On the 2nd of March 2012 the working meeting of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum Working Group 4 (“People-to-people contacts”) took place in the Czech Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs with support of the Association for International Affairs (AMO) and DEMAS, the Czech Association for Democracy Assistance and Human Rights. The meeting has gathered approximately 40 members of the platform from the Eastern Partnership countries and the EU member states. On behalf of AEGEE-Europe and the AEGEE Eastern Partnership project Shushan Kchachatryan (Project Content Manager) and Daryna Skryl (Project PR Manager) were present.

The recommendations from the meeting of the Forum’s Working Group 4, which met as part of a conference, included the following:

• Ensure open access for Eastern partners to the new generation programmes, especially programmes supporting Contacts between people, such as Erasmus for All and Creative Europe.

• The EU and member states should explore possibilities for researchers from the EU to visit the Partner countries, and vice-versa, through programmes such as Marie Curie Action.

• The European Commission and member states should continue to support the Jean Monnet Initiative, and to increase the number of scholarships available for students from Partner countries.

• Adult, non-formal and non-vocational education, as well as youth, must remain separate autonomous chapters within the single new generation programmes.

Besides participation in the recommendations’ forming, the project team members succeeded in networking with possible future partners, like Youth Eastern Partnership.

Also during the meeting a new initiative of the International Visegrad Fund was announced – V4EaP (http://visegradfund.org/v4eap/) offering quite a wide range of opportunities in Education and Civil Society development. The main aims are facil­i­tat­ing the unique know-how of the Visegrad coun­tries with social and eco­nomic trans­for­ma­tion, democ­ra­ti­za­tion and regional coop­er­a­tion par­tic­u­larly through the devel­op­ment of civil soci­ety and sup­port of coop­er­a­tion among local gov­ern­ments, uni­ver­si­ties and indi­vid­ual citizens. The pro­gram is launched in 2012 with total bud­get of €1,456,800 under the fol­low­ing four sep­a­rate grant and mobil­ity programs: Flagship Projects, Standard Grants, Visegrad University Studies Grants, Visegrad Scholarships for EaP.

After the ending of formal part of the meeting, participants had opportunity to meet the councils of their native countries to introduce themselves and tell more about the outcomes of the meeting.

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