Connected Action for the Commons

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= " a network and action research programme led by European Cultural Foundation" .

URL = http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/connected-action/


"together with six cultural organisations from across Europe: Culture 2 Commons - Alliance Operation City, Clubture Network, Right to the City - (Croatia), Les Tetes de l’Art (France), Krytyka Polityczna (Poland), Oberliht (Moldova), Platoniq - Goteo (Spain), and Subtopia (Sweden)."


Description

"The network works on topics such as the Commons, Public Space, Culture and Economy as a group and in their independent, diverse activities. We are co-developing and exchanging expertise as a network and engaging local communities into the work we do. The aim of the programme is to scale up our activities, combine our influence, highlight and connect new practices with European policy makers and gain knowledge from each other.


Each hub partner specialises in an area of work that is making change in their region.

  • Culture 2 Commons is a partnership of three Zagreb-based civil society organisations: Clubture, Operation City and Right to the City, connecting civil society organizations dealing with cultural, youth and commons-based issues across ex-Yugoslavia.
  • Krytyka Polityczna is active in three main fields: education, culture and politics, working through a national network of activists’ groups in Poland.
  • Les Tetes de l’Art specialises in participatory arts projects with artists and communities, encouraging learning and exchange in southern France.
  • Platoniq focuses on collaborative creation using ICT for social uses, including running their crowd-funding platform, Goteo, in Spain and abroad.
  • Oberliht works to connect dispersed artistic scenes and build an artistic community and communities making use of public spaces, mainly in Moldova.
  • Subtopia is a space dedicated to cultural and creative processes and production for professional creatives and start-ups in Alby, Stockholm.


Together we run the annual Idea Camp, by pooling our resources and methodologies ECF selects 50 of the most daring and innovative proposals through an open call process and invites these ‘Idea Makers’ to come and share their concepts at the Idea Camp. Each year the focus of the Idea Camp is slightly different, but always connected to our thematic focus. The location of the Idea Camp changes each year and it is hosted by a different organisation from the Connected Action for the Commons network. This year the Idea Camp will be hosted by Subtopia, in Sweden. " (http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/connected-action/)


Discussion

Marjolein Cremer:

"It is interesting to look in more detail at developments around participatory processes and an innovative funding and advocacy scheme for a more commons-based Europe. So what can we learn from the project?

This journey began for the European Cultural Foundation in 2013. In our attempt to catalyse social change, innovate our funding schemes and create greater policy impact from the ground up, the European Cultural Foundation brought together a network of six ‘hubs’: Culture 2 Commons – comprised of Alliance Operation City, Clubture Network and Right to the City (Croatia); Les Têtes de l’Art (France); Oberliht (Moldova); Krytyka Polityczna (Poland); Platoniq-Goteo (Spain); and Subtopia (Sweden). All of these hubs were locally and regionally relevant cultural organisations, firmly anchored in their communities and well connected with other organisations. They came together from 2013—2016 to create Connected Action for the Commons. The aim was to grow an empowered network that would promote new tools for democratic engagement through culture and that would nurture the commons.

By pooling the knowledge of the hubs and creating a network of local experience across Europe, the idea was to create more impact at the European level. The European Cultural Foundation wanted to strengthen these local practices and help the hubs to become more influential in shaping policies. We saw our role as catalyser, facilitator and assistant of the hubs in scaling up their knowledge and practice of the commons. This was not easy, as these different roles entail a different ambition and way of thinking from those of a traditional grant-making foundation. Step one is moving beyond the traditional way of supporting separate project grants: to shift the focus from a project-logic to more long-term network building. Step two is changing mindsets: from both the hubs as well as within the foundation. As a foundation, your role is no longer to support the completion of projects, but to accompany and support the development of a network as facilitator and partner. But how could we achieve this transition? How could we engage in a process that needs more than just financial support? How could we build trust and understanding with the possibility of failure that arises from an experiment that is long term (Gablier 2017)?

Connected Action for the Commons was one of the various (pilot) programmes the European Cultural Foundation has developed over the past few years with grantees and partners to change our own grant-making and operational mechanisms. As Vivian Paulissen, who was Knowledge Manager at the time and is now Head of Programmes at the European Cultural Foundation, explained:

- “As a cultural foundation that supports democratic renewal in Europe fuelled by local citizen’s movements, the European Cultural Foundation also has to reinvent our own institution so we can practise what we preach […]. It’s a long breath – exchanging, chasing, and quarrelling over small details that do matter and over big issues that need attention. Working in a complex networked way with hubs and communities in a more direct and peer-to-peer relationship, in which the European Cultural Foundation is apart from granting money, also facilitating knowledge, time, convening opportunities and networking. This was partly successful and partly not. And that is exactly the point: trust doesn’t come in a ready-made package. It is one big learning lab: we don’t have the final answers about the best way to do things. It is not as if we are simply peers and that the roles are interchangeable between foundations and grantees. […] It is not easy to imagine this relationship that, obviously, still holds power imbalances, in a world that is still organised largely around who holds the purse strings” (Paulissen 2018)." (https://www.spacesandcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Commons.-From-Dream-to-Reality.pdf)