Sharing learnings and good practices

Welcome to the Ambassadors of Change platform!

This platform is a P2P tool that facilitates the showcasing of 14 selected tested methods and good practices that emerged as a response to the challenges that the pandemic brought. 

These selected methods and good practices are represented by the Ambassadors of Change, creative hubs and organisations who were available via this platform for one month to provide information and share their insights and knowledge. The platform offered the opportunity to book a P2P session with the Ambassadors of Change and/ or ask for more information through an email to all interested parties.

With the completion of the program, the selected organisations provided a learning material that can be found and downloaded here.

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Content Overview Ι

Type

Practices

Programs

Methods

Category

Digital shift

Community building

Co-working

Co-creating online models

Utilization of space

Distributed models of work

Format

Video

Toolkit

Guide

Handbook

Search through a selection of inspiring initiatives that occurred during the crisis of COVID-19 from creative hubs!

Kickstarting a Creative Hub during the pandemic

In December of the pandemic year 2020, AZIL founders decided to move into a bigger place. 

We had to make a decision; either we leave our original hub location or expand. We went with the latter and in the last half a year went through a process of starting a community driven hub from scratch. All the theories and know-how learned from years of being a part of the Creative Hubs movement were now put to test and practice. In June 2021, we can happily say that in spite of half a year of hard corona measures making hubs difficult to operate – we are up and running and looking forward to a bright and exciting future.

Rational International (AZIL)
A vibrant meetup place
Zagred, Croatia

Mario Mlakar –
AZIL Co-founder, Manager

Republikken Escape Room

Learn how to facilitate conversations about frustrations and worries by a handful of designed, selected questions and concrete facilitation tricks.

The future was unsure because of the uncertainty of the situation. We needed to contain that by meeting our members with a new mindset and tools! Escape Room is a space for sharing frustrations and worries that creates connectedness, hope and scoping strategies.

Learn how to facilitate these conversations by a handful designed, selected questions and concrete facilitation tricks.

Republikken
Coworking space
Copenhagen, Denmark

Ivan Lopez Garrido – 
Daily Manager & Community weaver

Co-create, co-budget and plan together with the Plato tools

Custom-made tools that help participatory culture organizations co-create and plan collective projects online.

Blivande has always had a strong online component and we have built custom-made tools that help participatory culture organizations co-create and plan collective projects online. These tools and methodologies provided us with extra resilience during the pandemic. We now want to offer these tools and methodologies to other organizations.

Blivande
A place for participatory culture 
Frihamnen, Stockholm

Hugi Asgeirsson – 
Co-founder

Virtual Boundaries

Online textile art exhibitions beyond distance: An easy and replicable format for online exhibitions.

These uncertain times have called for arts and cultural institutions and cultural spaces to be reactive and flexible, working collectively throughout new approaches and digital formats.

Virtual Boundaries: online textile art exhibitions beyond distance
presents an easy and replicable format for online exhibitions born by the collaboration of different actors, taking place on Instagram platform.  

The online exhibitions featured by the project arise from the on-going experience of Textile Culture Net, an international network of four textile institutions and cultural spaces conceived during the pandemic, in spring 2020. The network includes Lottozero textile laboratories in Prato, the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź (Poland), CHAT (the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) in Hong Kong and the TextielMuseum in Tilburg (The Netherlands).

With this kind of initiative, both ‘public’ and ‘private’ institutions and cultural spaces can overcome boundaries, both geographical and institutional, forging a new way of collaboration to become more inclusive, sustainable, efficient, and at the same time, dynamic and powerful. 

Lottozero
Center for textile design, art & culture
Toscana, Italy

Alessandra Tempesti –
Curator of the Lottozero Kunsthalle

Digital Cafés

The Comincenter Digital Cafés are weekly events broadcast live on the Comincenter’s social channels.

They consist of interviews of about 30 minutes with entrepreneurs, university teachers and students, local and national policy makers. The main topics are: innovation, active labour policies, gender equality in the world of work, opportunities for university students. The aim is to inform, disseminate and generate the opportunities that are our strength.

Comincenter
Professional training courses & Coworking
Potenza & Matera, Italy

Stefania Clemente – 
Learning & Community Manager

(RE)ACT for Change

A study case about the reactions and proactions of a creative hub facing the challenges of C-19

After the shock of having to close the doors of our creative hub, on March 16 2020, due to the global pandemic C-19, our response was divided into two phases.

