RES-POL: Strategy for the development of culture of Ukraine until 2027

Funding: European Union
Partners: Public Organization Center “Regional Development” PPV Economic Development Agency, Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine
Duration: January 2024 — June 2025
Key experts: Alona Karavai, Olga Diatel, Iryna Chuzhynova
Project management: Roman Dyma, Yuliia Alenina
Contact: office@insha-osvita.org

The RES-POL project aims to strengthen the functional capacity of the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications and its departments (the Ukrainian Book Institute, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, the State Agency of Ukraine for Arts and Art Education, and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory). The focus is on four sectors (Arts and Culture, Cultural Heritage, Creative Industries, and Media) and over 20 subsectors (industries and types of artistic activity). RES-POL separately addresses 10 essential issues of cultural development (competitive wages, efficiency of state-owned enterprises in the field of culture, financing of creative industries, models of financing cultural services, communities and cultural heritage, EU integration and cultural policy, etc.).

In February 2024, the co-founders of Insha Osvita, Alona Karavai and Olga Diatel, as well as theater scholar and deputy director for strategic development and international cooperation of the Ivano-Frankivsk Drama Theater, Ira Chuzhynova, joined the project “Rapid Expert Support for Culture and Media Policies in Ukraine (Res-Pol)” as key experts in the “Culture and Art” sector. We joined with the understanding that working with strategies during a full-scale war is definitely not about dreams, but about honest analytics, revealing problems and not (always) popular solutions. We joined, maintaining our critical position on a number of state policies and institutions — including the Ministry of Culture. As part of the RES-POL project, a strategy for the development of culture in Ukraine until 2027 will be created.

In the spring, the Culture and Arts sector held six focus groups for artists, cultural managers and managers to discuss and identify key needs and pain points, and in the summer, five analytical notes were worked on in collaboration with five sector experts. As a result of this work — and also by summarizing the analysis of previous strategic and analytical documents — a list of more than a hundred essential issues was compiled, which were summarized in fifty. In September, we conducted a survey among artists, cultural managers and managers, who shared their views on the priority and urgency of addressing these issues, assessing them on a 10-point scale.

In October, we also joined a meeting with the new team of the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine to synchronize efforts to develop policies. Over the course of 2 days in Kyiv, we worked on a high-level strategy framework for policy development approaches, identified strategic goals, objectives, and cross-cutting issues.

The project (and our work in it) is ongoing. We will share all updates on the Facebook page of Insha Osvita.

The RES-POL project “Rapid Expert Support for Culture and Media Policy in Ukraine” is being implemented by the PPV Economic Development Agency in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine with the support of the European Union and will last until March 2025.