Inspirador. A Guideline for Sustainable Cultural Management

For the Goethe-Institut as the initiator of cultural programmes, sustainability and resource management in cultural work is an important issue. With its collection of strategies and tools, the Inspirador is a useful collection of ideas for sustainable cultural management.

 

It encourages users to try new paths and inspires them to think about sustainable work methods. The guideline has no claims to completeness or universal validity: It operates under a CC-license (CC BY-SA), which means that it allows an unlimited number of other Inspiradors to be created. Culture workers can use it to record other initiatives that could serve as examples of a creative, inclusive and sustainable practise in culture management.

 

 

 

 

The Inspirador does not only promote sustainability in the sense of protecting nature and the environment, it also looks at working relations or the city itself and includes collaborative and fair working methods. And, as its name suggests, the guideline wants to inspire. Since it aims to respect and promote specific local features, each language version provided new examples from the practise of cultural management that cover the realities in each respective country and region.

 

In 2015, the first version of the guideline was developed in Portuguese. The central questions of the guideline “Inspirador: dá para fazer produção cultural de outro jeito” were: How do culture managers make decisions about activities that don’t focus exclusively on the success of an event, but could also be models for a responsible way of dealing with the world? How can sustainability and the environment benefit from resource-efficient practises in cultural management?

 

Two years later, an updated version of the Inspirador was also published in English. “Inspirador 1.2: International guidelines for sustainable cultural management” lists strategies and tools from the field of cultural production and contains 48 examples to recreate, from developing a fair work schedule to communicating with the audience.

 

The third version has been available in German since 2018. In “Inspirador 1.3: Internationaler Leitfaden für ein nachhaltiges Kulturmanagement“, readers will find new as well as proven strategies and tools of economic cultural management. The guideline focuses on initiatives in Germany, such as Café Botanico, which grows around 200 kinds of plant for its own use, or Leaf Republic, a company that produces biodegradable plates and cutlery.