Sometimes the best projects start with just some conversations

Every good project starts with a gap and ours started with a rather glaring one. Within the municipality of Rotterdam, our integral approach to basic skills had already given language and financial matters plenty of attention. Numeracy though, and financial literacy to be more precise, remained a blind spot. Not because nobody cared, but because nobody had quite gotten around to it yet. So, we decided to. In Tom’s work as a policy advisor within the municipality of Rotterdam, he deals daily with exactly the intersection of basic skills and financial matters. So together with our valued colleague René Keijzer from International Affairs, he started exploring the possibilities for a project. Early in the process, Tessa joined as well.

She’d discussed Erasmus+ options with René before and her experience in this field together with her enthusiasm proved to be a huge asset to the project right from the start. It didn't take long before we found ourselves talking to the late Kees Hoogland of Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, one of the Netherlands' leading experts in numeracy. Kees was immediately enthusiastic about the project. This, he said, would fill a real gap in the field's collective knowledge. Coming from someone who had spent a career mapping that field, that was not a small compliment.

A thorough dive into the literature then pointed us toward Babeș-Bolyai University as a partner with real depth of expertise. And here's where the story gets a little bit magical: that same week in 2023, René happened to be travelling to Romania anyway and used the opportunity to sit down with Miruna Pochea from the university to talk through a possible application. Sometimes the best partnerships start with nothing more than good timing and a plane ticket already booked.

From there, the network grew organically, each partner chosen for what they could bring to the table on basic skills and financial literacy: Ligo Waas & Dender, the City of Sint-Niklaas, Albeda, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brasov Metropolitan Agency, and the National Economic College "Andrei Bărseanu" Brașov all joined the application. And somewhere along the way, in conversation after conversation, a shared feeling took hold among all of us: we weren't just filling in a form. We were building something genuinely original.

That feeling has stayed with us ever since and it's the reason this project exists and thrives in collaboration today. After some posts on LinkedIn, this newsletter is the first detailed update on the progress of the project that we share with the outside world. We're very excited about what the next months will bring!

By Tom Adriaanse and Tessa Cuperus