Picture by: Rosa Lisa Rosenberg, Stadt Essen
Inspiring start into our Partner Meeting
This time we were invited in Essen for our half yearly partner meeting. We started our partner meeting by a welcome speech held from Sabine Raskob the Deputy Chief of Environmental, Sport and Transport at Essen. After some games to break the ice in the morning and to get to know some new colleagues that are just starting to work in our project, we started with our first work session.
We finished the morning off by short pilot pitches to introduce and share the status of the pilots to everyone in our project, followed by a Q&A to gain more insights on pilot actions and challenges. Some of the challenges mentioned have been obstacles in terms of a legal and political level, process and involving stakeholders, persuasion of local authorities or the preparation of the market. In small groups we lively brainstormed to overcome these challenges, and we executed a SWOT-analyses to get more insights. The partners gained new ideas to deal with their challenges.
After reconnecting with project partners during our lunch break, we have been introduced and worked on the first draft of our project strategy. We expect to present a draft strategy at the end of this year.
After this successful day we visited the Folkwang Museum in Essen, which following the efforts to become the only climate neutral museum in Germany. The Folkwang museum is reducing their own carbon emission footprint to net zero. [1]
When the Architect David Chipperfield redesigned the 120-year-old museum in 2020, the Museum was originally not supposed to become climate neutral during the renovation process. Instead, the Folkwang museum is becoming climate neutral through different processes such as climate assessment, facilities technology, Museum operations, the agenda, networking, biodiversity, visitor mobility and a climate ticket. After an extended and interesting presentation we even got a guided tour by the museum director Peter Güterschlot.
Wrapping it up
The second Day in Essen started as motivation as the first, with a work session regarding our trainings. We first discussed the profile of different stakeholders. And then worked on getting a better overview on training milestones and the further implementation of a training programme. We noticed that some of the partners have already started with trainings. Some more to introduce CO2-reduction and engage partner organisations or stakeholders to this topic. Some more advanced to introduce CO2-reduction in daily work processes.
We finished our Project Partner Meeting with an interesting and relevant work session regarding the monitoring framework of our pilots.
Our Partner Meeting in Essen was a great success from which we drew important energy and inspiration to achieve further milestones in the project.
[1] https://www.museum-folkwang.de/en/green-museum