Advancing Equity for Athens’ Resilience
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The new Transatlantic Policy Lab report contains recommendations to improve trust, employment, and public space in the municipality of Athens, Greece. The report is the culmination of a yearlong effort by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Municipality of Athens, 100 Resilient Cities, and fifteen lab participants drawn from across Europe and the United States.
OVERVIEW
The Bertelsmann Foundation, with generous support from the Open Society Foundations, partnered with the 100 Resilient Cities initiative (pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) to launch the Transatlantic Policy Lab (“the lab”). The lab is a unique platform to explore the agenda for advancing just and fair inclusion, or equity, in American and European cities Boston, Massachusetts, and Athens, Greece, provided the backdrops for interactive, weeklong explorations into this issue by a team of trans-Atlantic experts from local government, philanthropy, think tanks, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. The lab is an organic, results-driven exercise, aimed not only at facilitating trans-Atlantic dialogue, but also toward developing place-based policy recommendations that can advance resilience on both sides of the Atlantic.
This report summarizes the Athens lab, which took place on June 26-30, 2016. Since its inception, the lab has worked in tandem with Athens' Chief Resilience Officer Eleni Myrivili. The lab is designed to build on the key findings of the municipality’s Preliminary Resilience Assessment, which used community engagement to rank and order the municipality’s resilience priorities. The recommendations contained within this report will feed into the Municipality of Athens' Resilience Strategy, which will be released to the public in 2017.