PERFARE – Performing arts to promote social welfARE access in Europe promotes social inclusion for those audience groups that are marginalized due to psychological and/or physical health issues and/or because belonging to minorities, through the fruition of cultural activities and performing arts initiatives.

The project, started in June 2022 and lasting a total of 36 months, is funded by the Creative Europe programme (Culture) and has the following specific objectives:

1. To innovate the partners’ organizations creative models in order to make Welfare services (i.e. health and wellbeing) an integral part of their artistic work;
2. To facilitate the access to performing art experiences for audience groups with psychological and/or physical health conditions by systemising collaboration opportunities among cultural-creative actors and the Welfare Sector.

PERFARE’s initial phase aims at mapping those good practices in cultural welfare that already exist at EU level. This is done during the training phase of the project, where all the partners – a multi-level consortium composed by creative and cultural organizations coming from Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Sweden – together with actors of the welfare system in their countries/territories, will be firstly involved in a capacity building process to foster their ability to work and cooperate with the actors of their local Welfare systems. In fact, during this period, they will:

• search and further map (i.e. through an interactive tool) success stories of such cooperation;
• share knowledge and capitalize tools that are already developed;
• participate in a tour of field visits across Europe to gain direct experience on how performing arts interventions can improve Welfare services for people with physical and/or mental health issues;
• set up a cooperation scheme with one or more stakeholders of the local Welfare system in each partner country.

As a result, 5 calls for action will be launched, one for each country involved, to fund artistic interventions that involve audience groups composed of the local populations targeted by the project.

The resulting pilot actions will be implemented in the partner territories and evaluated to measure their impact.