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Description
The Association of Professional Theatres in the Czech Republic is an organization of employers in the field of professional public service theatres and deals with issues of common interest. Theaters have been facing growing bureaucratic hurdles and a lack of funding stability for decades. The covid crisis has once again highlighted the need for changes in live performance sector legislation and the need for coordinated communication with ministries and public administrative bodies. Requirements for the provision of consulting, service and mediation services are increasing on the part of member theaters. Related to this is the need to increase the personnel capacity of the Association. Unlike comparable associations abroad that have entire teams, the Association has no full-time employees.
We would like to use the funds from the grant to create a permanent job position and thus provide stable security for long-term employees. The Association has long provided legal and tax advice to members, prepared methodologies, common positions and their communication for them, and strives to improve conditions in the cultural sector. Greater staff capacity will allow these services to expand, increase in volume and improve. It is necessary to map members of the Association to identify the diverse needs of individual theaters. The resulting data will argumentatively help in communicating the interests of the Association to public administrative bodies. They will also be a stepping stone in the preparation of other activities for our members. As part of the project, we want to further strengthen the competencies of our members through workshops, seminars and internships.
In preparing these workshops, we will draw on the experience of our partner Association of Norwegian Theaters and Orchestras. At the same time, we want to be inspired by their functioning in optimizing our processes, how to fully utilize the personnel capacities and gradually increase them.
Summary of project results
The project helped the Project Promoter to move further in the professionalisation of the association. Having a permanent staff member was a big qualitative shift in the ability to provide service to member theatres. Within the partnership the Project Promoter revealed the possibilities to move forward. The Project Promoter faced no crucial challenges.
Strengthening the capacity of the umbrella organization directly helps to strengthen the capacity of the member organizations, which are public service theaters that strive to cultivate society. The role of institutions today is quite crucial and unless we have strong institutions, they will not be able to fulfill their mission. At the same time, this project has increased the competencies of the staff in these institutions.
The job creation may be considered one of the main project benefits. Not so many associations/networks in Czechia are able to employ someone. The Project Promoterˇs study trip to Norway brought a lot of inspiration with a direct transfer to practise. Colleagues from Norway attended the Generally Assembly in Brno and gave a talk on "Arm’s lenght principle", which the Project Promoter has tried to promote in the Czech Republic. 9 workshops were held. The Project Promoter considers member education to be one of the priorities, along with advocating for decent funding for the cultural sector and for changes in legislation. Being able to build tailor-made seminars for Association members is absolutely essential. In general training sessions, presenters rarely understand theatre operations and it is harder to apply the knowledge from such training in practice. The Project Promoter´s social media presence has increased substantially and the content of the website has been expanded and adapted.
Nine professional workshops, job creation. Due to the great success of the technical workshops, the Project Promoter established a partnership with the Czech Technical Universtiy in Prague and will be working together to train the technicians while educating new ones. A working group of PR has been formed to work together to increase the reach of each message.
Summary of bilateral results
The Project Promoter gained inspiration in the field of mentoring program, making a Norwegian theater show case and organizing theater awards. The way of communication with the ministries was also very inspiring, especially through policy papers. In the Czech Republic, it is still more about behind-the-scenes lobbying and little is resolved transparently. On the contrary, it was quite shocking for our partners. In Norway, cultural organizations are governed by the long-arm principle, and this is something that the association has been trying to establish for about twenty years. In this way, the Project Promoter was able to "touch" it in practice and to obtain additional arguments for the intended change in legislation.