Project Grants
This first Culture Helps Solidarity / Культура допомагає: Солідарність call for Project Grants is launched at a moment when community connections across Ukraine and within Ukrainian diasporas continue to be reshaped by the consequences of war.
Forced displacement, relocation within the country or abroad, and the return of both women and men from military service have altered social landscapes, creating new forms of distance between people and disrupting familiar ties. Many communities are still in the process of forming new relationships, often without a shared sense of understanding.
Yet community connections remain central to people’s support, resilience, and emotional well-being. They frequently develop under conditions shaped by trauma, structural barriers, and tensions between individual needs and collective action. These challenges affect many groups, including displaced persons, diaspora communities, families with children, and vulnerable groups such as veterans.
Cultural and artistic practices offer distinct ways of responding to these complexities. Socially engaged art, community based and dialogical practices, collaborative approaches, and the sensitive use of therapeutic elements can create spaces where people reconnect across differences, rebuild trust, and imagine new forms of belonging.
Through creativity and empathy, artistic processes can help communities move beyond immediate limitations while also acknowledging the ethical and emotional boundaries of cultural work.
This first round of Project Calls supports cultural and artistic initiatives that respond to the changing landscape of community (dis‑)connection. We invite projects that help people navigate the social and emotional complexities of displacement, transition, and return by creating meaningful encounters, enabling shared cultural participation, and fostering renewed forms of solidarity.
Through creativity and empathy, artistic processes can help communities move beyond immediate limitations while also acknowledging the ethical and emotional boundaries of cultural work.
The first 2026 round of Culture Helps Solidarity Project Grants will support 16 cultural initiatives working directly with communities affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine. These projects are rooted in everyday places where recovery and connection are needed most: local cultural spaces, workshops, community groups, youth settings, refugee networks and creative gatherings.
The selected grantees are based mainly in Ukraine, alongside applicants from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic and Moldova. Their projects reach veterans, internally displaced people, Ukrainian refugees, women, young people, blind authors, migrant communities and local residents rebuilding trust after loss, displacement and disruption. The methods are varied, but deeply practical: collective music-making, theatre, ceramics, writing, photography, storytelling, movement, creative laboratories, local festivals and participatory exhibitions.
What connects the selected Project Grants is their attention to lived experience. One project uses ceramics to support injured veterans in recovery. Another creates a participatory photo exhibition with blind authors from Ukraine. Others bring Ukrainian women together through theatre and writing, support young people’s mental wellbeing through storytelling, create spaces for refugees and local communities to meet, or use music and movement to rebuild confidence and social connection. These are not abstract acts of solidarity. They are small, concrete cultural practices through which people begin to feel seen, heard and less alone.
Together, the Project Grants show how culture helps solidarity take root at the community level. They support people not only as audiences, but as participants, makers, neighbours and storytellers. In doing so, they help protect the spaces where people can process their experiences, rebuild relationships, and take part in cultural life despite the ongoing impact of war.
