Looking for collaboration around the Baltic Sea

Upplandsbygd Community-Led Local Development is a non-profit association operating within four municipalities across Uppsala and Stockholm County in Sweden. One of our municipalities, Östhammar, has a coastline to the Baltic sea and the other three municipalities are connected to Mälaren, the third biggest lake in Sweden with an outflow to the Baltic sea.

Upplandsbygd supports innovative ideas to improve the prerequisites of our countryside while simultaneously strengthening the ecosystem. During the last few years, we have worked a lot to build partnership with actors from the civic-, private-, and public sectors in our area that are motivated to work with the sustainable development goals from Agenda 2030 on a local level. We have seen many interesting initiatives recently, and we aim to help these actors find international contacts to share experiences and best practice on how to work with sustainable development and—at the same time—improve life in rural areas.

We intend to initiate a network around the Baltic Sea in which stakeholders from different sectors share their ideas and experience on how to transform rural societies to become more sustainable and to build a more resilient region. The network will focus on how we, together, can contribute to the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region which is targeting the three objectives: Save the Sea, Connect the Region, and Increase Prosperity.

We hope that this network will help and inspire motivated actors around the Baltic sea who share the ambition to contribute to reach the global goals and that it can work as a platform to initiate transnational projects in the future. To learn more about our ideas for the network and see if this might complement your work with sustainability please feel free to contact emma.mattila@upplandsbygd.se.

Best regards,
Emma Mattila Upplandsbygd CLLD