TOWCHED will demonstrate transformative potential of inclusive, arts-based and heritage collections-mediated educational interventions for children and youth, using SDGs as the results framework. These interventions, piloted in collaboration between Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs), Collections-based Organizations (CBOs) and educational institutions across Europe, will be critically assessed,providing a field-tested and well-supported roadmap to enriching our learning ecology with creative use of heritage, thus making Europe, and our world, a better place for all. Our innovative approach relies on the application of the Human Rights-based Approach (HRBA) as a project planning tool, which is foundational in Agenda2030 and the SDGs. TOWCHED will actively engage with children, young people, educators, creatives, heritage professionals, policymakers and professional development providers to ensure our goals and impacts are not only achieved, but that stakeholders can shape these goals in line with the principles of Leave No-one Behind, and the Right to Development. Furthermore, we will focus on lifelong perspectives, from early childhood education and care to young adult education in formal and non-formal learning environments. We will seek to empower CBOs to be more effective in supporting sustainable development through educational activities that foster people’s active, free, and meaningful participation. Our transdisciplinary approach will lead to creation of community of practice for competence-based sustainable development education and life-long learning rooted in our rich European heritage. The project will provide practical tools, and develop capacities to use these tools. In pursuit of these objectives, we will work closely with the transdisciplinary New European Bauhaus (NEB) and other similar initiatives. By integrating our project into this broader European movement, we aspire to contribute to the transformation of societies for a sustainable future.

Creative practices are underused in the urgent task of changing cultures towards sustainability. CreaTures promotes action for social and ecological sustainability by identifying those aspects of creative practice that contribute most effectively to socio-cultural transformation and producing an open-access framework to support practitioners and policy-makers in driving positive change. The project draws on pilot research that shows how collaboration, reflection and direct engagement are key to changing the public’s orientation to environment issues. Thus, its process of identifying and evaluating the design of significant aspects (and the impact of different contexts) involves three interrelated components: an Observatory, identifying and mapping existing, fragmented and often hidden transformational creative practices; a Laboratory, supporting new experimentation and direct engagement with diverse stakeholders, including the members of the public, by mounting several different scales and types of arts production, and; an Evaluation phase, testing new and existing creative practices in a systematic and concerted way for their impact. The project will combine insights from these undertakings into a transdisciplinary, evidence-based, and practical framework that highlights the strengths of and opportunities for the arts to contribute to addressing climate change and associated effects. The resulting framework will demonstrate effective paths to achieving sustainability, social cohesion and peaceful co-existence at a time of rapid change, offering a strategic research agenda for key stakeholders, a set of innovations addressing the cultures and conditions for delivering greater sustainability, and policy recommendations to focus and optimise work in mobilizing the arts for transformational futures.

STARTUP will engage in a double-sided process of taking action and doing research that promotes transformative change. The project highlights the critical role of cultural heritage (CH) and the cultural creative industries (CCIs) in socio-economic, post-crisis recovery and their potential to drive the transition towards a beautiful, inclusive, sustainable environment. These principles align with the New European Bauhaus’s (NEB) core values, which seek to engage citizens, institutions, and creative individuals as thinkers and change-makers in shaping a better future. The project adopts the placemaking paradigm, which promotes a bottom-up, small-scale and place-based approach. In eight small-scale trials, placemaking based on culture and creativity will be tested and refined. Cultural mapping and comparative case study research will further promote the knowledge-base for such interventions. The trials, mappings and case studies will form the empirical underpinnings of analyses of sustainable architectural design, multi-level policy and governance, and social, economic and environmental impacts (positive and negative) of culture-driven placemaking. These analyses, in turn, will form the evidence-base for STARTUP’s final results and main outcome: a “European Creative Placemaking Framework”, which is the policy-option STARTUP will innovate. The approach of the framework builds upon local actors in culture and creativity, and aims at strengthening these actors as well as local authorities, in building their future on the tangible and intangible cultural resources represented in the place. The framework, which aims to be a world-leading management tool, hereby supports local economic development, sustainability, social cohesion and identity across Europe, but based on local cultural and creative professionals engaged in their art.