Three thematic working domains define our programmes and describe our ambitions to inspire people and communities to EXPERIENCE Europe - IMAGINE Europe - SHARE Europe.
All our programmes work towards understanding Europe as a genuine cultural community. An emotional sense of belonging to such a community, a true European sentiment - as our founders called it - is a crucial element for growing Europe in a spirit and culture of solidarity, across national borders and social divides.
In our programmes, Europeans from many different backgrounds get to experience the common space and future they share, by culturally engaging with fellow citizens. Europe is both a cultural idea and a political project. Our work acknowledges the European Union as a historical cornerstone of the European unification ideas promoted by our founders. However, our programmes extend beyond the borders of the current EU member states and its institutions.
Our programmes stimulate Europeans to imagine their futures freely and creatively and to find new answers to joint European and systemic global challenges. Storytelling, artistic expression and cultural debate are essential instruments of our work for reflecting on the past, examining the presence and envisioning the future of Europe as a common public sphere.
Experiencing, envisioning and creating Europe as a shared public space is both an imaginative and hands-on endeavour. Together with the many people who participate in our programmes, we take this venture to real and tangible cultural places. To digital spaces online, to media, to public squares and local neighbourhoods, to cities and regions, to nature, to festivals and libraries, and into collaborations with many cultural centres, art spaces, creative enterprises, art schools, cultural institutions and public administrations we work with everywhere in Europe. These are the cultural leverage places where we offer people to tell their stories, to explore and experience, to debate, share ideas, co-create and democratically engage with each other.
In our programmes we develop new initiatives with other philanthropic and public partners and give grants to third-party initiatives.
EXPERIENCE programmes provide citizens and cultural professionals from different European countries (and beyond) with direct people-to-people contacts. They initiate human and cultural linkages. All ECF work in this field grows a European sense of belonging and builds on long-term cultural and educational exchange of people and common practices. Based on innovative peer learning and co-creation methods, these programmes provide cultural professionals with new collaboration platforms that link them - and the local communities they work with - across European borders and sectors.
Libraries for Europe, Public Libraries 2030 / OBA
Libraries are curated, public, safe spaces where people of all kinds of national, cultural backgrounds and ages meet. We regard the establishment of a programmatic connection between (public) libraries all over Europe engaging millions of citizens as a stimulus for the emergence of a new European Social Network that can fuel a culture of solidarity between individuals and communities, across differences, borders and nationalities.
Public Libraries 2030
ECF supports PL2030 - a network of European public libraries - to research and prepare for the launch and implementation of a Europe-wide programme which will leverage the potential of public libraries to meaningfully engage with citizens, nurture communities, and connect across borders, thinking in particular about re-building trust and solidarity post-lockdown. In June 2020 Public Libraries 2030 hosted a series of sessions to explore topics concerning the impact and implications of the Coronavirus for the library community.
OBA
Driven by the common interest in the contemporary and future meaning of a public space, the digitalisation as a fundament of building new communities and Europe as the living context of local engagement and international collaboration, ECF and the OBA (Amsterdam Public Libraries) explore programmatic collaboration that will seek to further consolidate and strengthen Amsterdam’s position as a European cultural and learning hub (both offline and digital).
ECHO Mobile Library
There are approximately 115,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, many of whom live in camps that lack basic facilities, let alone sources of adult education, knowledge exchange or any kind of cultural enrichment. They are often stuck in the interminable insecurity and boredom that arises from navigating the Greek and EU asylum processes, a limbo between unsafe origins and uncertain destinations. In this context, ECHO Mobile Library distributes language-learning resources and lends from a collection of over 1000 books – literature, non-fiction, educational and children's books – in 13 languages from Farsi to French. ECHO acts as an interface of cultural and linguistic exchange on the Southern border of Europe.
