Twelve cross-border projects will be financed by Interreg VI-A (Italy-Slovenia 2021-2027) through the call SPF 2/2024 of the Small Projects Fund managed by the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation - EGTC GO. The results for the second call have been published this morning on the EGTC GO website. The SPF GO! 2025 fund, as it is known, has as its main objective the preparation of the cross-border territory for the European Capital of Culture Nova Gorica-Gorizia 2025.
The twelve funded projects focus on the topics of multilingualism, active participation of children and young people, sustainable mobility, and sport, declining these topics in innovative and creative ways. Local students conducting guided tours, an international festival of minority languages, cultural exchanges between young artists, bilingual performances to enhance figure theatre, a mobile climbing gym, a cross-border online media for young people created by young people, a project focusing on the Soča river with riverbank cleaning, a descent with several boats and a bike ride to discover local cycling routes: these are just some of the project ideas that will be funded.
The call for proposals was open from 26 March 2024 to 14 May 2024. The themes it focused on were active inclusion and participation of children and young people (under 30), green mobility, social and environmental sustainability; enhancing and strengthening the culture of multilingualism; and promoting well-being and social cohesion in sport and physical activity accessible to all. 134 project proposals were received, of which more than 80 had two project partners.
116 proposals passed the administrative checks and moved on to the quality check, during which the evaluators scored the projects. As a result of this procedure, 44 projects received a score of 85 or higher, a condition for eligibility for funding. The funds allocated for this call amounted to almost EUR 1.5 million, which enabled 12 projects to be funded. Of these, three projects will be financed for just under EUR 50,000, while the other nine will receive funding of between EUR 117,000 and EUR 150,000. Only two projects were submitted by a single entity, while all others were submitted by a lead partner and a project partner. As in the previous call, the partners are both private and public entities of various kinds and come from a wide area, stretching from the two centres of Nova Gorica and Gorizia via Trieste, Ljubljana and other localities to the neighbouring Veneto region.
The results are available here.