About us

CIRENA is a 24-month citizens’ engagement project that amplifies voices from migration-affected, inland, and receiving regions across Europe. Grounded in everyday experiences, it invites citizens to take part in structured dialogue, reflect on the future of Europe, and jointly shape ideas for a more inclusive and cohesive Union.

By combining local consultations, civic learning, and cross-regional exchange, CIRENA turns participation into a lived practice. Citizens build knowledge, share stories, and develop concrete policy proposals that reflect solidarity, democratic values, and a shared European identity. The project culminates in the Citizens’ Solidarity Pact, a citizen-driven contribution to Europe’s democratic future.

Join the conversation. Follow CIRENA’s activities, explore the ideas and stories emerging from across Europe, and become part of a growing community shaping a more open, democratic, and inclusive Union.

CIRENA develops and tests participatory methods that connect local experiences with European policymaking. The project creates structured spaces for dialogue, learning, and co-creation, enabling citizens’ perspectives to be collected, compared, and transformed into shared policy-oriented outputs.

Its approach combines consultation, civic capacity building, and transnational exchange. Local dialogues feed into cross-border reflection, while learning activities strengthen understanding of EU decision-making and democratic processes. This layered design ensures that individual experiences are not treated in isolation but become part of a broader European conversation.

By linking grassroots input with policy reflection and dissemination, CIRENA contributes to more inclusive and representative forms of citizen participation and supports long-term democratic engagement across Europe

Our Mission

CIRENA aims to turn citizens’ experiences into a meaningful contribution to Europe’s future. The project brings together citizens from migration-affected, inland and receiving regions across Europe and creates a structured journey from local dialogue to European-level policymaking.

Through local consultation and solidarity roundtables, citizens are invited to discuss the challenges they experience in their communities and share their perspectives on European solidarity, democratic participation and social cohesion. These discussions are followed by storytelling and solidarity campaigns and a series of civic skills and capacity-building workshops, helping participants move from expressing their views to developing the knowledge and confidence needed to participate in democratic processes.

The process ultimately leads to the co-creation, testing and endorsement of the Citizens’ Solidarity Pact — a citizen-authored set of policy proposals reflecting perspectives gathered across different European regions. In this way, CIRENA goes beyond consultation: it gives citizens a role as co-authors of ideas and recommendations for the future of the European Union.

The project connects these different local perspectives and carries them forward through the CIRENA process, from consultation and capacity building to the drafting, testing and democratic endorsement of the Citizens’ Solidarity Pact. This creates a direct link between what citizens discuss in their communities and the policy proposals they collectively bring to the European level.