"Dreams are essential, if we didn't dare to dream, the CIN wouldn't exist," says Mohammad Ayoub from Lebanon during his participation in one of the workshops of the Cultural Innovators Network, The Cultural Innovators Network was launched in 2012 under the coordination of the Goethe-Institut in Morocco and with the support of more than 20 other institutes in the North and Southern Mediterranean.
Between 2012 and 2017, the project, funded by the German Foreign Office as part of the Ta’ziz Partnership, sought to connect artists, cultural managers, activists, and civil society actors in the target countries and thus help strengthen their potential, share experiences and projects with each other, and create spaces for discussion about their issues, especially in light of the political unrest in the countries of the southern Mediterranean following the Arab Spring.
With the project, the Goethe-Institut aimed above all to support democratic transformation processes, to establish a transnational network structure of civil society actors in the Mediterranean region, and to qualify the network members through local, regional, and transregional mutual learning.
The focus of the CIN project was to enable the participants, with as much responsibility and autonomy as possible, to organize themselves and design concrete projects, to then select the projects appropriate for implementation based on certain criteria and through a democratic vote. Afterwards, the selected projects were to be financed and implemented by the Goethe-Institut throughout the following years.
The starting point was in 2012 when 100 participants were selected from about 600 applicants. After that, a core group of 20 participants was selected to oversee the preparations of the CIN events.
This core group conducted learning journeys to three countries (Egypt, Germany, and Italy) to facilitate an initial exchange between participants from different countries and to stimulate the process of mutual learning. In the follow-up meetings, the core groups set an agenda for further activities in the project year.
The first meeting of all network members took place in Istanbul at the end of 2012. In this CIN forum, more than 31 project ideas were presented, from which 20 projects were initially selected to be funded and implemented in 2013, with further projects to follow in subsequent years.
These projects crystallized through the so-called CIN Labs, in which the members of the network developed their ideas based on social problems in the Mediterranean region. The topics of the projects varied between areas such as art, human rights, social entrepreneurship, cultural policy, journalism, education and research, and in 2015 and 2016 focused on the issue of migration, especially the migration from several southern and eastern Mediterranean countries to Europe, which was increasing rapidly at that time.
One of the concrete measures of the project was the Cultural Innovators Days, which were organized in the different countries participating in the project. The aim was to connect CIN with local actors from different Mediterranean countries, to seek new collaborations, and to raise awareness of the network and its projects among relevant actors from participating countries. The CINnovation Journeys, which allowed members to apply for travel grants to participate in project activities abroad, also served this purpose. "We need a new political culture of solidarity," said Azra Causević from Bosnia. She added: "The most important first step is that people from different backgrounds meet. They will find their differences, but most importantly they will discover their similarities."
In recent years, CIN has sought to connect activists, culturalists, and cultural managers from southern and northern Mediterranean countries to share and learn from each other's experiences. Egyptian journalist and filmmaker Ahmed Eman Zakaria says of his participation in the CIN project, "In the last five years, CIN has been a home for all its members with their diverse cultures; and that is exactly its core idea. Today I have many friends from all over the Mediterranean region, we build our dreams together, we think of the future in an all-inclusive way. We make mistakes in our work and through the experience, we learn from them. We criticize and reflect ourselves, for the good of the network. I've always believed that the CIN is about the human power it holds and that nothing could improve it except its members."