One contact point for youth

Introduce one contact point for integral youth policy, including culture and sports for all young people. That is what cultural and sports organizations wrote in a letter (dated 15 May 2017) to the informer of the new cabinet at the time, minister Edith Schippers.

Consultation on the future of cultural participation

LKCA (National Centre of Expertise for Cultural Education and Amateur Arts Netherlands), organized an extensive consultation round in the work field of culture about the future of cultural participation (Basis voor Cultuurparticipatie, Een agenda voor actieve cultuurparticipatie in de toekomst, LKCA, 2017/ Base for Cultural Participation, An agenda for active cultural participation in future). The agenda for the future that was drawn up at the consultation is based on societal trends and ambitions in the cultural sector. In particular, young cultural professionals were invited to share their views on the future of cultural participation.

Challenges

Challenges for the coming years are: secure the accessibility of performing arts; allow bottom-up initiatives to grow; give technology a place; and contribute to social questions with arts and culture. Young people especially point out that diversity and inclusion need to be addressed through cultural participation in a natural way, that there has to be opportunity for talent development, that funds should operate more transparently and be more accessible and especially that existing systems should be more open. 

Integral and multi-disciplinary systems

After the municipal elections of March 2018 and with the new national government (presented on 26 October 2017) the expectation of LKCA is that integral and multi-disciplinary sytems will be emphasized even more. This is very much in sync with the inventory of methods which use arts and culture to reach young people in the social domain. This inventory is a running LKCA project.

Value of sports, arts and culture

The value of this combination is well described, for example by Maike Kooijmans in her article ‘Talentgericht werken met kwetsbare jongeren. De opgetelde waarde van sport, kunst en cultuur’ (Talent-oriented work with vulnerable youths. The value of sport, arts and culture) from the Boekmans quarterly series of books about arts and sports number 112 (autumn 2017, only in Dutch), also mentioned in Paragraph 8.4.

Europe in Perspective – international training

The aim of Europe in Perspective: International Co-operation in Cultural Learning is to create new transnational and European professional development opportunities that strengthen the capacity of those working in schools as well as in non-formal arts and cultural education to develop more intercultural understanding and European awareness. In order to achieve this, a multinational modular training concept is to be developed and tested in the field.

The steering group consists of LKCA Netherlands, and national cultural education centres from Germany, England, Hungary, Austria and Scotland.