Two days, two hundred bright minds, international relations, politics, practice, exhibition, music, street fashion, evaluations and beauty salon: that was the congress of Fonds Soziokultur at bUm in Berlin from 25-26 April 2023 as part of the BKM programme NEUSTART KULTUR. After three massive years of crisis with and without contact restrictions, it was a clear signal from the scene, politics and administration.

• socio-cultural work, i.e. cultural practitioners translate global and social challenges into visions for a different reality - not only in times of crisis
• looking into and out of the international sphere sharpens cultural profiles, changes methods and reflects societies in a contemporary way
• the know-how about encounters through art, respectful relationships, formats, the invention of spaces and places in non-places is immense. More settings are needed to actually share this
• However, despite the unanimous recognition of this expertise at all levels, socio-cultural work is still carried out on the precarious basis of project funding with maximum administrative requirements for all-rounders from the independent cultural sector

• the implementation of the cultural diversity plan of Cologne's In-Haus e. V., for example  and thus also a lot of self-criticism
• Funding programmes that evolve with it: Alternating project and process funding as well as transfer funding for knowledge and methods, experiments with new partnerships
• Adequate, reliable funding that enables longer-term thinking and work
• looking beyond the old borders: international contexts and contacts create movement and enable thinking and acting for an international society

Over the past three years, Fonds Soziokultur has been able to fund around 1,500 projects with a total of 34 million euros from the BKM NEUSTART KULTUR programme and support them with its international accompanying programme ‘Re:Vision’. The scientific evaluations show the possible and meaningful transformative movements of practice, funding and also policy. We need to build on this - the fund's reversion to an annual budget of 2 million euros is hardly a basis for this!

Next step: The fund will take the congress findings as an opportunity to organise four workshops on resilience and relevance - for funding organisations that also want to further develop their funding methods.