As a network, the Fora form a valuable ‘antenna' for the Foundation, helping to keep it strongly in touch with Europe's diversity while providing local arenas for informed debate of European issues.
The Fora use their resources and expertise to advocate cultural cooperation at local and regional levels, and ‘spread the word' about the ECF´s objectives and campaigns. The ECF supports the Forum while respecting their autonomy and traditions. The Fora are active on many fronts and a selection of their activities are mentioned below.
The UK Committee organised a successful conference series, ‘Culture in an Enlarged Europe', at London's Chatham House where a publication entitled Europe: United or Divided by Culture is currently being prepared. In cooperation with partners, the Committee is also entering the first phase of a project that tackles language issues.
The Austrian Forum continued its series of panel discussions on the general theme of culture and politics. These involved significant personalities from the new member states (the Forum's host, the Institute of Human Sciences or IWM, is known for its expertise in the region). IWM and the ECF are partners in the Milena Jesenská fellowships for journalists programme. The Institute recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a conference on 'Conditions for International Solidarity'.
A large seminar in Helsinki on The Idea of Europe: Continuity and Change is organised by the Finnish Forum. The seminar (19-20 April) dealt with the future of the European integration process and aims to provide a forum for discussion about European identity and culture. The Forum´s own website will give you more information.
The Swedish Forum has organised a number of high-level scholarly talks on European themes.
The Fora network joined forces with the Foundation in supporting the vast information project, LabforCulture. For instance, the Polish Forum (hosted and supported by the Villa Decius Association) helped to secure the partnership of the Polish Ministry of Culture (which now gives €50,000 Euro to LabforCulture annually) as well as providing relevant data on Polish NGOs and cultural institutions. The Villa Decius Association recently organised The prestigious "Captive Mind Revisited" International Conference in order to reflect and discuss about the phenomenon of the "enslaving of minds" present in the states of the Soviet bloc. Another example of successful collaboration with the ECF was on the cross-border-media project ‘Zona'.
The Bulgarian Forum has been revitalised, with support from all sectors and levels of society. This is particularly important in view of Bulgaria's EU accession. The current conference 'New Dimensions of the Intercultural Dialogue in Bulgaria and South-East Europe' aims at identifying clearly all relevant cultural actors and cultural policy makers of the region and attempts to analyse the cultural sector of the region.
In the Netherlands, the ECF has brought together a group of outstanding personalities from the fields of culture, media, politics, business and academia: the 'Friends of the ECF'. The first meeting took place in June 2006 and discussed the ECF's work and in particular the focus on cultural diversity, as well as issues related to culture and economy.
The Czech Forum, whose work is supported by the Multicultural Centre Prague is currently organising a project 'Not About Us Without Us: Bringing the Discourse On Labour Migration to the sending regions' which seeks to stimulate a debate on the topic this region has to deal with, being the most important foreign labour pool for the Czech labour market. In the recent past it staged a series of readings and debates on ´migrant authors´ at the Prague Book Fair in order to create a positive response to current political debates about national identities, multiculturalism and migrants in wider Europe. The essay ´Europe of the Migrants - the Northern Perspective´ which came out of this project can be downloaded here.
The German Forum is active in a range of fields, including the young people's media initiative, theoneminutesjr. It has contributed substantially to the debate about the European Capital of Culture scheme, successfully using the lively German competition for 2010 to launch a series of events and recommendations enforcing the the ´Cities and Regions´ network including Hungary and Turkey.
The Irish Committee has a number of committed personalities, including the Chair of the Committee, Dr Mary Canning. The most recent demonstration of the Forum´s dynamism was a research, debate and publication project on ‘The New Irish Communities', a project which promoted effective professional education for pluralism and intercultural development - a highly relevant contribution to the ECF´s focus on cultural diversity. The project entitled New Europe - New Ireland which the Committee is now developing intends to examine this topic further. Seminars will be organised to lead to greater understanding on the part of opinion leaders and policy makers of the issues that Ireland now faces.
The Hungarian Forum, which has a special focus on European literature, contributed substantially to the success of the ECF's media mobility scheme.
Click here for the complete list of all the Fora.