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Description
he proposed project is needed to help deal with the stable trend of seclusion, isolation and ultimately reaching a ceiling of opportunities for development of the so-called “small organizations” in the Bulgarian NGO sector, which survive on an annual budget of less than 50 000 BGN, mainly with the help of voluntary labour, in the conditions of a new social changes, even though with a highly-competent staff. The project aims at developing the expertise of the team of A25 Cultural Foundation as well as boosting the organization’s capacity to carry out economic activities and use the incoming revenues to make up for the occasional and very limited financing of publicly beneficial activities in the field of culture. In this sense the project fully meets the specific objective of Building the Capacity of a CSO of Thematic Priority 6 of this call. The cultural sector has ended up being among the most affected ones by the COVID-19 crisis because with the introduction of social distancing, the financial framework of the sector founded fully on events and ticket sales, immediately vanished. Against this backdrop the project will strengthen the work and development of A25 Cultural Foundation so that the organization can adapt to the changes and gain further expertise and knowledge about its future additional expert and economic activities which help it fulfill its main mission of working for the public benefit.
Summary of project results
When Covid-19 and the measures for restraining the spread of the infection made their landfall in Bulgaria, the so-called “small organizations” operating in the Bulgarian nongovernmental sector were already caught-up in a chronic state of capsulation and isolation, caused by the quickly reachable threshold of the possibilities for development, achieved thanks to mainly voluntary work of their otherwise highly educated teams. In this reality, A25 Cultural Immunity project aimed at the gradual strengthening and development of A25 Cultural Foundation by deepening and enlarging the expertise, the skills and the international relations of its team for the purposes of both: improving the main area of operation of the organization, as well as enlarging its for-profit activities in the near future, so that they can at least partially compensate for the tiny opportunities for public funding of arts and culture. As a result of the support, A25 was able to join one of the leading European networks - Culture Action Europe, as well as ENCATC, which gave us access to valuable resources, strategic documents, meetings and debates on European level. Through the whole duration of the project, A25 continued to run Octane Number: Culture rubric in partnership with Uspelite.bg, in which each month interviews with arts and culture professionals, whose work makes a difference in society, yet remains in the shadows of the media attention, were published. A25’s team also prepared an analysis of the impact of the Covid-crisis on the non-governmental sector in Bulgaria, which was published at The Bulgarian NGO’s Information Portal. Last but not least, at the end of the project A25 has a refreshed web page with high functionality and new visual identity, thus the team of the organization successfully completed several additional trainings in digital marketing, allowing for-profit involvement into this rapidly developing field.
Campaign presentation subpage, where a video about the advancement of the project is uploaded: https://a25cultfound.org/projects/kulturen-imunitet-a25/
Subpage with all interviews in Octane Number: Culture rubric: https://uspelite.bg/oktanovo-chislo