Culture Next cities network launches the pilot edition of the Cities Fund for Culture, an alternative financial mechanism for European cooperation in Culture. 10 European cities contribute to a joint fund that would be offered, through an open call, to European artists interested in working together to share their Visions for Culture in a Sustainable Future.
”The Cities Fund is a bottom-up solution to complement the European Commission’s top-down funding structures. We are experimenting with new ways to foster collaboration in culture, at city level and country level as well”, says Ștefan Teișanu, Secretary General of the network.
The pilot edition of the Fund selects seven European artists to work individually or collectively and share their visions for culture in today’s changing world. Through a facilitated process, the selected artists are offered opportunities to discuss and work together, so then in the end they can decide to create their artworks individually or co-create them collectively.
The resulting artworks will be hosted and promoted by all member cities of the Culture Next network: 26 cities coming from 17 countries of the EU and the UK.
Highlights:
- 7 European artists are funded with 2.000 each and have total freedom for individual creation or co-creation of the artworks together with any of the other selected artists.
- Applications deadline: February 25, 2022;
- Main selection criteria: quality of the proposals regarding the applicants’ Visions for Culture in a Sustainable Future (essay of 2000 characters maximum);
- Duration of the artistic projects implementation: June to November 2022;
- The resulting artworks are promoted in the 17 countries represented by Culture Next member cities.
The 10 co-founders of the Cities Fund for Culture are Aveiro (PT), Braga (PT), Belfast (IE), Cluj-Napoca (RO), Elefsina (GR), Faro (PT), Leeuwarden (NL), LEEDS (UK), Leuven (BE) and Oulu (FI).
Everything about the Cities Fund: www.culturenext.eu/cities-fund.
The Cities Fund for Culture was launched on November 26, 2021, in Faro, Portugal, on the occasion of the 7th meeting of the Culture Next network. The topic of this meeting was Culture and Sustainability and the special guest was Mr. Jyoti Hosagrahar, Deputy Director of the UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre, with a key-note on the UNESCO’s Culture 2030 Thematic Indicators for Culture and Sustainability. Besides the launching of the Cities Fund for Culture, the Faro meeting hosted the official launching of the ECoC Archive, an extensive database with almost 300 ECoC-related documents from 1985 until today: bid books, monitoring reports and impact evaluation studies of the European Capital for Culture project. The Archive is hosted on the Culture Next website.
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Burnout is a serious condition that affects more and more people. The Mental Health America (MHA) in a study conducted in July 2020 reported that 75% of workers have experienced burnout, and 40% of those polled said it was a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic. The current circumstances affect our way of interacting, working, and living, in general. Working from home has its advantages and disadvantages for everyone. Sometimes the working hours are mixed with the personal time, therefore the employee tends to dedicate more time in performing working tasks than before Covid 19 pandemic.
Cultural Prescriptions is a type of initiative that encourages people who deal with different medical conditions to overcome their negative states and to improve their health and well-being by using arts. Various models of cultural prescriptions was successfully tested in other countries, such as the UK. During the autumn of 2020, the Cluj Cultural Centre implements a pilot of cultural prescriptions, offering participation in a series of specially designed creative workshops to a group of people with burnout symptoms.
Built on practical exercises using various artistic techniques, the workshops contribute to the development of imagination and emotional intelligence, stimulate the ability to express, reduce anxiety and cultivate self-esteem with the final purpose to help people overcome their burnout with time.
The design of the creative workshops is the result of the collaboration of experts and researchers from the fields of arts and health. The creative activities will be delivered by a team of artists from Create.Act.Enjoy, a Cluj based NGO known for their Art Therapy project, a unique intervention model taking place annually in hospitals across Romania. The impact on participants’ well-being will be measured through quantitative and qualitative techniques by the same team of researchers and the results will be used as an argument for scaling up this type of initiatives.
The workshop will take place in Romanian. Those interested to participate are invited to register here, no later than 1st of October 2020.
The artistic partners within Art & Wellbeing – Maribor Art Gallery (Slovenia) and BOZAR (Belgium) – also implement versions of cultural prescriptions in their local contexts.
The cultural prescriptions initiatives are implemented under the european project Art and Well-being, which addresses the relationship between art and well-being, or how the consumption of various forms of art affects mental and physical well-being. The project Art and Well-being is supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
]]>LEAP is an interdisciplinary assessment of the needs and opportunities for young people in Cluj-Napoca, a study which takes place in the Cluj metropolitan area. The project is implemented by the Department of Public Health – Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, the Department of Political Science – Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, PONT Group and Cluj Cultural Centre and funded by the Botnar Foundation.
The project aims to carry out a comprehensive, multi and interdisciplinary assessment of the needs and opportunities of young people in the Cluj metropolitan area, guided by an ecosystemic perspective and oriented towards future initiatives arising from the evaluation results. It will thus generate a digital repertoire based on evidence and information about data, actors and initiatives. The repertoire will focus on health and wellness, as well as education and the future of work in the Cluj metropolitan area, and will be based on a participatory and inclusive approach.