Tandem
Tandem is a cross-border collaboration programme that supports cultural organisations and their professionals with finding new partners abroad. Since 2011, Tandem has provided more than 600 fellows from all over Europe and its neighbouring regions with an educational placement experience in another country. Enhancing participants’ local cultural work with new international connections has established a dynamic pan-European peer community across more than 40 countries: www.tandemforculture.org
The Tandem peer-learning approach was co-designed with the Berlin-based NGO MitOst, which implements all programme editions in close collaboration with local partners in Eastern and Southern Europe.
EU Cultural Relations Platform
Global cultural relations are catalysers for engaging Europeans with critical questions about their worldwide historical responsibilities and the systemic issues of our times. Cultural professionals are mediators and multipliers for connecting Europeans with the contemporary challenges of citizens and communities around the world.
ECF has long been advocating for more culture in EU external relations. Together with a partner consortium of European cultural institutes, networks and universities, we contribute to the new EU Cultural Relations Platform. Until 2023, ECF will design and offer a series of annual exchange and learning experiences for leading cultural professionals from around the world and Europe.
Link
The IMAGINE programmes support the development and presentation of fresh ideas and stories that matter for envisioning Europe. Cultural and artistic expression and daring initiatives that reflect on the past, present and future of Europe are supported in Imagine programmes.
Vision Funds
There are many ideas and organisations that do not find support, because they are not fitting any box and lack of funding for experiments. Vision Funds are a placeholder for grants and pooled funding meant for ideas with potential; for responses to urgencies and for projects that make a real difference and imagine solutions. In 2020 we transferred our available funding into:
Culture of Solidarity Fund
was launched in 2020 ECF, engaging new partners as a quick and flexible response to the Corona crisis and its aftermath.
For more information on the Culture of Solidarity Fund, click here
The Europe Challenge
is a new initiative, we develop with partners the Challenge Europe. The Europe Challenge wants to put big ideas into practice. It supports and scales culturally-rooted initiatives with the potential of transformative impact on European sentiment, public sphere and community.
Stories of Europe
The story of Europe consists of many stories by many people with varying perspectives. Stories of Europe aims to put stories of artists in their different cultural expressions at central stage, providing many people food for thought, curiosity and further imagination. They are essential for developing sentiments, senses of belonging but also for challenging the status quo where it appears as not sufficient.
IDFA Life in Europe
We support the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), an acclaimed platform for independent films. IDFA will stimulate the idea of European solidarity in it’s next edition and activates the public debate on Europe, offering different meeting places for audiences and professionals. IDFA will curate and present (online) a series of documentaries that tell the stories of Europe, called Life in Europe.
Forum on European Culture
We support the Forum on European Culture, a biennial multi-disciplinary event organised by De Balie and Dutch Culture. It brings together hundreds of artists, thinkers from all over the world to reflect on the future of Europe. The third edition will take place in September 2020 under the thematic thread of We, the People! And explores the value, strength and impact of culture for Europe. Several civic councils and citizen’s encounters will be organised, next to the main event in De Balie in Amsterdam in Athens, Warsaw and Palermo.
A European Pavilion
The concept of national pavilions at European and world events seems increasingly out of touch and outdated in today’s world. Intentionally or not it reinforces national attitudes and sentiments if not complimented by European alternatives or indeed other regional or global approaches. It takes a European art platform to continuously think and challenge what Europe means today and what it can be tomorrow. Therefore ECF and partners develop the concept of a European Pavilion: A series of conversations and interviews with artists, curators, architects, popular culture practitioners, biennials and foundations resulting in a podcast series.
SHARE programmes highlight the importance of Europe as a shared public sphere in which people with different cultural and national backgrounds and views are connected, providing an alternative to looking at Europe only through national lenses:
Initiative for a European Public Space
The Initiative for a European Public Space (IEPS) is developed with partners and promotes promotes a European public space, which includes online spaces, inclusive media spaces and cultural safe spaces.
More soon.
