Networks live through and for their members. The experience of rural territories involved in the energy transition is precious when comes the moment to design the future of energy in the E.U. It’s also a great input to shape RURENER’s future! This was the purpose of the online workshop that we organized on Wednesday 8^th of July. Throughout the discussion, many new ideas came up to improve the service RURENER offers to its members. We let you discover them, add your suggestions, or comment them here!

Around 15 RURENER members highly motivated coming from 6 European countries, from Cyprus to Portugal, got together during this online session to design the future of RURENER. After a roundtable to introduce the participants, an exercise appreciated by the “RURENER family”, let’s share experiences! We started by asking ourselves what we love about RURENER and what we would like the network to help us more with? After collecting the feedback and expectations from everyone, we moved on to the second part of the workshop focused on designing solutions to answer the needs and expectations expressed. After 1 hour and 30 minutes of meeting, the conclusion is clear: we have ideas to build on and solutions to implement!

In order to facilitate the harvesting of all the propositions and ideas, we used a mind map during the meeting, collecting on the go all of the ideas expressed. We offer you to discover the main outcomes of the session and the different solutions identified, related to the four main needs:

• Have an easier (and more targeted) access to the spaces of sharing of experiences and knowledge about the energy transition in rural territories
• Getting support in the process of project building (especially cooperation projects) to get access to new funding opportunities
• Putting resilience and local development at the heart of the energy transition
• Involving local people around energy transition initiatives

In order to develop the solutions that were mentioned, our team imagined a detailed action plan, which allows the identification of next steps and the engagement of the RURENER team and members.