part 1
HOW DID WE GET HERE? Colaboradora was born in the wake of La Colaboradora, a project by the city administration of Zaragoza, the capital of the Spanish province of Aragon, whose mission was to face the chronic lack of jobs and income that plagues the youth. Back in 2013, its creators wanted to launch a solidarity network of entrepreneurs and freelancers in the creative field and offer them a coworking space with open, free educational programs. The project was a huge success and was acknowledged by the EUROCITIES Award in 2016. But it wasn’t just the award that drew us to La Colaboradora. This project helped us reflect on how to deal in practice with the relationship between culture and development. In the last decades, the assumption that cultural features were a hindrance was replaced by an understanding of them as a fundamental dimension of local development. Next to social and environmental aspects, culture not only contributes to generating jobs and income, but also favors a development model that interacts sustainably with territories and populations. Here at Instituto Procomum, we also believe in a community-based creative economy that values local territories, identities and knowledge and that is fostered by the political being of every entrepreneur.
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With this in mind, we carried out in 2018 the first edition of Colaboradora inspired by our partners in Spain. It was aimed at artists and cultural producers that work for social transformation in peripheral areas, focusing on the neighborhoods surrounding our headquarters at the so-called Bacia do Mercado (Market Wharf) in Santos. We connected a collaborative network of artists and creators with a collective work space (LAB Procomum) and an educational process for cultural production and community action in defense of the commons. The project culminated in the First Arts and Communities Festival, produced in partnership with Sesc (Mission of the Social Service of Commerce) and Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo).
Learn more about Colaboradora Arts and Communities: procomum.org/2019/04/08/revista-colab/
Colaboradora - ENTERPRISES FOR CHANGE
