The Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) organised the first workshop for community of selected pilots and fellows, associated projects, partners and initiatives on October 19th in Brussels. The workshop was held in the premises of the European Committee of the Regions, one of the associated partners of the CCRI.

As a CCRI project, RESOURCE was also invited to the event and 3 consortium members attended and its was a great opportunity to meet all the CE projects, cities, and regions.

The CCRI community – a family of projects to support circular economy transition

CCRI brings together a diverse group of cities, regions (12 pilots and 25 fellows) and associated projects and partners to experiment and demonstrate circular systemic economy solutions in order to bring them to market. This translates the European Green Deal on a local level, contributing to an inclusive and just green transition for all. So far, a total of 16 CCRI projects have been funded over the last three years, under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. The knowledge generated by such projects like RESOURCE will be made available to support the CCRI community as well as cities, regions and private actors beyond this group in their circular transition.

The RESOURCE project at the heart of an active and growing community

The team learnt about some fantastic examples of sustainable initiatives implemented by European cities & regions and met amazing partners and peers, with whom collaboration has been engaged, for instance about case studies identification, experience of scaling up Circular Economy (CE) startups, etc.

The team presented the project’s offer and needs within 2 separate break-out sessions on “Aligning needs and interests within the CCRI community”, one was on Resource management and another one on Bioeconomy & industrial symbiosis. The expressed needs included

  • Sharing best practices in fundraising and knowing CE friendly funds
  • Getting participants’ interest to be among the next 5 countries to apply in the replication of our methodology to come
  • Creating potential joint events and activities with some of the participants

RESOURCE will develop a set of services to support CE projects’ fundraising, through the experience of supporting 9-15 projects from Aragon in building circular innovative business models to attract and raise 20M€, and then expanding the methodology to 5 other European countries.

Press-release inspired from TREASoURcE article wrote by Kaisa Simola (CLIC Innovation), on 21.10.2022.