Danube Region Programme

In her free time, Milena Ljutica enjoys hiking, spending time in nature, and discovering new places. She is naturally curious and always enjoys exploring something new, whether it is a new trail, a new place, or simply a new perspective.

This natural passion for exploring and finding new viewpoints is exactly what she brings to her professional work as a Montenegrin team member with the HARMONMISSIONS project.

🌊 People of the Danube
Behind every Interreg project there are people — coordinators, project partners, officials, researchers, community organisers - who spend years navigating complex partnerships, shaping policies that make a real difference, and building something that outlasts the project itself.
Through this series, we talk to the people of the Danube region about what they learned, how they grew, and why working across borders matters.

🙌 https://interreg-danube.eu/blogs/people-opf-the-danube-insights-and-voices-from-across-the-region

When projects meet and talk, good ideas are travelling further 🌍🤝

In Interreg Danube Region we believe projects should not work alone. This is why we promote synergy building and capitalisation, and we give to our projects the space to meet, exchange and learn from each other. Now we can see the results! 👇

Danube4SEecosystem project https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/danube4seecosystem finished recently. During its lifetime it worked on stronger social economy ecosystems and better cooperation between social enterprises and local public authorities. Thanks to COOPOWER project https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/coopower, these results are now reaching new community, the one working for inclusive labour market for young people. 💪

What is inside:
🧩 Skills gap assessment tools, tested in 9 countries

🎓 Capacity building programme with training, mentoring and microlearning

💻 Digital training platform in many languages, with micro-credentials

🧑‍🏫 Mentor training programme, easy to adapt to your own context

🗺️ Social economy support methodology, based on 5 pilot actions in Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

All these approaches are already tested. Now other organisations can take them, adapt them and start new cooperation across the Danube Region. ✨

For us, this is capitalisation: nobody needs to invent the wheel again, good solutions just find new home.

👉 Read more and check the tools here: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/coopower/news/transferable-solutions-from-danube4seecosystem

🦅 Protecting birds of prey is starting with protecting their health.

Good news from AVIATOR project https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/aviator, supported by Interreg Danube Region Programme! 💚

Birds of prey living in captivity can now receive vaccine against West Nile virus, also in countries where it was not available before. Thanks to cooperation between AVIATOR partners and national institutions, the vaccine arrived to zoos, rehabilitation centres and other facilities.

Why this is important? Because birds of prey are showing us how healthy the nature is. And protecting the health of animals is also part of conservation, not only protecting the habitats. 🌍

13 partners from 10 countries are working together, because diseases do not know borders. Cooperation also not. 🤝

👉 Read the full story: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/aviator/news/a-new-step-in-protecting-birds-of-prey-from-west-nile-virus

Can AI really work in healthcare? 🤔 Yes, but the algorithm is only a small part of the story!

At AI Summit Budapest https://www.aisummit.hu/en, our DIGI4Care https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/digi4care partners from Bulgaria 🇧🇬, Austria 🇦🇹, Czechia 🇨🇿 and Hungary 🇭🇺 shared what they learned when AI leaves the testing room and comes to real hospitals. 🏥

The same eye screening technology was tested in 4 countries. Same device, but very different reality! Who does the screening? Who follows the patient? Who pays? 💶 Even the hospital Wi-Fi was a lesson. 📶😅

But the most important lesson is human. 💙 An algorithm can find a problem, but it cannot sit with a worried patient and give them trust. Patients still trust their doctors, and this is why healthcare stays human.

And it works! 👏 In Bulgaria, more than 300 people were screened and over 50 pathologies found. Now this experience supports a bigger screening for almost 5,000 people.

This is why cooperation across borders is so important. 🌍 With the Interreg Danube Region Programme, partners from different health systems can test, compare and learn together. 🤝

Our message: scale the care model, not only the technology! 💪

👉 Read the full story: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/digi4care/news/ai-summit-the-digi4care-case-study

🇪🇺 Commission REGIO

Why do two neighboring villages end up in totally different places with their energy communities? 🤔

The NRGCOM project https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/nrgcom assessed 8 real energy communities across Austria, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia over the past two years and found the answer usually isn't what you'd expect.

Two rural communities in Czechia, both full of local enthusiasm, scored 25/60 vs 48/60 on NRGCOM's readiness scale. The gap wasn't people or location - it was smart meters and basic energy management software. Without them, good intentions can't become a working system.

The project saw it again in Slovakia: a community with near-perfect scores held back not by tech, but by the wrong legal structure for national energy law.

The pattern across all 8 pilots: technology is rarely the problem. Legal rules and financial uncertainty - especially unpredictable grid fees - are what actually slow communities down.

