Smart and Fearless: Guidelines for Emerging Arts Centres in Eastern, Southeastern and Southern Europe

A practical guide drawn from four years of the TEH Startup Support Programme (2018–2021), during which four mentors worked directly with 13 emerging cultural centres across Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Greece, Kosovo, Romania, Ukraine, Italy, and Portugal. The publication distils that experience into six thematic chapters — artistic vision, community building, organisational models, audience development, negotiating with owners, and advocacy — each accompanied by concrete recommendations and candid accounts of what worked and what did not. Five extended case studies (Anibar, Communitism, Korpus, Kultura Medialna, Salaam Cinema) show these challenges as they played out in specific organisations. One of the co-authors is Mykhailo Glubokyi, lecturer of Webinar #2: Building Strong International Partnerships, and the publication directly extends what he presented there on trust-building, long-term partnerships, and entering European cooperation projects.

The guide speaks to themes running across all four ZMINA:Resilience webinars.

• For participants of Webinar #1: Organisations Ready for Projects, the contextual analysis of Eastern Europe describes the operating environment most participants know firsthand — the absence of long-term planning, reactive management, small core teams without clear role division — while the Korpus case study traces the concrete transition from startup improvisation to sustainable structure.
• For Webinar #3: Foundation of Impact Monitoring and Evaluation, the chapter on negotiating with authorities addresses why cultural impact is difficult to translate into numbers, and why that gap is one of the most vulnerable points in relations with both owners and funders.
• For Webinar #4: Fundraising and Donor Relations, the section on finding funding maps the funding landscape in post-socialist countries: limited state support, rare corporate sponsorship, international funds as a lifeline, and the political conditions that can block even that access.

Authors: Chris Keulemans, Mykhailo Glubokyi, Ada Arduini, Irena Boljunčić Gracin
Published by: Trans Europe Halles, 2021 | Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme
Available at teh.net