Outreach
Most of the projects of the artistic programme have been designed to include everyone and special adjustments will be made in order to welcome more people with disabilities. City-wide projects like Cross-Cultural Echoes, Public Art Festival and Mute Memorial invite everyone to take part in a city-wide event in the most accessible public spaces. The website that will be developed for ECoC will have special barrier-free features and will provide all the necessary information on the accessibility of venues and activities for disabled people. The digital culture project DigiKa will contribute to such upgrades.
People at Risk The community of Kalamata has a long history of solidarity and generosity towards vulnerable groups and people at risk. Every year, numerous fundraising events and solidarity initiatives are organised in order to support the less fortunate among us. In this spirit, Kalamata will offer refuge to artists that have been targets of politically motivated threats and will connect with an international network of Safe Haven cities that offers safety and support. A number of artistic projects have been designed to involve and support more disadvantaged people and to help soothe
their struggles through participation. Overcomers of physical addictions will be thoughtfully included in the programme and will be offered the opportunity and the space to share their experience and thoughts, to create their own art and to inspire others through projects like The Photonics.
Senior Citizens The seniors of Kalamata are very active. Many of them take part in choirs and other associations and they organise a variety of collective activities. All these groups will be greatly involved in community projects like the City Gardens Festival and the Med Life:21 and they will have the opportunity to participate in fun, community-building projects like the dance project In Flux for 60+ and the Once Upon A Time storytelling and puppetry festival, where their knowledge and experience can be shared with groups of young people. Since the beginning of the bidding process more and more senior citizens have worked together with young adults and have developed new ideas, activities and projects, like the promotional Collective Kitchens. Adjustments in physical accessibility to cultural venues will be made in order to enable more elderly people to attend events and participate in an even bigger variety of projects.
21. ― Explain your overall strategy for audience development, and in particular the link with education and the participation of schools. Audience development is a priority for the KALAMATA:21 project. We strive to ensure that the ECoC project will offer equal opportunities for the enjoyment of culture, not only for the regular users, but also for the underrepresented groups: the young, the marginalised and non-users, especially on a local and regional level. We strongly believe that the ECoC project should primarily promote culture as an agent for social transformation by breaking isolation, by offering opportunities for selfexpression, by deepening our knowledge of the Other, by improving mutual understanding through positive encounters, and by having an overall positive impact on citizens’ psychological well-being. Furthermore, a cultivated audience is the true legacy of a sustainable and successful ECoC. To achieve that, we have developed a holistic audience development strategy that focuses on two main goals: a) Access, b) Participation. Access aims to: i) increase participation, ii) remove barriers, iii) introduce new
audiences to existing cultural products, and iv) introduce the existing audience to new offerings (opening the door to non-traditional audiences). As for Participation, we aim to involve the community in: i) the decision-making process, ii) the creative process and iii) the construction of meaning (participation in the construction of the perceived social reality, creating new traditions by social phenomena, changing a status quo that doesn’t fit).
Audience Segmentation In our audience development strategy, we focus on local/ regional audiences originating from the city of Kalamata and the Messinia Region. We segment the audience into central, occasional, potential and non-users. Furthermore, among the non-users we identify the marginalised ethnic cultural minorities; in the Messinia region, this is mainly the Roma population of 1,500 people. The table below shows our audience segmentation and the key barriers or challenges faced by each segment:
Audience
Participation
Key Barriers
Central
Habit of accessing culture
Available time, opening hours, financial barriers for frequent users or families
Occasional
Occasional use of culture, prefer blockbuster events, visit during holidays
Cultural (difficult to understand the offer), access to information on the available offer
Potential Users
Do not use culture but might be interested in doing so
Cultural, social, financial, physical
Non-Users
Indifferent to or dismissive of culture, often users of cultural products such as music, radio, TV, creating their own sub-cultures
Negative preconceptions Inadequate education Cannot relate to cultural offer
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