Safer Spaces and Participation in the Arts - Creating and Promoting Child Safeguarding Policies

2026-07-22

The project Start2Act (Safer Spaces and Participation in the Arts - Creating and Promoting Child Safeguarding Policies) aims to support local civil society organizations (CSOs) of cultural education to be safer spaces, where children are entirely protected from (sexual) violence. To this end, prevention and intervention work has to be (further) developed within these local CSOs by drafting guidelines and strategies for action, implementing protection concepts or carrying out prevention projects. Hence, this project focuses on children’s rights, works with a participatory approach and recognizes the protection needs of all girls, boys and non-binary children. The measures will be undertaken with the involvement of children and all stakeholders at all times. Hereby, there will be extensive efforts to integrate groups of children into the project that are marginalized and therefore statistically prone to be exposed to violence. Within this project, a central aspect is the provision funding to respective local CSOs of cultural education. Hereby, the aim is to build up competencies within these CSOs to provide them with abilities to develop protection concepts themselves, to carry out organization-specific supervision or to realize prevention projects combined with methods being used in the field of cultural education. A total of around 242 CSOs are to benefit from the funding. In addition, the following measures are to be implemented to support CSOs through capacity-building: 1) qualification, professional exchange and consultation (one-day and multi-day training courses for multipliers, professional day for EU-wide exchange, expert pool); 2) practical materials (working materials in DE/EN, self-evaluation tool); 3) information and public relations (campaigning, competition for projects that innovatively link child protection with child participation). In particular, CSOs that have not yet (sufficiently) dealt with the topic of (sexual) violence are to be reached.

Germany

2025-10-01