objectives

The Purpose of APURE

The APURE main goal and ambition are reinforced through the dynamics of its method and of its action, which aspires:

• to be the support of a European network of popular education, acting with and for the rural world actors who express this necessity, by producing and spreading out new knowledge related to the rural world;
  
• to contribute, in cooperation with other organizations, to the collective education of the development actors through exchange and “intersection” of theoretical knowledge issued from “University departments”, new projects and practical knowledge issued from experience;
  
• to improve the knowledge and cultural values of rural zones, in order to turn them into the main handspike of integrated and global development processes of territories and of the economic and social challenges they are to face;
  
• to develop new supportive relationships within the rural world and between cities and rural villages.
  
• to contribute to facilitate and to deepen the relationship between university centres, research structures and actors in the rural world, to unpin them in the domains of the research-innovation and new technologies.
  
• to co-ordinate, and to foster initiatives facilitating the reunion of the actors of local development, exchanges of good practices, ‘forums’ and platforms of reflection and action, in between the Biennial sessions of the URE.
  
• to assist in the creation, in all places where APURE is present, of cells devoted to the teaching of methods of popular education and technical support at the service of the Associations, the local elected, the public actors, social and economic, in order to strengthen the ability of all.
  

In order to contribute to create the conditions to promote the rural values in our societies, to help to redefine its role and to assure that, all over Europe, the rural individuals, in its own territories, be full actors and actresses, capable of facing the challenges of the development and of implying themselves in dynamics leading to a new foundation of rural values alive and durable, capable of articulating production of wealth and solidarity.

What makes APURE what it is?

The credibility of APURE as an international association is due to the fact that its founders and members have, until now:

• strengthened, during the European sessions of the ERU and other events, a network of development actors, that goes much beyond the European continent;
  
• participated, as a invited Non-Governmental Organisation, in the most diverse and relevant European Conferences, and Programs as: SOCRATES and LEONARDO, LEADER and INTERREG, International Programs LIFE, Seminars...;
  
• contributed to the emergency of local dynamics and to the structure of local and territorial development partnerships (Comitato Val Soana - created in less than two months after the session of the ERU of 1998 in the Piémonte - Italy);
  
• participated in the constitution of the network "Femmes Artisanes en Méditerranée", in Tunisia, in partnership with PRELUDE, the Institute of the Patrimony of Tunes (Tunisia) and with the European Institute of the Mediterranean of Barcelona (Spain);
  
• contributed to the organisation of local seminars in rural communities, mainly in France and Italy, in order to promote the emergency of initiatives and territorial dynamics as well as the implementation of viable partnerships;
  
• carried through studies for the European Commission, mainly:
  
  • "Women and Rural Development in the European Union" - DGV, Secretáriat à l'Egalité des Chances, in 1995;
    
  • "Local Development, participation of the population and management of partnerships" Program LIFE, 1998-2000, in set with the City council of the Magnesia (Greece).