Source: European Union 2 Published on: 2026-06-15
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When we create together, we build what remains: Creative Europe Culture project coordinators gather in Brussels
From 10 to 12 June 2026, Brussels became a meeting point for the Creative Europe Culture community, as more than 170 beneficiaries – from Cooperation Projects, Cultural Networks, Platforms for the emerging artists, Orchestras, and sectoral actions such as Music Moves Europe, Perform Europe, European Heritage Label, European Heritage Hub – came together for three days of exchange, reflection, networking, and joint thinking about the future of European cultural cooperation.
On 10 and 11 June, more than 100 beneficiaries of Creative Europe Cooperation Projects selected in 2025 gathered for the annual Grant Holders Meeting, organised by the Culture Unit of the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Cultural operators, artists and project coordinators from across Europe exchanged experiences, built capacities and strengthened the networks that underpin European cultural life.
Part of the meeting was structured around eleven thematic clusters covering areas such as sustainability, digital and AI, culture at risk, youth engagement, and diversity and inclusion, where projects working on related questions came together to compare approaches and identify common ground. These exchanges fed into an on-the-spot mapping of the 2025 cohort of projects, showing how, despite their diversity, they form a common narrative that speaks directly to broader EU cultural policy priorities.
A further highlight, and a genuine première, was a dedicated session bringing Cooperation Project representatives into the same room as approximately 35 representatives of Creative Europe Networks, Platforms, Orchestras, and sectoral actions. For the first time in many years, these communities of projects met around shared fields of work, mapping their respective areas of activity and opening new avenues for synergies across the wider Creative Europe ecosystem.
The discussions of 10 and 11 June ranged widely, yet common threads ran through them all. Participants returned again and again to questions of trust, belonging and long-term impact, reflecting a field increasingly focused not only on the delivery of activities but also on what projects leave behind.
This shift was captured in the opening reflection by Vasilis Charalampidis, President of the Board of the European Creative Hubs Network (ECHN): “Innovation, when it truly succeeds, eventually becomes tradition.” Building on this opening and on the rich material generated across the self-managed workshops, four themes emerged with particular clarity: a move from building projects to cultivating ecosystems, and from delivering outputs to creating the conditions for lasting change; the challenge of fitting meaningful cultural transformation – which takes years to develop – into the timeframe of a project cycle; culture understood not merely as a sector but as infrastructure for dialogue, participation, democracy and care; and the productive tensions between artistic freedom and measurable impact, between inclusion and cohesion, and between temporary funding and the ambition for permanent change.
On 12 June, more than 70 representatives of European Cultural Networks, Platforms for the emerging artists, Orchestras, and sectoral actions – including Music Moves Europe, Perform Europe, European Heritage Label, European Heritage Hub – gathered for a dedicated meeting with EACEA and the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC).
The day was structured around two priorities: a forward-looking reflection on whether the current design of Creative Europe still meets the needs of the sectors, and parallel working groups on two pressing policy questions – artists’ working conditions (including artistic freedom and culture and health) and access to finance for the cultural and creative sectors. Participants were invited to move beyond general principles and share concrete experience: what provisions work in practice, where the programme’s flexibility falls short, and how instruments beyond grants could be better tailored to the realities of the sector.
Greater flexibility and administrative simplification: lessons from the meeting with Networks, Platforms and sectoral actions
The 12 June discussions pointed to several concrete directions for the evolution of the programme. On support design, participants reaffirmed that the quality of EU support matters as much as its volume: the sector is calling for a shift toward more flexible, process-oriented mechanisms that allow projects to adapt as circumstances change. On artists’ working conditions, the conversation moved beyond principles to practical questions: how to make cross-border mobility workable, how to establish fair pay benchmarks, or how to link funding to the protection of artistic freedom, drawing on models such as the EU Charter for Researchers. On finance, participants explored how the cultural and creative sectors can reduce dependence on grants by building readiness for loans, equity, impact investment, among others, and where EU action should be better targeted. Across all three areas, the message from the sector was consistent: future programme design must continue to be grounded in operational reality, and the path from ambition to workable solutions runs through the practitioners in the room.
Across the three days, a common message emerged: Creative Europe Culture beneficiaries are co-owners and co-designers of the programme’s actions, and EACEA’s role is to transform that operational experience into evidence, and evidence into policy. By bringing the full Creative Europe Culture ecosystem together in one place – to network, to map common ground, and to feed lessons learned directly into policy reflection – the Brussels gathering offered a glimpse of what European cultural cooperation can build when its different communities create together.