Cultural Participation Fund

We, the Dutch governmental culture fund of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, have been tasked with making culture accessible for everyone. Accessibility is important for society, and is also the key to revitalising the cultural landscape. By focusing on cultural participation, intangible heritage and cultural education, we promote a culture that invites and facilitates everyone’s participation.

Why we are doing this. Culture. You make it.

We believe in the power of culture. Culture is like oxygen: a society cannot exist without it. Culture shapes us, touches us, amazes us, enables us to develop ourselves and to play a role in society. Through imagination, we are better able to understand and help shape the world around us. Creating culture gives pleasure and brings people together, and allows us to share our stories. Culture stimulates our creativity. By personally contributing to culture, people give shape and meaning to their changing environment. And what’s more, participating in culture has a positive impact on our spiritual and physical wellbeing.

Culture. You make it. We help to make it possible.

Everyone deserves the opportunity to engage in culture, in their own way – both at school and in leisure time. Creating culture gives pleasure and brings people together, and allows us to share our stories. By personally contributing to culture, people give shape and meaning to their changing environment. This is why the Fund offers grants to cultural initiatives throughout the Kingdom of the Netherlands – from Zeeland to Groningen, from Aruba to St Eustatius, from large to small, and across all disciplines.

Our new policy plan 2025-2028: Culture makes a difference.

Cultural participation has a significant societal impact. It strengthens our society, making it more social, resilient, and adaptable. A resilient society is also the core focus of our new policy plan for the years 2025-2028. To build a resilient society, it is essential that everyone has access to culture. From the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, we have been tasked with focusing particularly on children and young people both in and out of school, as well as cultural participants of all ages in their leisure time. Special attention will be given to those in the Netherlands for whom participating in culture is not a given.

What is cultural participation?

Cultural participation means to be active in art and culture. By expressing yourself, you are seen or heard by others. Examples are playing the guitar, making street art, passing on stories or traditions, or breakdancing in the street with your crew. But no matter the diversity of cultural manifestations, they all have one thing in common: people do not experience culture passively. They do, develop and create culture, together.

Facts

More than 6.4 million Dutch people are culturally active in their leisure time. More than 80% of cultural practitioners are active throughout the year – most of them even (nearly) every week!

What we do

We are an incentive fund. Our primary task is to allocate grants in line with our ambitions, our programmes and our grant schemes.

As a Fund we comply with various codes and regulations. Three cultural codes play the leading role in this; the Diversity & Inclusion Code, the Fair Practice Code and the Culture Governance Code. We endorse and follow these codes ourselves and we also ask our applicants to adhere to these codes. We consider these codes important because together they contribute to a healthy, relevant, transparent and resilient cultural sector. We explain the codes in the video and indicate what you need to know when applying for a subsidy.