This small collection presents examples on projects in Europe supported by or submitted to the European Unions’ different educational and cultural programmes.

The globalization and the demand for lifelong learning competences among all citizens, along with the promoting of a social concept aiming to give all citizens access to education and learning, calls for innovation in education and building bridges cross sectors, countries and continents.


Jan Gejel Denmark Pina Raso Italy Joaquim de Toca Spain

The European network, City Learning Net, is an informal cooperation between educational and training organisations, cities and regions from 20 different European countries. The network addresses the challenge of giving all citizens, despite social, cultural and educational background, access to lifelong learning and thus to empower them to manage their professional and personal lives in the global communities.

The network develops and carries out European projects, courses and mobility especially focused on the citizens who need lifelong learning the most and who need a new motivation to learn and develop personal competences.
Thus the typical target groups in these activities would be adults with special education needs, young drop-outs, migrants and elderly.

But the City Learning Net, as well as the European programmes in general, is also indeed interested in taking such initatives beyond Europe.
One of the old and dedicated City Learning Net partners is Girona in Catalonia, Spain. This partner has been involved in Latin American-European cooperation for many years, and the City Learning Net would now like to take advantage of the network, language and cultural resources of this partner and disseminate examples of lifelong learning projects in Central and Latin America.

Therefore the Girona and Aarhus, Denmark, partners in the City Learning Net established a small project early 2008 to select, edit and translate into Spanish a number of examples of innovative European lifelong learning projects.
The result is this selection of presentations and small interviews, and this Collection will be disseminated to contacts and networks in Central and Latin America, especially through the network of the Girona partner.


First City Learning Net meeting in Girona, Spain

It is our hope and ambition that colleagues in Central and Latin American will take an interest in this collection and will be interested in sharing experience, knowledge and new ideas with the City Learning Net in Europe.
Therefore we invite our colleagues in Central and Latin America to establish a dialogue with us on these matters, and also to disseminate projects or activities from their cities or regions the could be of interest for the City Learning Net.

In the long run we would very much like to see the Atlantic as a mirror of interesting and innovative lifelong learning activities at the two continents, and use our solid Spanish partner and the Catalonian region as the rotation axis of this mirror.