Chiajna, the richest county in Romania, has serious problems of infrastructure, education and social services. Citizens involvement is non-existent due to fear. Fear of a Mayor with shady people around as known in all media https://ziaristii.com/interlopii-primarului-alde-din-chiajna-au-batut-un-consilier-pnl-sediul-politiei-si-l-au-atacat-cu-topoarele-pe-seful-local-al-pnl/. Citizen participation in local development is a must and build a community they have the right to live in.

Chiajna, Ilfov in the west part of Bucharest.

Chiajna has a very fast growth due to affordable housing. The local budget is not spent in order to respond to the good quality of citizens’ life. There are over 45,000 people living in a community with bad infrastructure, where mothers cannot use the baby trolley or access to disabled people, there are no public kindergartens with full program so that parents can go to work, financing the local football team is a priority and there is no transparency when it comes to the local budget. We want to engage citizens to contribute to the local development and be active in communicating with the City Hall. Citizens’ intimidation has to stop.

The beneficiars are 45,000 citizens, local authorities and mass media. We want to inform the citizens of their right to get involved in decision-making process, we want to train local authorities’ representative on how transparency works and how can citizen participation help them and mass media will be a vehicle of making the citizens’ voice heard.

Information and consultation with citizens through door hangers, posters, Facebook, meetings.
We will inform citizens of their rights and we will call to action for engagement. We will organize meetings with them in order to convince them to be part of the local decision-making process. We will also launch a call to action to volunteers who would like to take part in the monitoring team of local administration. For this team we will organize a training session.
We will organize meetings with local authorities to address the importance of citizens participation and transparency. We will also provide a training session for the employees on how to ensure transparency and how to get the most out of citizen participation. Working together with citizen is also in their interest.

We will have public consultations taken for real with no shady people in the room.
Citizens participation in the community’s development – participation to planting campaigns, in local administration’s meetings,
Existence of a Local Action Group

Citizens have a set of rights and responsibilities, including the right to participate in decisions that affect public welfare. Participation is an instrumental driver of democratic and socio-economic change, and a fundamental way to empower citizens. We want o encourage them to participate to the local budget but it is hard for someone to participate to a Local Council’s meeting as they are announced in very short time (a day or a few hours) and impossible to respect the 5 days term to subscribe to the attendance list. We strongly believe that by engaging citizen in public decision making, Chiajna can offer healthy and productive lives for its citizens.

HAR has an educational centre in Chiajna and this is how we discovered the problems in the community. Moreover, Mihaela, the project coordinator, is part of the community and is acknowledged of the uses also from a personal perspective.
We want to encourage people to get involved in the public decision making, to improve the life in the community and not accept it because of fear.

Human resources – 14,650
Administrative – 1,750
Communication & events – 30,000

Right tactics to get citizens involvement.