COVINFORM - Baseline report: Community and citizen responses

COVINFORM’s project is implementing a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach to examine how vulnerability is defined and addressed in COVID-19 responses from government, public health, and communication perspectives. The project also aims to examine the impact that different national, regional, and local responses have had on vulnerable and marginalized groups and view these impacts through an intersectionality perspective to understand how different factors interconnect, potentially further increasing vulnerability and marginalization. In line with the objectives of the project, this report aims to describe local community structures, stakeholder networks and responses across COVINFORM target countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, Greece, Romania, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (England & Wales). To reach this goal, project partners have conducted desk research on both community-level response plans and emergent citizen responses in at least one sub-national unit in each of the project partner countries. The report provides first a brief introduction of its main aims and objectives; second it provides a short overview about the relevance to consider local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it explains the research design methodology. Third, the work developed for each partner country is presented with the aim of providing a baseline report per target country containing top-level descriptive analysis. Fourth, the main findings are briefly summarised and discussed, providing a global analysis across countries as well as a set of good practices. The main results of the baseline research per partner country have already highlighted some interesting findings: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and social consequences have been more severe in large cities compared to medium-size cities where the actions were more widespread, and a greater number of needs met. In such a context, a great effort has been devoted by the local administration, in close collaboration with the national government, to reach the most vulnerable segments of the population, such as ethnic minorities, homeless people and those socially excluded, e.g. the elderly living alone. To meet the needs of these populations, public-private partnership was strategic: many of the successful initiatives saw a strong participation of volunteers, NGOs, religious communities, but almost everywhere with the financial and even organizational support of local administrations. Several good practices emerged from the country reports: among them we have identified some mainstream in the organizational, solidarities, cooperation, culture, technology and door-to-door initiatives. It is worthy to stress that this report will be updated in M24 with the results of the analysis of community and citizen responses in the target sub-national units