I am pleased to report that the first two days of the inaugural UNESCO International Conference on Learning Cities hosted by the Government of Beijing Municipal City and the Minister of Education, China, has successfully concluded with the assent by acclamation of the Beijing Declaration of Learning Cities.

The Cities Learning Together conference is approaching rapidly. The European Union Centre at RMIT, PASCAL and the Hong Kong Institute of Education are very pleased to invite your participation. All the elements are now in place for an exciting and stimulating experience in Hong Kong in November.

A great deal of work has been done so far by many people and our conference partners: ASPBAE, ICAE , CITYNET, PRIA, EAFAE, APUCEN, and DVV (see details in attached booklet).

Organisations in the UK benefit by generating £90 million per year through the UK's membership of UNESCO. These finances, which include investment, tourism revenue and project grants, have contributed to regeneration, community development and conservation across the UK.

Given our excellent relationship in Pascal with UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning, subscribers will be interested in this report.

Please find below details of the first three books in a new PASCAL book series on Universities and Lifelong Learning being published shortly by Manchester University Press. The series editor is PASCAL Director for Europe, Professor Mike Osborne of the University of Glasgow, and we are very pleased that so many of our associates and principals are involved in the project.

This work was inspired in the first instance by the PURE project, and a number of other books will follow.

For those interested in monitoring and assessment tools for community-engaged universities, this inventory prepared for the Community-Engaged Scholarship Partnership in Canada may be helpful: