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In order to take up the challenges of society and act together to respond to the issues that our city and our territory are facing or will face in the future, with a desire to strongly connect their community (students, teachers, researchers) with the city and the territory of Brussels, the Université libre de Bruxelles and its Dutch-speaking counterpart, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, have created the BROL (Brussels Research Open Lab) on the site of the future bi-university campus Usquare. The purpose of this space is to act as a third place, an open meeting place for all the players who make up Brussels, where the two universities wish to contribute their skills and expertise in collaboration with the people of Brussels, the city's inhabitants, actors from the voluntary sector, entrepreneurs and public administrations. It is quite natural that BROL will play the role of a local Open Lab within the CIVIS network.

Seed funding of locally anchored projects

Like the other CIVIS Open Labs, BROL has launched its first call for seed funding of projects, with the aim of contributing to the development and implementation of solutions to local societal challenges and needs. This call was opened on 21 June 2022 and closed on 22 August 2022. Applications were subject to an evaluation and selection process. The awarded projects have been funded and supported by the BROL team.

Cité de la Jeunesse – City of Youth

Supported by Promo Jeunes ASBL, the "Cité de la Jeunesse" project aims to encourage young people to live together and become emancipated through the design of a city created by and for them. This place represents a device allowing the exercise of active citizenship and the meeting of young people from Brussels who do not meet either in school or in their leisure time.

 

 

Participation in the CIVIS project will enable us to continue the participatory process through, on the one hand, the organisation of workshops to facilitate the collective to determine how to activate, how to make the place available to young people live and how to develop it and, on the other hand, the organisation of practical/creative/manual workshops to bring out common achievements, which will serve as a basis for a collective appropriation of the space.

   

 

Project partners

Applicant:Promo Jeunes asbl

Partner associations:collectiv-a, Philomène ASBL, Promo Jeunes AMO, BRIK, Infor Jeunes Bruxelles, Boîte Magique ASBL

Academic partners: ULB laboratoire GERME (Pr Dirk Jacobs & Dr Alejandra Alarcon) & ReSIC (Laura Calabrese) ; VUB (Pr Esli Struys)

Want to learn more or get involved?

If you are a member of one of the CIVIS member universities or a stakeholder in any of the CIVIS territories and would like to find out more about the project, reach us by email or by contacting your CIVIS university.

Project contact: e.hanson@promojeunes.be

OpenLab contact at ULB:etienne.toffin@ulb.be

Agir pour la prise en compte de l’illettrisme – Taking action to address illiteracy

Lire et Ecrire estimates on the basis of international surveys that 10% of the adult population in Fédération Wallonie–Bruxelles is illiterate, i.e. does not master the fundamental languages (oral, reading, writing, arithmetic) and basic knowledge from primary school, neither in French nor in another language.

Lire et Ecrire is regularly and increasingly approached by private and public organisations interested in acting on these findings at their level, either for their users and/or their workers. We are developing similar skills internally: literacy training, including for workers, raising awareness of the persistence of illiteracy and taking people into account, ongoing training for frontline workers, development of territorial platforms, etc., but also more specific projects such as La Traversée. However, we have not developed specific professional skills to support these organisations and are struggling to find the right methodological and organisational framework. We would like to be able to respond regularly and appropriately to their calls for tender and/or requests for collaboration that could have a significant impact on people.

As a lifelong learning movement, we actively support the possibilities of civic engagement of illiterate people who wish to do so and are attentive to creating opportunities for learners to position themselves as competent actors in the fight against illiteracy, its causes and/or its consequences. Aware of the difficulty for literate people to understand the specific difficulties of non-literate people and convinced that being a beginner reader is not the same as being a beginner thinker, we seek to base our work on the expertise of our teams as well as on that of the people who experience these situations.

In this project and around the problem described above, we wish to create a space for reflection and design associating researchers (statutory and/or students) and operators in the field to define an intervention device of the type accompanying a company or organisation in taking account of illiteracy in their development.

