To learn how to apply for EU cooperation projects, I traveled to Zakopane in Poland. There, I learned a lot about the goals and priorities of the funding program and how we can better measure our progress. And there was also a pool, a bowling alley, snow, and mountains.

Why?
The Erasmus+ funding program consists of three Key Actions. So far, we have used Key Action 1: Mobility for Individuals, which includes youth exchanges, youth participation projects, and mobility measures for youth workers. Key Action 2: Cooperation Partnerships, focuses on organizational development rather than individual participation. The goal is to develop greater capacity through cooperation with other organizations in order to be effective at the European level. Ideally, the organizations should learn from each other. To try this out, we plan to participate in a so-called Small Partnership in the future.

Training in Zakopane
To make sure this works out, I visited Poland. The Polish National Agency for Erasmus+ held a seminar in Zakopane from November 16th to 20th, 2025. The seminar was designed to train substitute applicants in planning, applying for, and implementing Small Partnerships.

Found on the SALTO platform
I found the announcement for the seminar on the SALTO platform. SALTO is the umbrella term for the competence centers of the National Agencies. They jointly operate a platform for advertising training courses. I found it very helpful and highly recommend that everyone take a look.

Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains
I packed my things and took the train from Berlin via Wrocław and Kraków to Zakopane. Zakopane is a mountain village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. It’s a very small mountain range. Zakopane is a winter sports and spa resort. Much of it reminded me of Garmisch. The Hotel Tatra, where the seminar is being held, is fantastic.

Participants from many countries
Two team members led the training. Three staff members from the National Agency were also present. The seminar began with a comprehensive introductory session. After all, finding partner organizations is also part of the seminar’s mission. About half of the participants come from organizations in Poland, the rest from Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Greece, and Turkey. The VVP (Association of People with Disabilities) is the smallest organization, but none of them are particularly large. NGOs are clearly in the majority. In addition, there are people from schools and representatives from two government agencies.

Goals, Funding Priorities, and the Bowling Alley
The rest of the day is spent with an introduction to the goals and priorities of the „Small Partnerships“ funding program. We also work in groups to identify the needs of our organizations that we want to address through the „Small Partnership.“ One of the two team members actually works as a consultant in the private sector. He advises companies on writing grant proposals. His experience is very helpful, but initially disconcerting for us from the NGO world: „How do you prove it? Your experience doesn’t count!“ However, his insights are very helpful in better demonstrating why our organization has the needs we believe it has. We generate a lot of data with our evaluations. But we rarely use it strategically. I want to do this more strategically in the future so that the vast amounts of data can be transformed into useful information. After dinner, we also discover the bowling alley in the basement of the Hotel Tatra.

Good Practice
On the morning of the second day, two people from Krakow joined us via Zoom. They presented past „Small Partnerships“ they had implemented, which the National Agency had recognized for good governance. Both aspects were very interesting; the speakers provided practical management tips and warned of potential pitfalls.

Visibility
The first project was very interesting. It addressed the same organizational needs regarding visibility and public relations that our organization has. The main piece of advice: Talk openly with partners about finances.

LARP
The second organization presented organizes so-called „Live Action Roleplays,“ or LARP for short. These are interactive role-playing games in which participants physically portray fictional or real characters and improvise a story. Players slip into roles such as elves or knights, don costumes, and interact with each other to experience adventures in different settings, such as medieval fantasy worlds or post-apocalyptic scenarios. They use this to promote diversity and inclusion.

Writing Workshop
Then it’s time to write outlines for the grant applications. Here, I learn how to better align the goals of our project with the priorities of the funding program. The second part of the writing workshop focuses on quality standards. Through input from the private sector, I learn how to connect our goals with concrete, measurable indicators of success. I also take home many suggestions for better disseminating the results.

Positive Feedback Gives Courage
The feedback on our project outline on the third and final day is encouraging: The topic fits the funding program, it addresses a general priority as well as a program-specific one. The needs are clearly described. The measures are appropriate. The goals are achievable and easily measurable. This gives me hope and strength to continue working on the application and to submit it despite the expected stiff competition.

Excursion to the Mountain
On the second day, we also had an excursion. In the snow. Beautiful. We rode a cog railway up a mountain. And the cog railway didn’t crash like in Lisbon. But you could clearly see the cables at the top, which pull the two cars up and down each other. And the view of the Tatra Mountains was magnificent. The Tatra Mountains lie between Poland and Slovakia and are only 50-60 km long. They could easily fit into a single Alpine valley. Nevertheless, the peaks are snow-covered and reach up to 2600 meters in height. Unfortunately, there are no glaciers left.

City Tour
After the hike up the mountain, there will be a city tour. Zakopane is about 400 years old. It was once a small, poor village. But in the mid-19th century, tourism began to take hold here. Wealthy people and intellectuals were fascinated by the Tatra Mountains, much like we in Germany were by the German forests during the Romantic era. In Zakopane, these people bought land and built houses, founded the first church, and initiated an administrative reform that made the town an independent municipality. Around 80 wooden houses in the so-called Zakopane style have survived from those bygone days.

Cultural Center
At this time, Poland was occupied by Austria, Germany, and Russia. While Russia and Germany brutally oppressed „their“ Poles, culture, nationalism, and opposition were possible in the Austrian part of the city. Austrian Zakopane thus became a center of the Young Poles, a modernist art avant-garde movement contemporaneous with and similar in content to our Romanticism.

Cemetery Full of Important People
Numerous important Polish poets, thinkers, and artists are buried in the small cemetery next to the old wooden chapel. In 1908, Józef Piłsudski, then a „not-yet-Marshal“ and assassin of the Tsar, founded his first volunteer company of mountain riflemen here, laying an important military foundation for Poland’s rebirth.

Mask Deals
The rich and beautiful, and those who aspire to be, still gather here. I had heard about the place because, during the pandemic, I consumed media reports about Warsaw police arresting two street artists. These artists had illegally placed their own posters in advertising displays on public transportation. The posters depicted the then Minister of Health as a hypocritical saint, criticizing his dubious mask deals as corruption. And these mask deals were orchestrated in Zakopane. Activists in Berlin copied the action out of solidarity, and that’s how I learned about it and heard about Zakopane for the first time.

Dinner
After the city tour, we went to eat at the Krupowa Izba restaurant. It’s a traditional restaurant right in the heart of the town, in the pedestrian zone. The table was groaning under the weight of food; I was already full after the appetizer, and then came cake!

Conclusion
I can highly recommend participating in such activities. Not just because of the cake and the bowling alley. You learn an incredible amount. With the number of Erasmus+ applications increasing, it will likely become more important every year to design high-quality projects. And small organizations like ours can only achieve this if we continuously develop our skills. I’m constantly struck by how little we leftists from Western Europe know about Poland and Central Europe. For this reason alone, I believe it’s crucial that we continue to forge partnerships with organizations from countries like Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Georgia, and so on.

More information:

Call for Partners:
https://vernetzungpartizipation.noblogs.org/post/2025/07/22/partners-wanted-getting-ready-for-europe-peace-project-lab/

Where are the bison? Report on partnership building activity with Belarus:
https://vernetzungpartizipation.noblogs.org/post/2025/05/24/where-are-the-bison-please-report-from-the-partnership-building-activity-belarusian-youth-work/

Salto Training Calendar
https://www.salto-youth.net/