We invite people to take the initiative: in fact, we strive to foster a new spirit of sharing, with which to rethink cultural and public spaces, in a new light that makes them more inclusive and engaging. We see culture as a driver for building a new active citizenship.
Our work is divided into various areas of intervention.
Encouraging active participation
If you want to learn more about the words, concepts and outlooks of active participation, click here. It is the result of a process involving representatives and experts from over 70 municipalities, associations, universities, research and training centres, national institutional entities, other second tier organisations and foundations of banking origin you will find listed in the report together with their contact details.
The Encouraging active participation mission contributes to achieving the following Sustainable Development Goals
Participation spaces
Participation requires collective spaces For this reason we support New Cultural Centres, Community Centres and Independent Cultural Centres as local hubs that activate inhabitants and the relationships between them. For this purpose, we worked with our strategic allies to put together the SPACE CALL FOR PROPOSALS aimed at 100 spaces in Piedmont, Liguria and Valle d’Aosta. We have also launched a practice community intended for managers of cultural and civic centres who want to participate in training, networking and workshops. We also support Neighbourhood Centres, starting with those in Turin and Genoa, and public spaces, with a particular focus on spaces adjacent to schools and cultural and civic centres.
Cultural participation
We endeavour to spread cultural practices so that they involve ever broader segments of the population, thereby boosting the development of audiences for culture and their active involvement by experimenting with different approaches. To support these aims, the Culture Around the Corner programme has been developed with the goal of bringing culture to your doorstep, wherever you live, creating new opportunities for relationships, sharing, cultural aggregation, socialising and personal and collective growth. Support for festivals with the strong involvement of local inhabitants is also part of this plan.
Our challenge also extends to cultural practices in the scientific arena, which we are tackling by establishing, amongst other things, think-tanks like PICS, which focuses on bringing science to the wider public, working on the relationship between Culture and Health.
Civic participation
We are committed to disseminating collaborative practices so they can involve increasingly broad segments of the population. In order to promote and support these processes, in January 2023 we published the Guidelines for collaborative practices, with the aim of creating favourable conditions, by supporting dedicated actors, practices and spaces, to help people interested in collaborating and helping one another more fully in the places where they live, working together to implement projects of various kinds but consistent with the old or new identities of their areas.
The other areas we support to promote active civic participation relate to the Universal Civic Service, to the processes that follow the confiscation of assets from organised crime and to support for predominantly second-tier actors dealing with these community dynamics.
Democratic participation
Based on the experience of designing and implementing the Polo del ‘900, we support initiatives that foster democratic participation: those aimed at informing citizens to stimulate democratic practices, engagement in public life, and rebuilding of the relationship between citizens and institutions and the dynamics of representation. In particular, we have a specific team dedicated to supporting different forms and models of policy/politics schools, including Prime Minister, a real school of politics that invests in training our country’s future political leaders. In this field we also directly experiment with projects to bring young people closer to Europe such as Next Gen U a two-year project developed with the Polo del ‘900 and 14 cultural and civic centres in Piedmont, Liguria and Valle d’Aosta.
Focus on young people and inland and mountain areas
Youth participation is a cross-cutting priority across all the themes mentioned, so we encourage applications from under 30s, their associations and social enterprises, whether existing or in the start-up phase. We will continue to foster dialogue with the under-35s by building relationships with the spaces and communities they habitually frequent and encouraging them to see themselves as agents of change and co-protagonists in solutions to the problems of our time.
Finally, the analysis conducted by geographical areas led us to prepare a specific plan on participation and inland and mountain areas. Its implementation is focused on specific initiatives to strengthen participatory planning by local actors in collaboration with regional public policy directorates and their capacity building for more effective use of funds provided by the National Strategy for Inland Areas (SNAI) and greater competitiveness in public calls for proposals. Other specific actions are being taken to create and support youth enterprise in these areas, including the Appennino 2023 project, in which CSP led a composite partnership with which it won the annual call by the Garrone Foundation.
