CAE Poland Hub

Culture Action Europe’s Polish Hub unites cultural professionals, educators, artists, and policymakers across Poland to address systemic challenges in the country’s cultural sector. Emerging from dialogues at the 2024 Warsaw Cultural Conference and grounded in grassroots realities, the hub focuses on improving working conditions, bridging cultural divides, and integrating culture into education, health, and social inclusion. By fostering collaboration between national, regional, and local institutions, the hub aims to amplify Poland’s cultural voice within Europe while tackling underfunding, burnout, and fragmented infrastructure.

Our Goals

The Polish Hub is driven by a vision to transform Poland’s cultural sector into a resilient, inclusive, and socially impactful force. Building on insights from the 2024 Warsaw Cultural Conference, we prioritize addressing the human crisis in culture—overwork, underfunding, and systemic mobbing—through advocacy for fair labor practices and capacity-building programs. We aim to integrate cultural education into Poland’s reformed national curriculum, ensuring educators and animators are recognized in the qualifications system. By partnering with health and education sectors, we seek to highlight culture’s regenerative power, exemplified by initiatives like combating burnout through creative practices. Bridging Poland’s East-West divides, we strive to diversify audiences and foster inclusive communities in a historically homogeneous society, learning from Western European models of multicultural engagement. Internationally, we advocate for stronger Central European representation in CAE’s governance and push for funding structures that prioritize cross-border collaboration over mere cultural promotion. Ultimately, we aim to redefine Poland’s cultural narrative—from one of infrastructural investment to one centered on human dignity, equity, and innovation.

What We Do

The Polish Hub prioritises policy reform by shaping actionable outcomes from the 2024 Warsaw Cultural Conference, focusing on labor rights campaigns to combat workplace violence and burnout through workshops on self-care, HR best practices, and political lobbying for sector-wide protections. In education, we collaborate with the Ministry of Education to embed cultural learning into Poland’s revised national curriculum while piloting innovative programs like the cultural voucher system, which fosters partnerships between museums and schools to co-design inclusive programming. Bridging culture with health, we co-create sessions on topics like “Culture for Burnout” for the 2025 Open Eyes Economy Summit in Kraków—a major interdisciplinary forum—and translate CAE’s CultureForHealth findings into Polish to advance evidence-based policies. To strengthen regional ties, we organize Central European dialogues with cultural actors from post-communist countries, sharing strategies on EU funding and inclusivity while expanding CAE’s Polish membership to bridge geographic divides. Capacity-building initiatives include “Slow Culture” workshops promoting sustainable practices and peer support groups to share longitudinal studies on culture’s impact on well-being. We also develop toolkits adapting Western European models of multicultural audience engagement for Poland’s evolving communities, ensuring cultural institutions become spaces of belonging. Through these interconnected efforts, we aim to transform Poland’s cultural sector into a resilient, equitable force for social cohesion and democratic renewal.