Cultural funding in Slovakia

Cultural funding in Slovakia is possible on different levels. And actually the most important source for cultural projects and for civic initiatives is the state money, which is the Ministry of Culture. Unfortunately we do not have developed system of cultural strategies on city levels and on regional levels, which means cities and regional governments usually just are taking care of their own institutions. And compared to the independent sector the funding proportion is approximately 95% to 5% in the best cases. Which means that as an independent operator you could not easily get support for your activities, especially when you are doing long-term projects and all year long activities.

The most important source, as I said is the Ministry of Culture, and that is why usually most of the people from the creative sector are waiting for funding usually until May or June of each year to get support for the same year, which makes the realization of cultural projects very difficult. And I think there is a big need of change, and on the ministry level there will be soon a change that the money for independent cultural activities will be moved to specialised fund that would be kind of independent from the government and could operate more flexible.

At the same time I believe that the very basic funding for independent cultural projects should be coming from the cities and from the regional governments, because they should be aware of what is happening on their territory and should be kind of be interested in development of the region, otherwise most of their activities would die after a couple of years. And I think that the situation has proven that since the nineties there have been many cultural activities, independent theatres, and associations that have ceased to exist just because of this non-existing support on the city level.

CultureFighter

Cultural funding in Slovakia

Slavo Krekovič

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