Several dimensions seem to us to need to be dealt with, requiring a cross-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, in a non-exhaustive manner: the analysis of the demand and how to mark out our response in relation to it, the methodological and ethical framework for intervention, the internal competences of Lire et Ecrire and the external competences to be mobilised, the organisational, institutional and partnership framework to be implemented in order to carry out this mission - including the statutory, administrative and legal questions.

In our opinion, this is an innovative approach, more specifically on at least 2 aspects: the development of a service offer in and from a non-market association framework and the mobilisation of the expertise of people experiencing illiteracy in the process.

Project partners

Applicant:Lire et Écrire Communauté française

Institution: Les régionales de Lire et Ecrire (particularly the one in Brussels)

Academic partners: Brussels Research Open Lab

Want to learn more or get involved?

If you are a member of one of the CIVIS member universities or a stakeholder in any of the CIVIS territories and would like to find out more about the project, reach us by email or by contacting your CIVIS university.

Project contact: sylvie.pinchart@lire-et-ecrire.be 

OpenLab contact at ULB: fanny.sbaraglia@ulb.be

Jeu de plateau/Board game - Creat'on - Neder-over-Hembeek

This project consists of the creation and implementation of a board game that will be used as the main methodological tool during a Hackaton that aims to work on employment support services in Neder-Over-Hembeek. The main objective is to structure the whole hackathon and to allow all participants to participate regardless of their ability to read, write, or express themselves in French or Dutch.

 

This hackathon is a continuation of the study carried out in 2020 by the ULB Policy Lab on the modes of intervention of the partners of the Brussels City Job Centre in the geographical area of Neder-Over-Heembeek (NOH) financed by the local 2020 project. At the end of this study, avenues of reflection and recommendations were made in order to reach an unemployed public that does not or hardly ever solicits the services of Actiris and its partners.

Three major challenges were taken up:

  • To circulate information between the partners of the MDE and the partner NOH associations
  • To identify a relevant communication method to inform the public in this area.
  • To implement effective concrete actions

The main deliverable of the project is a complete game (board, cards, pieces and rules) that can be reused by any other type of collective: a team of professionals, citizens, public administrations, students etc. 

Project partners

Applicant: Aurélie Tibbaut 

Partner associations: Centrale de l'Emploi de la Ville de Bruxelles, Actiris

Institution: Université libre de Bruxelles

Academic partners: Policy Lab Science Po ULB 

Want to learn more or get involved?

If you are a member of one of the CIVIS member universities or a stakeholder in any of the CIVIS territories and would like to find out more about the project, reach us by email or by contacting your CIVIS university.

Project contact:aurelie.tibbaut@ulb.be 

OpenLab contact at ULB:fanny.sbaraglia@ulb.be 

Biorama

Biorama is a structure that works as a platform between the academic world, citizens and public authorities to position itself as an actor at the service of change and urban ecology. Its objective is to develop projects to raise awareness of the living world, to empower citizens for resilient urban projects and to propose nature-based solutions. Biorama wants to invest the urban space as a place of experimentation by involving citizens and their territory for environmental improvements and resilient transformations. Biorama defines itself as a citizens' movement that raises awareness of the importance of nature in the city, and that seeks and develops appropriate processes of ecological action with the cross-involvement of citizens, associations, researchers and public authorities.

   

The financial support of CIVIS made it possible to set up a first collective activity on the modality of an urban Bioblitz. This Citizen Science activity enables an inventory of biodiversity to be drawn up in a participatory and inclusive manner. Participants were able to discover treasures from nature, plants, insects and other small neighbours that are often overlooked. ULB biology students (bachelor and master) actively participated in the implementation of this activity and in the exploration of this methodology to reconnect inhabitants and users with nature in the city, while working to consolidate the state of knowledge in the field of urban biodiversity.

Project partners

Applicant:  Biorama

Academic partners: MUZOO asbl

Want to learn more or get involved?

If you are a member of one of the CIVIS member universities or a stakeholder in any of the CIVIS territories and would like to find out more about the project, reach us by email or by contacting your CIVIS university.

Project contact:contact@biorama.org

OpenLab contact at ULB:etienne.toffin@ulb.be