Europe Talks
We support Europe Talks: an international online matching and debating platform and a series of local events in which citizens can meet and talk to other people on specific topics of European relevance. The initiative challenges growing polarisation and fosters solidarity by bringing together people of different political opinions across Europe. Newspapers and media platforms in different countries in Europe collaborate in Europe Talks, which is hosted and coordinated by Zeit Online.
Link coming soon.
Online European Public Spaces
Europe is facing real challenges in coping with market-driven and mainly non-European online platforms on which dis-/and mis-information and nationalistic tendencies easily grow and threaten democracy. There is no real European digital public space that is based on values of collaboration, sharing and safeguarding privacy and freedom of people. Waag Society initiates a series of in-depth conversations and research to define the public values that are at stake in the current digital environment. Over the course of 2020, there will be design labs planned with stakeholders from different sectors and interests.
Link coming soon.
‘VAHA’ – Oasis:
Building Common Ground for Spaces of Public Discussion & Dialogue in Turkey and Europe. In Turkey and Eastern Europe, independent cultural organisations and civil society initiatives are struggling to preserve a safe space for dialogue and freedom of expression. New local actors nevertheless try to provide and maintain unconventional (cultural) spaces and action for public programming and debate. Their efforts are a crucial source of inspiration and provide a spirit of endurance for their local public and civil society peers. They can function as veritable ‘oases’ (vaha in Turkish) that supply freedom of thought, open debate, creativity and human encouragement for the surrounding ecosystem of other independent cultural initiatives and local citizens.
Cities of Change
Cities, including smaller municipalities are often the places where positive change occurs that is an example and is meaningful for Europe as a shared space. Being at the intersections of the most pressing social, environmental and economic problems, (informal) city networks make real collaborations possible, involving citizens directly in decision making processes and shaping policies. They bring bottom-up, democratic and inclusive alternatives for sustainable futures with equal opportunities for all. ECF is the co-funder of three multi-annual funded EU programmes that connect dozens of European cities and their actors in culture and media. ECF also participates in the “Cities of Change Funders network” of EDGE to share knowledge and shift philanthropic resources to systemic alternatives in cities.
Summer of Solidarity
We supported ‘Summer of Solidarity’, the first pop-up continent wide, European, collaborative, storytelling media initiative. The 'Summer of Solidarity' project aims to knit together a patchwork of human stories through collaborative slow journalism, by going on an e-road trip throughout the continent.
Culture for Solidarity
is a partnership with 3 cultural organisations. This action-research project explores the role of culture in shaping inclusive cities.
Link
In 2020 we - and partner Rijeka2020 - hosted Culture Lab Europe.
MediActivism
has developed as a network of young media-makers and critics across Europe who strive for an inclusive public European media-infrastructure. Media has a role in improving the public spaces that we inhabit in our cities. Ten partner organisations in citizens’-, refugee and inclusive media jointly develop practices and tools for a more inclusive media-sphere in Europe, while focusing on urban issues that are shared across the different cities they are working in.
Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities
CCSC is a joint project with ten partners across Europe that aims to increase citizen’s participation in the creation of cultural policies in cities. CCSC works on more sustainable and inclusive cities by making culture and creativity more central to policy-making by experimenting with participatory forms of cooperation between cultural organizations and policymakers.
Link
SHARE programmes have the generous support of Compania di San Paulo, Creative Europe, Erasmus+.
European Online Public Spaces is supported in collaboration with Adessium Foundation.
Vaha – Oasis is implemented by our partners Anadolü Kültür (Istanbul) and MitOst (Berlin) and funded by Stiftung Mercator and other co-financing partners.
ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture
For the last eleven years, the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture has honoured laureates as diverse as the cultural fields in which they work. They come from the performing and visual arts, literature, music, film, cultural activism, critical thinking, architecture, digital and media culture. Brilliant, innovative, daring, compassionate – these individuals and collectives have shone out in their resolve to find a better way, even in the face of global upheaval, and to shape a future that is more fair and respectful of both people and the planet that we share.