Reaction Phase 
Quick adaptation to ensure survival: 

  • Ensuring short-term financial sustainability by creating new digital memberships and responding to emerging needs
  • Making work spaces safe and supporting the community 
  • Building alliances and a collective intelligence with our peers: the creation of a new Coworking Porto Association and the #StaySocialCoworkSafe initiative.

Proaction Phase
Deep and long analysis aiming to prosperity:

  • Exploring our internal weaknesses and strengths and prospecting the future for upcoming threads and new opportunities
  • Building a Strategic Plan towards resilience, recovery and prosperity
  • Acting collectively, now and always: Community and collective intelligence: hub level, neighbourhood level, city level, international level.
  • Making tangible changes: renovations and creation new and future-focused spaces, services and long-term memberships – the rise of digital content production spaces at CRU (new video/photography and audio/podcasts studios), new amenities for physical encounters (new specialty coffee bar at our renovated shop, and tiny auditorium for small events) and a new digital membership (CRU Club).

Inspiring Change and Supporting Replication
We intend to inspire change, through the storytelling of our experience: motivations, challenges, processes and results.

We will share our story, in the form of a short study case, containing brief reflections, community and partners testimonials, guidelines, notes and faqs, photos and clear infographics, resumed in a digital document.

CRU Creative Hub
Creative Hub
Porto, Portugal

Tânia Santos – 
Founder & Director of CRU Creative Hub

Learning Labs Cross Innovation

Develop skills, knowledge, and networks necessary for cross innovation partnerships.

Through a series of workshops and seminars, officials, entrepreneurs and students from the culture incubator Klump Subtopia and The Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH) will develop skills, knowledge, and networks necessary for cross innovation partnerships and become success ready. The learning lab module is used both as part of Klump Subtopia incubator program and in education and extracurricular activities at KMH.

We launched the first edition of the program in March 2021, with 8 cultural entrepreneurs, and 10 commercial companies and organizations (eg Apple, Scania, Region Skåne).

The program is briefly described below, and as we see these Learning Labs as joint explorations, it would be awesome to join other peers on the exploration adventure! How can we together make this more efficient, rewarding and fun?

Klump Subtopia
Centre for Art, Culture & Social Engagement
Norsborg, Sweden

Martin Q Larsson – 
Incubator Director Klump Subtopia

Baltic Creative

A Toolkit for COVID response.

Baltic Creative CIC supports circa. 170 companies across 118,000 sq/ft of space. The challenges facing all our tenants during the pandemic crisis have been varied which has meant we as a business, have needed to be even more flexible, innovative and supportive.

We introduced a whole range of support which included:
1. Grant support and advice
2. Business support and advice
3. Financial support
4. Health & Wellbeing support (Physical & mental)
5. Advocacy support
6. Operational support
7. COVID guidance and advice
8. New MOU with Liverpool John Moores University

We’d like to focus on sharing the work we did around:
1. Health & Wellbeing support
2. Grant support
3. Financial support.
4. COVID & Operational Guidance
5. Advocacy

Baltic Creative CIC
Community Interest Company
Liverpool, UK

Alex Christey-Kelly –
Operations Officer (Northern Lights & Digital House)

Lacuna Lab / Un-Scattering Creativity

A Berlin-based Non-Profit-Association; a multidisciplinary collective and studio.

Lacuna Lab e.V. is a Berlin-based Non-Profit-Association founded in 2015. It consists of a multidisciplinary collective and studio, located in the heart of Kreuzberg. The mission is to promote cultural exchange and explore future visions by bringing together people from  different backgrounds and professions and combining their skills and methodologies. Members of Lacuna Lab are active practitioners coming from arts, creative coding,
interaction design, music, writing, technology and science.

The organisation is continuously welcoming the public to create moments and learning processes together, exploring new realities in terms of hybrid methodologies. The goals are to bridge fields of specialisation and explore future possibilities of collaboration, to evolve innovative practices, to envision the future and to generate new forms of art. Since 2020 Lacuna Lab e.V. is a member of the European Media Art Platform / European Media Artists In Residence Exchange.

From the beginning on, Lacuna Lab e.V. has been a habitat for collaboration and exchange on interactive, interdisciplinary artworks and participatory events, such as exhibitions, workshops, meetups, and lectures. An artist-in-residence programme allows guests from partner organisations to temporarily work in the studio space and participate in the association’s activities. During COVID-19, we opened digital spaces for dialogue, to create opportunities for growth and discovery during these challenging circumstances.

