As part of the Initiative for European Public Space, ECF is building a coalition to shape a European media landscape. Together with journalists, researchers and concerned citizens, we are drawing and testing a blueprint for a networked European media model based on public values and independent from both market and government.

Europe is facing real challenges in coping with market-driven and mainly non-European online platforms on which dis-/and misinformation 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.

All across Europe, citizens of all backgrounds and cultures are organising their communities. They create spaces where culture works to strengthen social ties and helps to imagine alternative ways of living and engaging with others in understanding, trust and peace. ECF connects these spaces and thus helps to build a crucial infrastructure for a cultural movement that can reclaim European democracy.

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.

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.

Connected Action for the Commons was an action-research programme and network with six cultural organisations from across Europe and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) as collaborating hubs. Under the thematic focus Connecting Culture, Communities and Democracy we worked together with Connected Action for the Commons, a network and action research programme.

The Idea Camp was a three-day incubator workshop for some of the most creative and adventurous ideas from across Europe and neighbouring countries, created by the Connected Action for the Commons Network.

ECF has been active in the field of young people and media for many years and specifically through the Youth and Media programme. In 2010, a new network called Doc Next Network sprung up out of this collaboration. Initiated and supported by ECF, the network aimed to create a vibrant European space where young people’s media messages are more accessible in mainstream public discourse.

Read about ECF’s European Neighbourhood programme which has stimulated civil society working in culture to influence policy reform and societal development in the Balkans, Kaliningrad, Moldova, Turkey, the Ukraine and Arab-Mediterranean countries.

In 2011, ECF and Soros Foundation Moldova launched this two-year project in rural Moldova to improve conditions in small-scale local communities facing enormous challenges – growing poverty, high levels of youth unemployment, underdeveloped public services and social disintegration. The programme ran until December 2013.