the website. The publication of the six Gender Equality Plans (in synthesis) were of great satisfaction for us!
We also continued with other dissemination initiatives, like the internal events and the national Stakeholders’ meetings. We also participated to other sisters’ projects’ online conferences, and participated to some calls for papers, whose results will be available in 2022. A main event (for us), deserves to be specifically high lightened, since we are very proud of it.
On the 2nd and the 3rd of December we participated in the Unimore Project meeting in Modena… partially in presence!
Considering that pandemic in September seemed to slowdown, and that vaccines were doing their work, we took courage and decided to organize a “near-normal” event at the beginning of December. Unluckily, a new pandemic wave prevented some of our partners to participate in presence, and we had to provide for their online participation too. It was a very tough challenge at technical level, with some mishaps, but we succeeded!
This event was very important for us: we are fully aware of the role of personal relationships in the European projects’ success, and this meeting represented a recovery and resilience sign for all of us.
And now? Here we are again,
another winter under the pandemic threat, but we are truly confident this will be the last one. New challenges are in front of LeTSGEPs: in 2022 we will optimize the results of the implementation phase in a second Gender Equality Plan for our six partners, we will repeat another implementation process, go ahead with training, dissemination…
No doubt, another big deal of work is in front of us, but we are confident that we will continue on this path for other fulfilling results that we will share with you with pride.
What else? Good work to all of you, happy new year, and above all.. good health to all of us!
