Founded in 1998, the Basics Network gathers peer projects
issued from party scenes among 12 European countries. I was one of the
co-founders as manager of Techno Plus.
The subscribing projects are peer projects coming from and being part of
the different party cultures, developing harm reduction, risk-competence and
self-empowerment strategies related to party culture, sexuality, and drug use. The
actions of all groups are initiated and realised mainly by peers from the party
scene, and they all define their projects as community-based and
self-organised.
In 2001-2002, the member NGOs developed a project
co-financed by the European Public
Health Programme in order to (I was the project manager):
- Share their practices on volunteer training,
chill out organisation, drug checking, crisis intervention, leaflet edition, etc.
- Promote
safer clubbing within the party scenes ;
- Support the
emergence of new peer projects across
- Encourage
and develop scientific research based on user’s needs.
Since 2005, the Basics Network has been leading
a working group on safer nightlife in the framework of the Democracy, Cities
& Drugs projects (DC&D). The
DC&D projects gather European cities and civil society networks in order to
promote local, integrated and participative responses to the issue of drugs.
This DC&D Safer Nightlife working group published
a guide to support the development of integrated and local partnerships for
safer nightlife. They are currently working on a digital library, universal
preventive icons, video production, etc.
Finally the Basics Network submitted a proposal
in April 2009 to the Drug Prevention and Information Programme to share
practices on new technologies, research, training and to organise common
interventions in big European events. I was involved as consultant to support
the French partner Techno Plus. Unfortunately the project was not selected for
a matter related to financial capacity of one partner. Anyway, we will solve
this problem and submit again the project in 2010.
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