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.

Culture of Solidarity Fund

Under the umbrella of the Vision Funds, the Culture of Solidarity Fund launched in 2020, 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.

Networked European Media

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.

Digital European Public Spaces

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.

Physical spaces for public debate

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.

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.

Connected Action for the Commons

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.

Idea Camp

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.

Doc Next 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.

European Neighbourhood programme

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.

Trio

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.