about human and european consultancy

After a long period of silence on my weblog I will catch up with developements at Human European Consultancy.

Soon after my last post we were notified that we had been awarded two other large contracts. One was the follow-up of the European Network of legal experts in the field of non-discrimination. We had been waiting for this news since july, so we started to prepare for managing this network for another 4 years. Another contract was to establish an Academic Network of European Disability experts, called ANED, following a tender in September 2008. That contract which will also run for four years.

Together with the new contracts for the European Fundamental Rights Agency the new contracts asked for a lot of management attention. Mobilising experts, negotiating a work programme with the contracting party and starting the work on the actual products. Besides these new projects we had an exiting time with the implementation and finalising of the training project on anti-discrimination and diversity. Altogether more than 1100 participants from NGOs and nearly 300 participants from trade unions were trained on their role in fighting discriminaton. And more than 1000 companies and other interested groups attended the Diversity Management workshops we organised throughout Europe.

Summer period kept us busy as well since international donors tend to launch their call for tenders just before their own holidays, so that they will find the tender proposals on their desk when they return. We did submit, as leader of a consortium of European Human Rights Institutes, a proposal to provide support services to the Strategic Human Rights Dialogue project in Viet Nam which can help inform the EU – Viet Nam debate in the light of international best practices and experiences in other countries. We also prepared and submitted a proposal for a tender for a new european wide Network of socio-economic experts in the field of anti-discrimination. For both tenders we have 6 competitors. On the Vietnam tender the announcement of the winner is in delay and for the Network tender we expect to hear the outcome late November/beginning of December.