IANOS Community Engagement Training on Samsø
Last week, a group of IANOS partners of the islands of Ameland, Terceirra, Lampedusa, Nisyros, and Bora Bora headed to Samsø – a small Danish Island known for its community-based transition towards a 100% renewable energy supply, fully accomplished within 10 years. Led by our colleagues Martijn de Vries and Thomas Nielsen, a group of 19 people attended a three-day Train-the-trainer sessions and community engagement workshops at EnergiAkademiet. The aim was to train the project partners in engaging the local communities on their respective islands.
The first day consisted of presentations from each of the IANOS island delegates, sharing their islands’ decarbonisation goals and their experiences in community engagement. Also, the Hanzehogeschool gave a talk on designing a stakeholder engagement strategy of the lighthouse island of Ameland. The day ended with an interactive workshop by Shubhra Chaudhry from New Energy Coalition on crowdfunding for renewable energy initiatives
On the third and last day Søren Hermansen, CEO of EnergiAkademiet, delivered an engaging and interactive workshop inspiring the IANOS island delegates in ways to organise stakeholder and citizen engagement meetings about community-based energy projects on islands.
In conclusion: a lot of ideas were exchanged, common challenges identified, best practices shared, and memories created. Now the partners are ready to implement wat they learned on their own island!
Want to read more in-depth information about the days, programme and workshops? We wrote an in-depth report about the training.
