Cork City Council is engaged as a partner in several European Funded Projects across a number of different funding calls .These projects help to advance Cork City Council’s knowledge about international best practice activities, promote transnational collaboration and help to accelerate social and economic innovation activities to enhance Cork in a sustainable way. Cork City Council Staff are currently involved in projects under themes including smart cities, social innovation and engagement, energy efficiency and tourism.
Cork City Council has engaged in projects such as:
Cult-CreaTE aims to examine the potential of all kinds of Cultural & Creative Industries (CCIs) in terms of tourism. In particular, the project will place an emphasis on opportunities for experiential ‘co-creation’ which actively involves the visitor in cultural and creative tourism (CCT).
Informed and supplemented by the learning as offered by project partners and assimilated, as and where appropriate, into the local context, the project will seek to identify a set of focussed and feasible actions by which to positively influence the Cork City Council Tourism Statement of Strategy & Work Programme 2017-2022
Cork City Council, Malta Enterprises and Tartu City Council have commenced a new year-long EU-funded project focused on social entrepreneurship in 2021. FOSO-POCO focuses on creating better understanding of the conditions for social entrepreneurship by directly involving relevant actors and stakeholders in efforts to identify and address existing gaps in the supports for social enterprises.
Co-funded by the COSME Programme of the EU
The project has 3 specific objectives:
The partners in this project are Tartu City Council, Cork City Council and Malta Enterprise, who will act as lead partner. Each partner will organise a number of stakeholder meetings where gaps in the support services available to social enterprises are mapped and analysed. A peer review of the situation in each of the 3 participating countries will be undertaken by the stakeholders. A survey of local stakeholders is also being conducted. The findings from these meetings will be presented and shared at 3 workshops organised by the partners from Ireland, Malta and Estonia and where local and national stakeholders can participate.
More information on the partner cities is offered in the boxes at the end of this page.
As part of the project, we undertook a short online survey of organisations working in the field of social enterprise in Malta, Ireland and Estonia. The survey results were used in the preparation of the final report that will inform national and EU policies in this area and is of particular interest to policy makers because it is addressing the challenges facing social enterprises in the post COVID-19 period.
The online survey covered the following topics:
See Project member webpages for further details of the workshops.
The final workshop took place on 18th January, 2022 .This was an opportunity for the stakeholders from Malta, Estonia and Ireland to share ideas and final thoughts - particularly with reference to the launch of the EU Social Action Programme in December, 2021.
The FOSO-POCO has allowed for better understanding of the state-of-play and potential of social entrepreneurship at local level in Tartu, Cork and Malta, where we shared good practices, as well as improved understanding of how to foster and grow social economy ecosystems.
This final workshop has brought the FOSO POCO project to an end, and its partners aim to investigate other venues for future collaboration for Social Entrepreneurship. We look forward to working together. The final report is attached. Final-Report
The Twinning or Sister city concept developed in Europe following the Second World War. It was seen as a way of removing old enmities which had developed in the war years and it is now grown to such an extent that it covers not just the European mainland, where it began, but also the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Asia, Africa and beyond. Cork is currently twinned with six cities.
The objective of twinning is to help develop links in: cultural, educational, social, tourist, technical, scientific and economic areas. It is hoped that the development of such links would have benefits for all communities involved.
Cork City Council has opened online applications for its Twinning Grants. We are putting out a call to any organisation, group or individual located or providing services within the administrative area of Cork City Council that proposes to promote the twinning links between Cork City and any of its six twinned cities: Swansea (Wales), Coventry (England), Rennes (France), Cologne (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Shanghai (China). The nature of the activity may be community based, voluntary, social, cultural, educational and/or sporting or of general social and economic benefit.
Over the years, Cork City Council's twinning grant has enabled Corkonians to be a part of international poetry exchanges, marathon runner exchanges, and international academic collaboration amongst other diverse activities. Covid restrictions mean that applications this year must comply with some related terms and conditions but this will surely make for some innovative ideas for strengthening our twinning ties in a time of global pandemic.
Applications can be submitted online here. Hard copies of the application form are available on request by contacting gillian_lucas@corkcity.ie The closing date for submission of application forms is no later than 5pm, 11th February 2022.
Alternatively you can download the application form from the link below:-