In May, a new EU project was launched to help engage young people in cultural education in rural areas. With a total support amount of 2.5 million DKK from the Erasmus+ programme, the aim is to develop the skills of cultural workers so that they can create better cultural offers together with young people. The project has the participation of partners from Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark, from which the Region of Southern Denmark and the Center for Rural District Research (CLF) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) participate.
SDU in Esbjerg formed the framework when the partnership in the EU project R YOUCULT held their first meeting at the beginning of May. The project is supported by the Erasmus+ program and over the next two years will investigate how to make it more attractive for young people to live in rural areas. The aim is to develop a universal training program for cultural actors in rural municipalities and cultural institutions throughout the EU. The training program must give cultural workers new skills to facilitate processes that can lead to anchoring and building a dynamic youth culture in the countryside.
According to Helene Mikkelsen, specialist consultant at Regional Development in the Region of Southern Denmark, there is precisely a need for a project like this to generate knowledge about how to create better cultural opportunities for young people:
“There is not much systematic knowledge in the area – and workshops with cultural actors in Southern Denmark have made it clear that they lack the tools to work with culture for young people in rural areas. Specifically, e.g. are asked sharply about how to match the local offers with what the young people demand.”
Successful first meeting
Helene Mikkelsen and her colleague Julie Kirstine Olsen, development consultant in Region Southern Denmark, both participated in the kick-off meeting, where the project partners had the opportunity to greet each other for the first time.
“It was wonderful to properly greet all the partners and experience their commitment to the project and to the agenda on culture for young people in rural areas, which we all have an interest in. Now we are in dialogue with the other countries to get the final details in place. In each country, we need to find 12 employees in the cultural field who will participate in the training course. So we are about to start contacting the cultural actors in the southern Danish municipalities. The cultural actors have previously shown great interest in the project, so we hope that there will be a desire to be allowed to participate,” says Julie Kirstine Olsen.
Based on the region’s cultural strategy
The idea for the project arose when Region of Southern Denmark and the South Denmark EU Office agreed to pursue the possibility of implementing the region’s cultural strategy through an Erasmus+ project. EU consultant Cathrine Holm Frandsen has collaborated with the region to identify the project opportunity, find project partners, and clarify the application stages. She tells:
“It’s great to see how you can stand with an identified project opportunity in the region’s development strategy and then work together to develop it into a concrete EU project. Hopefully, in the long term, the project can help to strengthen the local identity, attractiveness, and settlement in the rural areas.”
SDU is at the head of the project, which, in addition to the Region of Southern Denmark, brings together the University of Jyväskylä, City of Jyväskylä, The Museum of Central Finland, University of Groningen, Hanze University Groningen.
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