FUNDER35

Funder35, helping youth arts and culture organizations grow

Launched in 2012, is an endeavor geared to help youth arts and culture organizations improve their management and productions to become more efficient and sustainable and secure better market positioning.  FUNDER35 was proposed by the Committee for arts & culture of the Association of Italian banking foundations and savings banks (ACRI ) and Fondazione Cariplo acts as the lead organization in this initiative. Other foundations have joined in with their backing: 10 foundations in the first edition (2012-2014), 18 in its second iteration (2015-2017) and 19 in the third iteration which started in 2018.

The foundations have embarked on this initiative to help Italy’s most promising youth arts and cultural organizations gain more solid footing and become stronger, in the belief that once their management and operation become more orderly structured and with innovative quality programs these companies can more easily secure their position in the market.

Selected organizations are helped to embrace technology innovation, improve management and operation, and with advice on tax and administration matters, and on how to raise funds domestically and internationally.

The table below sets out key figures relating to the first two editions of the initiative.

While in the first two editions support largely entailed provision of financial resources, for the third iteration of the initiative the 19 partner foundations chose to focus their help on the following three areas:

• enhancing and expanding the services provided to the arts and culture organizations in previous years so as to establish FUNDER35 as the national champion when it comes to supporting cultural innovation and arts and culture organizations, especially youth ones;
• strengthening arts and cultural organizations supported in the previous two 3-year periods (some 300 youth organizations engaged in 223 projects), and progressively enlarge their number;
• networking all initiatives that are consistent with the lines of and have been backed by the foundations involved in FUNDER35 to further consolidate the pact made with these foundations and establish them as the most sensitive to supporting cultural innovation and youth organizations.