On Tuesday 15 April, Lyudmila Petrova (Creare NL) is presenting at Philea – Philanthropy European Association webinar on “The Heart of Culture: Measuring Value Beyond Statistics”.

Why do arts and culture matter? With the artistic and cultural fields coming under increasing scrutiny comes the need to spell out and justify the value of arts and culture. The 2024 State of Culture report demonstrates how the “intrinsic” value remains challenging to articulate in policy terms yet the instrumentalisation of culture, recognised as a driver for non-cultural issues, is a major growing trend across European and national policies.

“As cultural policy is tuned to serve multiple external goals, cultural activities and practices have come under the quantitative measurement” – State of Culture. Artists and cultural institutions are increasingly pressured by funders to demonstrate their achievements at the conclusion of a project, which fails to capture the long-term effects of arts and culture.

How is philanthropy tackling the challenge of recognising the value of arts and culture beyond quantitative data? Are funders contributing to expressing art’s impact in numbers? What are the practices in terms of monitoring, evaluation and learning that foundations can implement to avoid instrumentalising the field and putting their partners in the complex position to predict and calculate the transformative effect of their work?

She presents the value-based approach methodology and its application in the GLAMMONS.