The quantitative research, based on an online questionnaire, is conducted by the Department of Political Science – Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca and is addressed to young people, children, parents and teachers, who can fill in the questionnaires below:
Project phases and activities:
1. Documentary study on needs, gaps and opportunities
a. collecting, recording and reporting existing data
b. creating a map of stakeholders for the areas addressed (mapping stakeholders)
2. Data collection and analysis
a. qualitative research
b. quantitative research
3. Analyzing public policies and identifying systemic gaps and stakeholder involvement
a. analyzing public policies
b. stakeholder involvement
c. offering proposals to improve existing public policies
4. Dissemination
a. developing a platform
b. scaling
Expected results:
- Encouraging young people and their participation
- Raising awareness of the importance of young people\’s contribution to the design and implementation of future initiatives
- High quality data on young people\’s opinions/understandings of their own needs, how they can be addressed, by whom, how they see themselves
- Basic data for creating a medium-term intervention plan (10 years)
- Raising awareness of current initiatives in the city and improving knowledge of relevant youth NGO initiatives
Sustainability:
- Assumption of results by the municipality
- Alignment with Cluj-Napoca 2021-2027 development strategy and with the action plan
- Development of a repertoire to serve as a source of information and assistance for young people, and also of knowledge, information and tools for relevant governmental, non-governmental and academic actors
- Potential scaling at regional and national level
- Potential scaling as a working model and good practice at European level
- Development of an integrated study on the well-being and participation of young people that can be multiplied in Cluj (new editions of the study) and in other cities
- Implementation of pilot projects to address the specific needs and opportunities identified by this project
InDICEs is a research project that aims to empower policy-makers & decision-makers in the Cultural and Creative Industries to fully understand the social and economic impact of digitisation in their sectors and address the need for innovative (re)use of cultural assets.
The Cultural Heritage Sector is a key enabler of the advancement of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) in Europe. Not only does it provide access to vast amounts of reusable cultural content, it can be seen as a R&D lab of the cultural and creative ecosystem through which it contributes both to the economic advancement and to society at large. However, researchers and policy-makers are struggling to fully understand the crucial role that the Cultural Heritage Sector can play in the digitisation process of the cultural and creative ecosystem in Europe.
By tracking policies in an open observatory and establishing policy priorities for successful digital transformation and future governance of cultural and creative content ecosystems, inDICEs provides tools to measure and advance the impact of cultural heritage in Europe.
By the end of the project, policy-makers will have a solid framework to assess the impact of cultural heritage and an open observatory to keep track of the advancement of its impact. For their own part, Cultural Heritage Institutions will be able to make strategic decisions that will allow them to increase their positive contributions to the CCI and society.
This project is funded by the European Commission via the Horizon 2020 programme.
Project Partners
ICCU (IT), KU Leuven (BE), Sound and Vision, Centrum Cyfrowe (PL), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (IT), Platoniq (ES), Europeana Foundation, European Fashion Heritage Association (IT), MICHAEL Culture (BE), Deutscher Museumsbund (DE), webLyzard technology gmbh (AT), Capital High Tech SARL (FR), PIN SOC.CONS. A R.L. (IT), Centrul Cultural Clujean (RO).
The social media accounts where the activities of the project can be followed are:
A new project funded by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program has recently started and Cluj Cultural Centre is one of the partners, in a consortium of 13 other organizations throughout Europe.
The objective of the inDICEs project is to help decision makers from the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to fully understand the social and economic impact of digitization in their sectors in order to meet the need for innovative (re) use of cultural goods.
Cluj Cultural Centre contributes to the inDICEs project by collecting data and analysis and developing guides based on the research conclusions. Also, Cluj Cultural Centre contributes to the co-design of the online Observatory – an integrated online platform for researchers, the general public and representatives of cultural institutions. Cluj Cultural Centre has a key role in connecting with the artistic and creative communities and in facilitating their involvement in the project activities.
As a result of the InDICEs project, policymakers will have a solid framework for assessing the impact of cultural heritage and a tool to track the impact of cultural heritage in Europe. In turn, cultural and heritage organizations will be able to take strategic decisions in their work, especially regarding the digitisation of heritage. InDICEs brings together internationally renowned research groups in the field of cultural economics, intellectual property law and digital sciences, representatives of the cultural sector, non-governmental organizations, social innovators and platform developers.
The project consortium consists of: ICCU – Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (Italy), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven / Letteren (Belgium), Stichting Nederlands Voeld Beeld en Geluid Institute (Netherlands), Fundacja Centrum Cyfrowe (Poland), Bruno Kessler Foundation (Italy), Platoniq Sistema Cultural (Spain), Stichting Amsterdam European Mobility (Netherlands), European Fashion Heritage Association (Italy), Michael Culture (Belgium), Deutscher Museumsbund eV (Germany), web technologyLyzard (Austria), Capital High Tech Sarl ( France), PIN – Polo Universitario Città di Prato (Italy) and Cluj Cultural Centre.
The project will run between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2022 and the total financing of the project is 2 999 062.50 euros, of which 83 750 euros will be allocated to the activities of Cluj Cultural Centre.
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