The SUSTAINMENT project consortium worked actively for two years with a spirit that can de described as enthusiastic and visionary. There is a common understanding of the challenges and requirements that we face. Nevertheless, all cities have managed either to establish an SMC during the project life-time or to have the plan ready by the end of the project.

Through out the project lifetime each city wrote Activity reports on a bi-monthly basis.UBC EnvCom then compiled the individual reports into one document, summarised, and analysed the activities. To check out some of the "gems" that our project partners have been involved in, open the Activity archive document below:

The 1st Competence Development Training held in June 2006 fueled the motor of all partner cities to begin the plan development work and prepared them for coming distance learning tasks. The distance learning tasks created a foundation from which the cities could begin to further fill in the content of the SMC development plan. Meanwhile, a Russian focused training workshop was held in Uppsala, Sweden in 10-11 October 2006 to catch the Russian participant cities up on the content of the training seminar they missed due to earlier funding delays. Partners gathered in Riga for the 2nd Competence Development training workshop 30 October -2 November, 2006, which completed framework for the SMC development plan. After the Riga training, the trainers started their city specific guidance which took place in 4 phases. The 3rd Competence Development training took place towards the end of the guidance phase in Novgorod in 16-18 April 2007.

After the completed guidance phase, cities worked on further developing their drafts into a final SMC Development Plan. These Plans were finalised by the end of September 2007 and they were published as a part of the URBANworks toolkit. From September onwards cities worked to gain the political approval for and implementation of the Plan, eventually leading to the establishment of a Sustainability Management Center. By the end of the project good results were achieved in many of the partner cities, and the process continues further.

The Final conference disseminating the main project results, was held in Gdansk, Poland in November 2007.

The organisation of sustainable management is a challenge for local administrations. Answering ques-tions such as How to best systematise cross-sectoral cooperation? How to best involve stakeholders like citizens or the private sector in the process? are crucial to the development of a process.
In the SUSTAINMENT project, each city was provided with funding especially earmarked for a Local Dissemination Event.

According to the SUSTAINMENT it is an information event "describing the state of sustainability in the municipality using project results". These events were a great opportunity to gather selected key stakeholders and push forward and gather support and input/resources for partner cities´ plans to bridge the city’s sustainability gaps. It was also an opportunity to locally communicate information about the project team’s work with the SMC development to selected key stakeholders.

It was up to each city to plan their Local Dissemination event and choose its form. We recommended cit-ies to follow the Communication cycle presented in the Communication training and integrate this with the work in the distance task. The aim was to promote dialogue, rather than one-way communication, such as printed material or website.

Many of these events have been public forums aimed at citizens, while some of the events have been for example workshops geared towards the city administration and political decision makers. The following list includes reports from the events and some additional material (sometimes in local language). The poster is from "Car free day in Turku".