Last week, we welcomed from Portugal Micaela Gil and Miguel Sousa (virtually) - the lead partners of the SHIFT-R transfer network, to Nykaabi! We visited Pensala, Mirka, Normen, the center, Jepro, NIC and Concordia. We even had some donuts with mead, it being vappen and all.
NIC (represented by Ellie Käldström) is a stakeholder in this project, along with Concordia and Åbo Akademi. I (Frank) am actually representing Nykarleby itself, not NIC, but either way I'm wearing both hats for this post!
Nykarleby will be conveying more information about the project through their channels, but we recommend reading about it here. The TL;DR version is that several small towns in Europe are suffering from brain-drain, old unused buildings, and an aging populations. Fundao in Portugal is the lead partner, and they have already managed to turn around their population curve. What have they done, and could Nykarleby gather some inspiration from them? And that's not even mentioning the other 6 towns that are part of the transfer network.
Let's see if we can learn from each other!
