Our Mission

Imagine the world as a network of "living houses", vital points of human creativity and living cultural traditions: community cultural centers in city neighborhoods, small towns, and villages, connected through Internet, telephone, national and international meetings, and various forms of face-to-face cultural exchanges. The International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C) (or in Bulgarian, the country of I3C's headquarters, "Международен Съвет на Самодейните Средища" is the global network of national networks/associations of community cultural centers (3c-s), which are community buildings dedicated to social revitalization through local (often amateur) arts, safeguarding local intangible heritage, and promoting inter-ethnic and inter-religious dialogue. A working definition we have given to a "community cultural center" is:

community-based, physically built, multi-functional space, which are dedicated to overall community development through the medium of creative activities linked to modern and folk arts, the preservation of local intangible cultural heritage, as well as hosting performances and exhibitions of professional and non-professional artists with the mission to enhance social cooperation and cohesion beyond ethnic, religious, generational, and socio-economic divides, thus nurturing human creative and spiritual development and quality of life.

I3C works closely with its first continental network member, the European Network of Cultural Centers (http://www.encc.eu) to help other national and continental networks be formed to foster around the world an understanding of art and local intangible heritage as key forces for a better quality of life. I3C, as the global voice for advocacy and support for 3c-s around the world:

• Conducts country cultural mappings; finds and shares good practices in local socio-cultural management
• Reviews and selects from existing research a database of relevant analytical work
• Creates and distributes a Newsletter on global topics concerning the community cultural dynamic
• Maintains a social networking web-tool (http://www.international3c.ning.com) with forum and blog spaces to enable practice-exchange and project-partnering for previously detached centers
• Organizes annual workshops, a Summer School on Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation (coming up in 2010), and a biannual World Summit of Community Cultural Centers (coming up in 2011)
• Specializes in consulting on network-building, program sustainability, and public-private partnerships (PPP model) and consults community cultural centers and/or traditional communities of heritage practitioners; states; intergovernmental organizations such as UNESCO and UNICEF; development institutions such as IMF and the World Bank; national and international NGOs
• Motivates and monitors the creation of new national and continental networks; supports community initiatives where 3cs remain inactive
• Raises awareness nationally and internationally about UNESCO's and the EU cultural policies and exemplary national laws
• Develops a UN consultative status

The International Council hopes to link in a family of shared ideals and practices all similar national networks weaving a larger, living and flexible global net - applying the analogy of the African shekere instrument net and way of producing sound - which is a net not only virtual but also very real and physically present through the actual house buildings of all the community cultural centers.

I3C is currently the only international non-governmental organization representing internationally community cultural centers with their rights, responsibilities, and needs for favourable conditions for the activities of amateur/non-paid artists and community animators around the world.

I3C cooperates with a group of scholars, professors, students, and independent researchers, forming the I3C Research Advisory Group (RAG), in order to develop specialized advise on how to develop individual, culturally-specific local implementation of UNESCO's 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and more broadly on the ways local history, celebrations, and knowledge - both traditional and modern - can be an engine for social cohesion, cooperation, and sustainable community, regional, and/or national development.