COMMUNITY VALUES

BACKGROUND

The huge civil society sector of amateur arts, voluntary culture, and heritage in the Nordic and Baltic region not only provide joy, friendship, and meaning for the participants, but the activities also promote added community values, like social inclusion & cohesion, active citizenship & democracy, environmental sustainability.

However, these potential for fostering societal benefits can be improved by a more conscious development work by the learning providers in the sector and by a strengthened support from the key stakeholders. Until now, learning providers in the sector can find and use many good practice examples from peers as inspiration, but they still need more systematic tools and methods on how to assess own activities and pathfinders to improve their daily practice.

AIM AND OUTPUTS

The overall aim is to develop and promote better methods and tools to the cultural associations in the Nordic – Baltic region to assess and compare the added community values of their cultural activities.
During the project we will:

  • Provide a combined desk and field survey to clarify the state of arts of added community values in the cross-cultural civil society sector, and thereby disclose relevant focus points, topics and related indicators regarding 3 key areas of added values: Social inclusion & cohesion, active citizenship & democracy, and environmental sustainability.
  • Develop an appropriate online Benchmarking Tool incl. methodological guideline, which allows the stakeholders to assess the added values of their activities in different dimensions and categories of societal benefits.
  • Disseminate the results to the wider cross-cultural civil society communities and other key stakeholders in the Nordic – Baltic region in a sustainable manner.

OUTCOME

The intended long-term impact is that the huge cross-cultural civil society sectors in our Nordic

 

  • Baltic countries will be better to access and work more consciously with the added community values of their activities, and thereby to strengthen their already important contribution to the inclusiveness, cohesion, democratic values and community spirit in our societies, and not least strengthen their incipient awareness of the importance of integrating green values in the cultural activities.