The Project

 
Culture Guides 08

In recent years, we have seen more political and public interest in reviving rural and sparsely populated areas and to counter the current migration from rural to urban areas.

One way to counter this trend is to provide and promote more arts and cultural activities with added community values. To secure cultural sustainability in these areas, we need to strengthen the “citizen helps citizen" or "peer to peer" approach, where civil society associations from the cross-cultural sector of amateur arts, voluntary culture, and heritage are engaged.

Aims and objectives

The aim is to improve the competences of the voluntary associations and their volunteers to provide enlivening arts and culture opportunities in the sparsely populated communities with an added value for civic and democratic participation, community bonding and local identity.

The objectives are:

  1. To develop innovative ways of outreach to citizens engaged in arts and culture to become resourceful culture volunteers.
  2. To develop high quality courses tailored to these groups on how to organise cultural activities with an added community value.
  3. To develop the competences and skills of the voluntary associations to support volunteering and cooperation with stakeholders.
 

The innovative dimension of this project is its integrated adult education approach, where we will:

  1. Complete local field surveys of the current competence profiles of culture volunteering to get a baseline as well as state of the art examples for the succeeding development work;
  2. Develop an integrated curricula frame for culture volunteers as well as culture managers to provide enlivening cross-culture activities with added community values.
  3. To design and test a series of national pilot courses for culture volunteers and managers in the varied contexts of the partner countries.
  4. To design and test new Erasmus+ pilot courses for culture volunteers as well as culture managers with the aim to offer sustainable Erasmus+ training events as well as high quality national courses after the end of the project.
  5. To provide a Communication Portal with desk research and other supporting information about the issues of the project as well as presentations of the project’s pilot work and outputs to the virtual audiences.

Outline of activities

 

This includes:

  • Two national umbrellas for voluntary culture: Voluntary Arts Network in United Kingdom and Cultural Councils in Denmark;
  • One national association for liberal adult education: The Hungarian Folk High School Society;
  • Two organisations from the liberal adult education and NGO work, with expertise in field research and curricula planning: Foundation of Alternative Educational Initiatives in Poland, and Interfolk, institute for Civil Society from Denmark;
  • One public body, the Municipality of Lousada, Portugal.
  • Furthermore, ActKnowledge from New York will be involved in the pilot work as external evaluator to incorporate the Theory of Change methodology in the impact evaluations.

The partnership circle