European LEADER Awards 2023

Winners announced in the Hemicycle of the European Parliament

In November 2023, ELARD, in collaboration with the national federations of LAGs, launched the European LEADER Awards.

This award ceremony aims to reward the most impactful and innovative European projects of the 2014-2020 programme and highlight concrete achievements funded by the LEADER 2014-2020 programme. Indeed, ELARD wanted to give all European LAGs the opportunity to publicise their achievements in terms of projects that were funded via the LEADER approach in 2014-2020.

Participants had to submit their projects by the 17th of November 2023 so that the Jury panel could judge and rate the projects individually on the following criteria: Innovation, Respect of the LEADER principles, and Local impact of the project.

In parallel, the public vote took place on a dedicated digital platform.

The results and the winners were exclusively announced at the Awards Ceremony during the 2023 European LEADER Congress in Brussels, Belgium, on the 18th of December, within the Hemicycle of the European Parliament.

Four prizes were then awarded :

The People’s Choice Award, thanks to the online vote of the public ;
The 3 Jury’s Choices Award.

It is the project Technology Club Albrechtice nad Orlicí – Tékáčko, from the Czech Republic, who won the People’s Choice Award.

The first prize for the Jury’s Choices Award is the project Villages of Portugal from Portugal. The second award goes to Spain with The Green Experience project, and the third award goes to France with Accompagnement la mobilité en zone rurale project.

For more information about the winning projects, LAGS and project bearers, please click here.

More than 115 projects have been submitted to the competition. All the projects can be found on this dedicated page.

To know more about the Jury Panel, please have a look at the Jury members’ biographies.

All the winning LAGs were present to receive their award on stage.