The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers last Tuesday authorized a voluntary contribution of 10,000 euros from the Instituto Cervantes to the Cluster Project Fund of the European Union Network of National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC).
EUNIC is a European network of national cultural institutes and agencies that operates in numerous countries, promoting collaboration between European organizations and local partners and the dissemination of European culture. On the Spanish side, full members are the Instituto Cervantes (since the founding of EUNIC in 2006) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), which joined the network in 2015.
EUNIC promotes European cultural cooperation in more than one hundred countries around the world through a network of 137 clusters, geographic concentrations of member organizations that coordinate to carry out joint projects in their areas. For example, the EUNIC Madrid cluster brings together, among others, the Instituto Cervantes, the Alliance Française España, the British Council, the Centro Checo Madrid, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Goethe-Institut España, the Institut Français de Madrid, the Polish Institute of Culture, the Instituto Camoes, the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Ibero-American Institute of Finland, the Italian Institute of Culture Madrid or the embassies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, among others, while the EUNIC Barcelona cluster is formed by Goethe-Institut, Institut Français and Istituto Italiano di Cultura.
To this end, EUNIC has been managing since 2013 an annual financial aid program (called Cluster Fund) to its clusters to facilitate the realization of these joint projects in line with their statutory and strategic objectives. On this occasion, one of the objectives of the fund is to co-finance cluster projects that contribute to the collaborative implementation of the EUNIC Strategic Framework 2020-2024. This fund is financed by extraordinary voluntary contributions made by the majority of members, who have the power to decide the amount they wish to contribute. Specifically, the Cervantes Institute had offered 10,000 euros to the 2022-2023 edition of the Cluster Fund.
According to the Government, the EUNIC aims to play a leading role in promoting and strengthening cultural cooperation as a dimension of sustainable development. With the aim of supporting and boosting this commitment, the Cluster Fund’s call for the 2022-2023 edition pays special attention to proposals that target young people, directly through its activities. Likewise, this edition aims to support opportunities for Ukrainian artists and give greater visibility to Ukrainian culture in the countries of the European Union.
