Cool Neighbourhoods took practical lessons from its Middelburg Midterm Event to the Interreg North-West Europe Communication and Impact Workshop in Brussels, where Tiny Maenhout shared how thoughtful event design can turn communication into participation, peer learning and wider impact.

 Participants exchange experience during the Interreg North-West Europe Communication and Impact Workshop in Brussels.

Sharing a practical good practice

The Brussels workshop brought together communication practitioners and projects from across Interreg North-West Europe to exchange approaches for improving communication, stakeholder engagement and project impact. Cool Neighbourhoods used the opportunity to share a practical example from the project’s Midterm Event in Middelburg – not simply what was communicated, but how the event itself was designed as a space for exchange and learning.

Tiny Maenhout brought the Middelburg experience directly into the Brussels discussion. Drawing on her first-hand involvement in the event, she explained how the programme had been deliberately structured to move beyond a conventional sequence of presentations and create repeated opportunities for participants to meet, exchange experience and make new connections.

Tiny’s perspective – creating participation throughout the event

Tiny highlighted the practical engagement formats used in Middelburg, including Welcome & Connect, the Collaboration Café, the Knowledge Exchange Zone, Lunch & Learn and Connect & Continue. Together, these elements created different points during the event for informal discussion, structured exchange, networking and reflection.

Her contribution focused on what these activities looked like in practice, what worked well, what could be improved and what other projects could take from the experience. This practical perspective was important: the value of the Middelburg approach was not in creating activities for their own sake, but in making it easier for municipalities, researchers, practitioners, programme representatives and community-focused organisations to use the knowledge being shared.

Key message – Communication is most effective when it creates opportunities to exchange knowledge, build relationships and take practical learning back into organisations and regions.

 

From visibility to wider impact

The wider Brussels discussion reinforced a key Cool Neighbourhoods message: communication should not stop at visibility. Well-designed communication can help project knowledge move into new partnerships, stronger local capacity and practical action. The Middelburg experience showed how a project event can become part of that process when participation and knowledge exchange are designed into the programme from the outset.

This also connects directly with Cool Neighbourhoods’ wider approach to building capacity beyond the partnership. Project knowledge is shared with partner teams, adapted to local contexts, delivered to practitioners and community stakeholders, and then carried further through professional and regional networks. The aim is not only to communicate project results, but to make those results usable and replicable across North-West Europe.

A model other projects can adapt

The Brussels workshop provided an opportunity to compare this experience with approaches being used by other Interreg projects and to identify practical ideas that can be transferred. The lesson from Middelburg is straightforward: bring related projects and practitioners together around a shared challenge, make project knowledge visible, create space for genuine exchange and plan how the learning will continue after the event.

For Cool Neighbourhoods, the discussion in Brussels was therefore both a chance to share experience and an opportunity to strengthen the project’s own communication and capacity-building approach. Tiny’s contribution helped turn the Middelburg experience into a practical example that other projects can adapt to their own settings.

As Cool Neighbourhoods moves forward, these lessons will continue to support the project’s wider objective of transferring knowledge beyond the partnership and helping municipalities, practitioners and communities build greater resilience to heat stress through collaboration, adaptation and replication.