How can we design sustainable programs that ensure the right to culture for all, without targeting (and as a consequence “othering”) specific groups – usually the “vulnerable” populations?

The challenge

Seeing the crisis as an opportunity to Build Back Better, the ecosystem of museums and cultural organizations can work strategically to rebuild trust, bringing citizens together again and maintaining or renewing a sense of communities in pandemic/post pandemic cities.

We invite you to join us, to explore ways, both practical and in terms of content, in which cultural organizations and art professionals can bring citizens together again and maintain or renew the sense of community in cities amidst the COVID19 pandemic. And discuss how we can make sure that these new community engagement tools/methods are equitable and available to all.

• A call is currently out from Voices of Culture for a structured dialogue with the EU commission on the challenges and opportunities of culture and the SDGs. In the discussion paper, independent expert Gijs de Vries notes that  since all governments have committed to the SDGs, Agenda 2030 offers a great opportunity for the cultural sector to demonstrate culture’s importance to citizens and society. 

• Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals

• OECD Museums and Local Development 

The challenge owner

The CoMuseum is an international museum and cultural stakeholders’ conference enriched by satellite events, organized yearly at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. It acts as a global platform of expertise for the wellbeing of cultural organizations and the communities they serve, fostering the production and exchange of ideas and the facilitation of networks between culture and arts professionals from all over the world.

The CoMuseum is more than a conference: three women behind three major cultural and educational stakeholders Sophia Handaka, Eleni Alexaki and Maria Papaioannou and a superpower team of inspired people from the filed have been nurturing the creation/birth of a physical and virtual interaction platform for museum and cultural professionals. Its goal is to share best ideas and practices from around the world, highlight contemporary challenges, and create a global network of professionals that will co-design a culture-centred future for our societies.

Organised by: Benaki Museum, U.S. Embassy in Greece, British Council

PARTICIPANTS

Facilitation by

Christos Papamichael is a graduate of the Theatre studies department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds an actor’s diploma from the Higher School of Dramatic Art “Praxi 7”. He is the co-founder of the collective culture group WE (EMEIS) [2013], which carries out theatre productions, educational programs in prisons and the annual Our Festival – Meeting of Solidarity Artists, of which he has been the production director since 2015.

In 2016, he founded Liminal Access with the aim of embedding the concepts of inclusion and accessibility in the creative industries. He is a scholarship alumnus in the following programs: Start – Create Cultural Change 1617 from the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, German Association of Sociocultural Centers and Arts for Good fellowship – ART and Disability 1718 by the Singapore International Foundation. 

Committed to continuous learning, he regularly attends trainings, conferences and meetings related to cultural management and social entrepreneurship, such as: Sustainable Cultural Management summer course (2016), 1st International BoschAlumniForum – Commoning as a local response to the global crisis (2017 ), DO BUSINESS, DO IT YOURSELF! (2017-2018), Impactful Festivals in Practice (2019). He is also a member of the Impact Hub Athens community, a local and internationally connected network for positive social impact.