Policy area: civic engagement
Short description: street and neighbourhood initiatives. Current activities focus on ‘lief and leed’ (love and sorrow) that aims to prevent loneliness, on informal language education, and on street-cleaning.
Quantitative evidence: ‘Opzoomer Mee’ nowadays facilitates over 100,000 inhabitants of about 2000 streets (a third of all streets) in Rotterdam who participate in street and neighbourhood initiatives. (…) In this context ‘Opzoomeren’ is the quiet force, working at the street-level, and able to mobilize people quickly, it has a low budget, and hardly any administrative overhead. They operate in almost all subareas of the city, the poor as well as the rich areas.