Meet at Culture

Istanbul to receive UNESCO funding for Culture Project

Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) announced to be among the grantees of the International Fund for Cultural Diversity (IFCD), established under Article 18 of the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The grant will support İKSV in realizing the nationwide project of ‘Thread of Culture: Empowering Turkey’s Local Cultural Professionals’, proposed and to be carried out by the Cultural Policy Studies department of İKSV. One of the nine eligible projects to receive funding among 480 projects from 60 countries, Thread of Culture is also the first project to receive the fund from Turkey.

Thread of Culture will establish a platform for professionals working on every level of the cultural field across Turkey to offer a wide variety of capacity building trainings, and to set new standards for cultural production, policies and management. Developing countries that are parties to the 2005 Convention have the opportunity to benefit from this fund, which aims to develop sustainable cultural policies and support practices, researches and projects.

Thread of Culture, scheduled to begin in July 2020, aims to improve the competencies, skills and increase the overall capacity of cultural professionals at a local level, in as many cities as possible across Turkey. To this end, a need assessment research will be conducted, cultural management training programmes will be designed and implemented and a web platform open to public will be activated. In order to establish a balance between participants from civil and public sectors, the participants of the training programmes will be chosen among the employees of both public and nongovernmental organisations and independent institutions. The content, curriculum and the programme of the training will be designed, prepared and implemented by prominent professionals from the academia, civil society, and private as well as the public sector. Thread of Culture will persistently open its resources and know-how to its participants across the country and to the public along the way for everyone to access with a web platform that will reflect the diversity of cultural expressions in local contexts. The web platform will function as an online capacity empowerment tool (discussion forum, audio-visual content, publications) while assuring the sustainability of the project in the future.

The objective of the project is also to foster civic participation in the decision-making processes in the cultural field by enhancing dialogue and cooperation between civil and public sector, which is also among the foremost universal objectives of the 2005 Convention. Training sessions with novel methods of participation and dialogue are being designed for civil and public sectors to work in a spirit of exchange and cooperation. A multifaceted assessment of the project will be presented by the Cultural Policy Studies of İKSV to all relevant institutions, policy makers and officials in the form of a report upon the project’s termination. To take shape with the contributions of the participants of the training programme, the report will try and measure the integration of civil society into the decision-making processes in the cultural field, and identify the obstacles faced by the private sector while proposing alternative ties with public sectors.

Carried out by the Cultural Policy Studies of İKSV with the partnership of Turkey Europe Foundation (TAV), Thread of Culture is planned to run between July 2020-2022.