In February project partners met in Györ, Hungary to kick-off the Inclusive border Cycling project. The project partnership is made up of 16 experienced partners from 8 countries (Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Moldova) who will deliver pilot activities along cycling trails which cross rural, mostly peripheral areas, plagued by multiple socio-economic problems. The project aims to tackle these challenges by innovative ways of social inclusion: by valorising local cultural assets and by focusing on the inclusion of vulnerable groups into cycling tourism.
Project partners will work together on:
- valorising local cultural heritage through storytelling and social inclusion to strengthen trail attractiveness and identity,
- integrating local products and their brands into sustainable tourism trail offers for raising local incomes in rural areas,
- elaborating an inclusive trail maintenance model involving local, vulnerable social groups for strengthening trail identity and ownership locally
- presenting tested inclusive methods in a Handbook with complex proposals for an effective and sustainable social inclusion along cycling trails in remote border areas,
- elaborating and testing pilot cross-generational volunteer programmes as well as inclusive tourism products suited for special needs of the silver generation and vulnerable youth groups that are yet missing from the trails and resulting in a Transnational Inclusive Cycle Product Model,
- working out a Transnational marketing strategy for border cycling routes that addresses specific challenges in rural border areas, focusing on socially inclusive tourism,
- creating a transferability plan to support cross-border trails that do not have a common branding and joint promotion with suitable guidance and innovative promotional activities.
