Case

Designing a Framework for Culture-Driven Resilience & Collaboration: Seed Money Initiative, BSR Cultural Pearls

Commissioned by Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture (NDPC)

Baltic Sea Region

2023–2025 (Phase I completed)

About the Project

BSR Cultural Pearls is a flagship initiative co-funded by the EU Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme. It supports smaller municipalities in the Baltic Sea Region to strengthen social resilience through culture. Each year, four cities are awarded the title of “Cultural Pearl” and supported with tools, mentoring, and funding to implement culture-driven action plans.

As part of this, the Seed Money Initiative was designed to encourage Cultural Pearls to collaborate with local cultural and creative sector (CCS) practitioners on innovative, locally grounded activities.

Our Role

Creative Insights Studio, through Abbas Sbeity, was commissioned to design the strategy and framework for the Seed Money Initiative. Our task was to create a clear and adaptable mechanism that would enable municipalities to engage their CCS ecosystems in meaningful and innovative ways while also ensuring administrative simplicity and practical relevance.

What We Delivered

We worked closely with NDPC and other consortium partners to research, prototype, and document the incentive mechanism, as well as to develop a visual and editorial guide for its implementation.

Approach Highlights:

  • Conducted stakeholder research across municipalities and CCS actors

  • Facilitated ideation workshops with NDPC and project partners

  • Developed and tested a prototype framework for seed funding

  • Designed and delivered a visual guidebook outlining the initiative

  • Led an online workshop with Cultural Pearls to introduce the toolkit

  • Provided 1:1 support for implementation and refinement

The result is a structured and flexible incentive mechanism that enables each Cultural Pearl to engage local creatives through activities such as scenario design, artistic interventions, and community dialogue facilitation with up to € 5,000 in support per activity.

Municipalities that tested the toolkit

Svendborg (Denmark), Kiel (Germany), Jakobstad (Finland), Rūjiena (Latvia), Smiltene (Latvia), Helsingborg (Sweden), Peipsiääre (Estonia), Płock (Poland), Alytus District (Lithuania), and Kaskinen – Kaskö (Finland),

Access the toolkit Prototype

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