The Actors of Urban Change (ACT) program empowers urban change makers to make their city a better place. Over eight years the program has attracted over 120 participants from 37 cities all over Europe, including Turkey, Georgia and Russia. But how did the program actually empower all these local projects? DRIFT evaluated the impact of the program on the participants by using three unique lenses: empowerment, social learning and translocal diffusion.
The ACT program helped us to form new visions of urban changes in our city to bring new ideas and adopt these to local reality.
Key insights:
- Participants gained confidence to create urban change and professionalise as members in an international, translocal network across Europe
- The program has empowered the participants by helping them create collective narratives through a shared identity of urban change agents
- Key to the successful program was the management team, which is perceived as highly motivated, compassionate, connected, caring and willing to go beyond their capacities to help participants
- The actual impacts on urban change in the respective case cities were not further reflected in this evaluation. Still, they should be addressed in continuous monitoring of the alumni network of urban change makers.
