By Since we formed in late 2016, Europa United has been on a mission to discuss Europe via its most important assets – its citizens.
On our platform, aspiring journalists and social commentators joined the conversation on campaigns such as Scottish independence, Brexit, Catalonia, Palestine and the environment. All while the Europa United team encouraged and guided writers to put their inspiring thoughts in writing and helped them on their path to a busy future.
Being outside the bubble of big Europe has allowed us to highlight perspectives of regions not always on the EU’s radar. With the Eastern Dialogue and The Moldovan Coffee Break, we broke ground by engaging with the Other Europe – one that we as an Irish organisation knew only too well.
To understand better distinct social ideas and motivations from around the diverse continent we share, we worked with young writers and thinkers and published work by academics, policy writers and journalists from across Europe, not to mention professional institutions and government agencies. With our Irish persepctive, we celebrate Europe’s diversity by preserving the linguistic nuances characteristic of each writer’s origins, rather than proof-edit into perfect English.
Together with our contributors and collaborators, we highlighted injustices like the ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict and the never-ending refugee crisis. Having been an open supporter of the Remain campaign, when the UK made its decision to leave the EU, we mourned its and our loss; continuing to hope that Britons will one day re-join the EU community.
To top off all that, we broke ground with our Eurochat series, blending topical European issues with interviews, features and lots of fun along the way.
But now the time has come to draw a curtain on Europa United. For some time now, the demands on our time and purses have become too hard to bear on our own, and we decided that a formal end is better than a drawn-out, B-grade expiry.
The Europa United website will be closing, but not straight away, so you will have a few weeks yet to browse our amazing library of 650 articles and podcasts, which we hope soon to make available to you again in a more permanent form.
We are not giving up because we still believe in the work we do in citizen media. Some of our current team will be joining The European Network: a multi-project platform for podcasts and other media projects, of which a number are now in process/gestation. Not all will be Europe-specific but they will be new and exciting; and we hope you will join us in our new endeavour. That amazing library also will be part of The European Network.
Finally, thank you to all out contributors and organisation volunteers over the last five years – we simply could not have done what we did without you!
And of course, thank you to our followers and supporters. We sometimes agreed to disagree, knowing we share the common cause of encouraging conversation and debate that informs, educates and inspires. We hope you will stay active, open -minded to new ideas and points of view – and remember how easy it is to forget, in the warp-speed world that we live in today, that the vast majority of us just want to get along.
Thank you for staying with us and we hope to be with you in some other form very soon.
Europa United
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