The good news: NRGCOM has turned its methodology into a free tool anyone can use. The ETMEC Community Advisor runs right in your browser — no downloads, no login. Check where your community stands 👉 https://oer.ro/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Annex_05_ETMEC_Community_Advisor_app-1.html

❤️ Two Series, One Truth: Interreg Runs on People

Ana Savanović never planned to work in civil society — she imagined herself as a teacher. Instead, she ended up in Baranja, Croatia, building what she now calls a safe haven: a place where young people at risk of exclusion can learn to write a CV, or just sit with someone who won't judge them.

Her story just ran in PlaceCRAFT's Local Voices series, which introduces the people shaping the project's pilot regions.

A few months earlier, we started 🌊 People of the Danube, where we talk with coordinators and Lead Partners like Simona Roudi in Beltinci, Mirza Sikirić in Zenica, or Teodora Đurnić in Montenegro about what it's really like to lead or be part of a transnational project across so many countries.

Two very different formats. But read together, the same idea keeps coming back:

❤️ Trust is the real infrastructure. Ana built PGDI on trust. Teodora, in Montenegro, sees the same thing at a bigger scale that young people aren't missing ambition, just access and belief that their voice matters. Mirza, leading 16 partners from Bosnia and Herzegovina, says the same about institutions: once roles are clear, trust follows.

❤️ Ownership is what makes it stay. Ana doesn't tell young people what to do and she helps them build their own initiatives, like Lounge&ART, designed entirely by the community. Simona describes the same behind RurALL: real impact comes when people shape the solution themselves.

❤️ One story doesn't work without the other. Strategy without a face stays abstract. A good local story without structure is just a lucky accident.

Transnational cooperation isn't a line in a call for proposals. It's Ana in Baranja, it's Simona in Beltinci - all of them together, proving the Danube region is more connected than its borders suggest. 🌍

📖 Ana's story: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/placecraft/news/local-voices-l-pgdi-building-trust-and-opportunity-for-young-people-in-baranja
📖 People of the Danube: https://interreg-danube.eu/blogs/people-opf-the-danube-insights-and-voices-from-across-the-region

🇷🇴 Getting to know Monica – Danube4SEecosystem project, Romanian Lead Partner
🔗https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/danube4seecosystem

Monica has been close to the human side of Danube4SEecosystem from the start 🤝 and it shows. Beyond the strategies and policy documents, what she keeps coming back to is how perceptions shifted: social enterprises learning they could turn to municipalities for support, and local authorities discovering that social enterprises are real partners in developing their communities, not just service providers for vulnerable groups 🌍.

Her honest takeaway: what will last isn't the reports, but the connections - the team, the stories, the communities who opened up to them. As she puts it herself, in the end, it's people who create the change 💬.

🌊 People of the Danube
Behind every Interreg project there are people - coordinators, project partners, officials, researchers, community organisers 👥 -who spend years navigating complex partnerships, shaping policies that make a real difference, and building something that outlasts the project itself.

Through this series, we talk to the people of the Danube region about what they learned, how they grew, and why working across borders matters ✨.

🙌 https://interreg-danube.eu/blogs/people-opf-the-danube-insights-and-voices-from-across-the-region

🎙️ The first COOPOWER podcast is live! "Untapped Potential: How the System Loses Young People and What We Can Do About It"

Made with the COOPOWER Ukrainian partner - Platform for Social Change, this episode brings together voices from education, employers, community organisations and employment services 🤝 to talk about how vulnerable young people can become "invisible" to support systems and what can be done before that happens.

📻 Worth listening if you work in youth employment, education, social services or local policy or simply care about young people not being left behind 🇺🇦 ❤️

🎬 Watch here: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/coopower/news/our-first-podcast-is-available

🏭 What if the future of industry was already there, waiting for someone to see it?

That's what the ReInd-BBG https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/reind-bbg team set out to prove almost three years ago. And after all this time, all the site visits, partner meetings, and long conversations with local communities across the Danube region, we can say it: they were right. ✨
Instead of paving over new land, ReInd-BBG bet on the abandoned and forgotten – old factories, empty compressor stations, degraded industrial sites and asked: what if these became the new engines of growth instead?
The answer is now visible on the ground. In Hrastnik, Slovenia, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy6oljDKETo, a former compressor station called Kompreshaus is turning into a business incubator. 🏗️ Six municipalities across Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Montenegro have new blueprints for turning brownfields into opportunity. And 17 partners from 7 countries proved that reindustrialisation doesn't have to mean starting from scratch.
Tomorrow, we close this chapter with the ReInd-BBG Final Conference. 🎉 It's a moment to celebrate everything the team built and everyone who believed that the future of industry might already be right there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Congratulations to the whole ReInd-BBG team! 👏