Champions

Cooperative Harmonized Action Model to stop Polarisation in Our Nations

CHAMPIONs’ central action was to establish permanent offline working groups – ‘CHAMPIONs Roundtables’ – combining first-line practitioners (FLPs) of different disciplines, professions and institutions/ agencies, to jointly develop effective detection & response solutions to counter polarisation, build resilience and protect vulnerable groups in their local communities. FLPs were trained to build capacity to design solutions and programmes to most effectively address the drivers of polarisation on local level, and to collaborate most efficiently by breaking down institutional barriers – as for instance in community-embedded approaches. In medium term, project activities were not only be directed at vulnerable individuals, but also included the wider community – who was engaged in awareness-raising events – as well as local and national policy-makers.

Builduing resilience and protecting vulnerable groups

To facilitate these processes of offline joined-up solution development, an online platform was produced combining three central instruments: (i) ‘Alert’ – a collation of tools and services developed under other EU-funded projects that enable FLPs to bring attention to key focal issues to address in their community (e.g. social media monitoring tools); (ii) ‘Arena’ – a communication & cooperation mechanism that enables instantaneous information exchange either privately, between collaborating FLPs, and publicly through sharing good practice and highlighting strengths/ weaknesses of certain actions; (iii) ‘Training Yard’ – a capacity-building resource centre which FLPs can engage with either individually or as a group, complete with learning materials, video-tutorials, good practice guidelines/ handbooks and case study simulation exercises developed through the project action.

Transfer to other countries and communities

The long-term aim of the project was to transfer this pilot model to other communities across the EU where other FLP Roundtables were established and became users of the developed platform. To achieve this, synergies with related EU-funded projects, platforms and networks were harnessed throughout the project and after its implementation period.

Duration 

March 2019 - March 2021

Consortium Partners

Center for Policy Studies, Central European University (CEU CPS), Hungary
Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland
European University Institute (EUI), Italy
ITTI sp. z o.o. (ITTI), Poland
A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe (CEJI), Belgium
Lancaster University (ULANC), UK

Funding

Internal Security Fund (ISF) - Police