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Strategy

Strategy 2025 - 2029

The Continue Change Strategy establishes ECF’s vision for the next five years, building on past achievements and addressing contemporary challenges. This strategy focuses on four interconnected areas to deepen European sentiment and solidarity through culture:

Connecting Libraries of Europe to a European Social Network
Libraries are more than repositories of knowledge; they are vibrant cultural hubs where communities gather to learn, share ideas, and engage with their heritage. ECF will connect European libraries to create a dynamic network that bridges local stories with continental narratives. Shared programming on topics like climate literacy and cultural exchange will transform libraries into nodes of collaboration and belonging.

Empowering European Digital Citizenship
ECF champions a cultural approach to online engagement in a world shaped by misinformation and digital divides. Through workshops, creative campaigns, and educational tools, ECF supports young Europeans in responsibly navigating and shaping digital spaces. These efforts promote critical thinking, foster meaningful dialogue, and safeguard democratic values, ensuring Europe’s digital future reflects its cultural diversity.

Growing a European Culture of Solidarity
Solidarity is a cornerstone of Europe’s identity, transcending borders and crises. Through the Culture of Solidarity Fund, ECF supports initiatives that use art, storytelling, and collective action to strengthen connections across communities. For instance, projects addressing local challenges like refugee integration or cultural preservation showcase how solidarity transforms shared struggles into opportunities for growth.

Imagining Philanthropy for Europe
Philanthropy has the potential to drive long-term cultural and societal impact. ECF envisions a collaborative, cross-border philanthropic ecosystem that connects local initiatives with continental ambitions. By mobilising resources and fostering partnerships, ECF supports projects that celebrate Europe’s shared heritage while addressing pressing issues, from sustainability to social cohesion.

 

These focus areas reflect ECF’s commitment to leveraging culture as a force for connection and innovation and celebrating Europe’s shared heritage and collective identity. Together, they pave the way for a future where culture inspires collaboration, solidarity, and belonging across borders.

Our Vision

We have a vision for Europe. A continent where all can live, work, dream and express themselves freely, in diversity and harmony. Where we share a sense of belonging based on solidarity, mutual respect between people and with collaborations across borders of all kinds.

We believe in the power of culture to achieve this Europe. Culture helps us negotiate ways of living together, build and understand our multiple identities and make Europe our home. It offers the space to question and redefine the principles we stand for and helps develop and preserve feelings of mutual comprehension and solidarity.

Feeling European does not come from pie charts and growth rates. It comes from sharing stories and experiences. Culture connects and unites us and invites us to imagine different futures.

Our Mission

Our societies face challenges that affect all of us and generations to come; climate crises, growing inequalities, polarization, digitalization and for the time to come: the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We believe these challenges need courageous and imaginative answers from a united Europe.

We have pioneered in growing a European sentiment for over 65 years, and our mission is as urgent as when we first started. Today we are committed to promoting a European sentiment through culture, by developing and supporting initiatives that let us share, experience and imagine Europe.

We do this by providing grants, building communities, offering incubator programs and online platforms, giving awards, organizing events and challenges, publishing books and building alliances, all supported by advocacy and communications.

Every program, grant or collaboration is a block added to the foundation of our common European future. Step by step, day by day, collaboration by collaboration.

Our Values

We strongly believe in a core set of values that guide and drive us in our daily work. Our aim is to embed them in all we do and live by them in our interactions with colleagues, partners, grantees and all other stakeholders.

  • Cooperation, sharing and solidarity are crucial for a united Europe that works for all its citizens.

 

  • Diversity is a given and something we celebrate. We try to include it in all we do; language, operations, programs and representation.

 

  • Standing up for democracy and the rule of law are essential for the future we envision. They need continued work and imagination.

 

  • We recognize human dignity and ingenuity as individual values that deserve respect.

 

  • We ensure that individuals or groups of people are not treated differently or less favourably, to secure equality.

 

  • We stand and fight for freedom to express oneself, of conscience, of movement, of the media and to challenge those in power, in Europe and worldwide.

 

European Sentiment

In 1954, our founder Denis de Rougemont wrote about the ‘necessity to awake a common sentiment of the European’.  “Unless there is a fairly rapid and general awareness of the danger that all our countries are running together, but also of the immense resources that Europe would still have at its disposal on the sole condition of uniting – all the treaties and acts that can be concluded will be insufficient, will come too late, or will remain a dead letter. If, on the contrary, a sense of common destiny is awakened among Europeans, most of the obstacles that exist today will seem easier to overcome, or even vanish since they consist of prejudice, partisan blindness, unfounded mistrust and, above all, ignorance of the real situation.”

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