We always want to learn from each other, and grow as a community. As Ambassadors of Change we want to give back and share insights from the last six years into running a creative hub successfully.

Lacuna Lab
An artist-run collaborative community
Kreuzberg, Germany

Thomas Heidtmann –
Co-Founder / Member

The Cooking Covid recipe

Cooking, eating, sharing stories, experiences, concerns but also opportunities and desires for the future!

We are all saturated with daily, back-to-back online screen time to not only work but also socialise. We are all tired of the screen. We all need physical contact.

We need creative thinking to find solutions, to identify new ways to communicate, be productive, establish genuine commitment, be inspired and have fun within the virtual world; the ‘new normal’.

We invite you all to invest a couple of hours of cooking, eating, sharing stories, experiences, concerns but also opportunities and desires for the future!

Let’s test and shape the Cooking Covid methodology together!

The future is hybrid.

Consorzio Materahub
Creative Hub supporting CCIs
Matera, Italy

Becky Riches – 
Project Manager

Viseiras

Empowering local communities to develop similar resilient strategies for fighting Covid and promoting entrepreneurship.

The project is about resilience and internationalization in a time of Covid. In March 2020 Buinho started fabricating and distributing Covid protective equipment to regional hospitals and health officials. And in April 2021 we went to Cape Verde to provide 3D printing workshops and empower local communities to develop similar resilient strategies for fighting Covid and promoting entrepreneurship. We want to share our vision on how creative hubs can channel disruptive change in small and isolated communities, and how moments of crisis can become an opportunity to increase the internationalization of our organizations.

Buinho Creative Hub
FabLab and Creative Residency Alentejo, Portugal

Carlos Alcobia – 
General Manager

The State of Presence Report

The new normal, and how to find opportunity in chaos.

Without a doubt, 2020 was a challenging year. Covid-19 brought to the surface a significant amount of challenges for everyone. No one was spared, and even the most prepared were suddenly afraid of what was coming next. The world is now in survival mode.

Suddenly, all the forthcoming trends are now happening at an incredible speed, almost like in pressure cooking. Instead of rushing into these changes, we decided to go the opposite way.

Everything is uncertain and, in times of uncertainty, we need to stay aware of the present. That is how we started this report. We were aiming to better understand what was happening in order to anticipate future behaviour. We interviewed people from different disciplines, who have innovative and entrepreneurial spirits, to learn about how they are dealing with the present crisis, and how they are adapting to face the future.

We are now sharing the learnings in the form of a Report (you can download it here for free: https://thepowerhouse.group/the-state-of-presence-report/ and by running a series of roundtables as online events and mentoring sessions. 

Want to find opportunities in times of uncertainty? Come join us for an hour of learning exchange!

ThePowerHouse GmbH
Shaping the Future of the Creative Industries

Joana Lacerda – 
Director of Impact at ThePowerHouse GmbH

Victoria Square Project

A contemporary artwork and a physical space of reference.

Victoria Square Project (VSP) is an evolving social sculpture. A contemporary artwork, while at the same time a physical space of reference for the neighborhood around Victoria square, VSP acquires its meaning and value in the context of urban development and neighborhood planning around its particular urban area. “Who is the contemporary Athenian?” is the research question posed as an attempt to concretely identify the elements that define an inclusive Athenian society today.

VSP is an art space community centered working in situ. Thus, to respond to COVID-19 crisis the team had to explore new ways of communication, reach and empowerment of their community. Our main goal was for the space to remain active and present to the daily life of our neighbors. Thus, a new strategy was developed, a hybrid model that combined in situ and digital programs. 

The big windows of VSP allowed our community to visit our art space without any physical contact. Inspired by the COVID19 crisis we developed a new game, #6, the number sent for physical exercises purposes, as an alternative self paced exploration of the neighborhood. The kids art workshops 10 countries / 10 artists held online. As a result, kids from Astypalaia and Kavala until Athens and Voukouresti explored influential artists from the countries of origin of our neighbors, such as Ghana, Bulgaria and Bangladesh. The newly shaped community co-Living Room co-created objects and elements that are currently installed in the physical space. Station One Artists-in-Resident program combines in situ research and digital lectures with the SNFPHI at Columbia University. 

During this process Victoria Square Project developed a toolkit and methods that gained valuable experience from and has shifted its perspective of community engagement, communication, project management and coordination. 

Victoria Square Project (VSP)
An evolving social sculpture
Athens, Greece

Ioanna Ntali –
Communication and Development Coordinator