Implementation of Creative Europe Programme: how EU supports Ukraine’s culture

In 2016, Ukraine became a part of the EU’s Creative Europe Programme, which supports the cultural, creative and audiovisual sectors. Since then, Ukrainian entities have had access to grant funding across over 30 diverse competitions. This support is especially relevant and important for Ukraine during the full-scale invasion.

This topic was discussed during the presentation of the intermediate results of the programme at Media Center Ukraine – Ukrinform.

During the discussion, Mykola Ulyanov, EU Creative Europe Programme Desk Ukraine, explained that the large scope of the program provides exceptional opportunities for supporting culture in Ukraine, in particular during the full-scale invasion.

“In 2022, in view of the special security circumstances in which Ukraine found itself, the European Education and Culture Executive Agency initiated a special open call for Ukraine as a special and exclusive mechanism for supporting culture in Ukraine. The name of the open call was “Support to Ukrainian displaced people and the Ukrainian Cultural and Creative Sectors.” It was a sub-grant program. And its peculiarity is that the implementation of the projects proposed at the application stage is administered by consortia, where participation of Ukrainian organizations is required in the role of coordinators or simply as important partners. As only organizations from Ukraine really understand the context and how they can best support culture in Ukraine, its cultural organizations, and thus ensure post-war recovery,” he explained.

According to Mykola Ulyanov, 28 organizations implementing 32 projects received support under the Creative Europe Programme in 2023. The total volume of funding granted to Ukrainian organizations in 2023 under various competitions of the program amounted to about EUR 5 million.

The most popular competitions are European cooperation projects. He emphasized that Ukraine leads among the 40 participating countries of the program in the competition for the distribution of European literary works.

At the same time, Tetyana Shulga, Culture Sector Manager of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine, pointed out that the project supports all possible cultural directions.

“In fact, we work in all possible directions and continue to support culture while paying special attention to the development and support of the ‘productive layer’ of Ukrainian culture as well as to the support of Ukrainian activists and small organizations through sub-grants. That’s because we believe that culture and creative industries are extremely important both for the resilience of the country itself and for its further development. It is the driving force that provokes change, that provokes dialogue about change, that helps to establish communication between people who may not always share certain values or are divided in their opinions, who have to find ways to coexist together in the same territories, which is the case with, say, displaced persons and communities that shelter them,” she explained.

Tetyana Shulga noted that Ukrainian culture is currently facing many challenges. However, she hopes that it will be possible to provide all the necessary and appropriate support in the difficult tasks that the country is currently facing.

It is worth noting that the EU’s Creative Europe Programme is the largest program supporting the cultural and creative sectors in Europe. The program’s total European budget for 2021-2027 stands at 2.44 billion euros, with operations spanning 40 countries.

Read more: https://mediacenter.org.ua/news