BRIDGING
Bridging Social Capital by Participatory and Co-Creative Culture
The European sector of participatory culture (defined as amateur arts, voluntary culture and heritage) is, next to amateur sport, the largest civil society sector in EU member states, and it has been the fastest growing civil society area in terms of members and new associations in the last years.
The aim is to bridge social capital and to promote inclusion by strengthening co-creative culture activities in this sector. Thereby, the projects intend to strengthen co-creation activities which change the learning context not only from individual creativity to collective creativity, but involve different subgroups of individuals into the activities in order to bridge people who are generally outside of each other’s direct social networks. The work will focus on bridging social capital in the following five contexts of culture activities: inter-social, inter-generational, inter-regional, inter-cultural, and inter-European.
On the short term level, the goals of the project are to educate, teach and engage the key staff in the huge European lifelong learning sector of participatory arts and culture and to initiate new co-creative culture activities with high potential of bridging social capital. In the long term, the project aims to help to increase the mutual trust between different social groups participating in the activities. We hope that by providing information and raising awareness, the project will inspire the learning providers in the sector to be more societal engaged in order to counter the current decline of cultural cohesion and mutual trust in our communities and to promote openness and inclusive participation among formerly segregated social groups.
Method
The 2-year project has four main phases:
- Launching of a Communication Portal, English and completion of a state of the art-survey in five participating project countries.
- Compiling good practice and innovative approaches and publish five thematic compendia reports.
- Design and test curricula in seven national pilot courses in all of the seven partner countries.
- Complete seven national conferences on the issue, including the final dissemination and publication of the project summary report.
