Fostering Rural Resilience through Creativity- and Arts-driven Entrepreneurship (RURAL CANVAS ): Erasmus+ KA227 - Partnerships for Creativity ID: KA227-2020-406

Fostering Rural Resilience through Creativity and Arts-driven Entrepreneurship (RURAL CANVAS) is a project that aims to bring the two worlds of arts and creative industries on one hand, and rural areas in Europe on the other, to boost employability and entrepreneurial skillset of artists and creative workers, foster interdisciplinarity and facilitate rural resilience as a result.

The onslaught of COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the future of artists, creators and cultural workers in an unprecedented manner. Social distancing and other precautionary measures have hampered the job prospects of this group, creating postponements and cancellations of performances, exhibitions, events and other modes of securing livelihood and having a sense of purpose that one gains through their work. Arts, culture and creative industry is the third largest employer in the EU, following behind construction and food sectors (European Commission, 2016). Therefore, the closure of various venues, institutions and companies and pushing professionals from this industry out of jobs has sent a major shockwave to the economy and has threatened significantly EU’s further growth. As another area has been hit massively by COVID-19, namely rural areas, the project will aim to have artists and creative workers conceive of creative solutions for these areas.
However, for that to happen, it is essential that artists and creative workers first upskill themselves in entrepreneurial skills and 21CS. It is widely known that a large proportion of artists lack entrepreneurial skills and mindset (Artenprise, 2018). Collision between artistic skills and creativity on one hand, and entrepreneurial, hands-on knowledge together with the right attitude has a great potential for generative innovative solutions and business models. Given that rural areas suffer in particular from the lack of innovation and have been hit
immensely by COVID-19, artists and creative workers will be equipped with entrepreneurial hard skills as well as entrepreneurship-focused 21st century soft skills and use this knowledge to conceive of solutions to the challenges faced by the rural areas.

In this manner, artists and creative workers will be ignited with new skills to complement their primary profession, which in turn would foster their employability skills; they would make valuable contribution to the rural development and rural community coping mechanisms; they would garner more garner a bigger sense of meaning and purpose. The project will heavily rely on project-based and problem-based learning to upskill the artists and creative workers and will be highly collaborative, as one of the key outcomes of the project would involve teams of artists and creative workers to create implementable projects in the rural areas. The processes of upskilling artists and equipping them to create projects will be driven actively by Rurart Alliances, a group of relevant and competent stakeholders set up at the beginning of the project. In addition, each team will be assigned a mentor either from Rurart Alliances or consortium partner network, who will guide the team in their project creation.

The overarching objective of RURAL CANVAS are following:
-Equipping artists and creative workers with entrepreneurial and 21st century skills to complement their primary profession
-Contributing to resilience and innovative solutions to rural challenges through co-creation, mentorship and project-based initiatives driven by artistic and creative approaches of artists and creative workers
-Forging synergies between arts and creative sector representatives, rural stakeholders, entrepreneurship actors and local authorities
-Enhancing employability and mental toughness of artists and creative workers
-Inspiring novel approaches in using art and creativity as a vehicle to tackling societal challenges