All funding for Berlin Mondiale for 2025 has been cut
November 19, 2024
Berlin, 19. November 2024 – In a shocking move, the Berlin Senate has decided to cut all funding for Berlin Mondiale in 2025, leaving the organization without financial resources. This decision not only threatens the organization’s programs and staff but also undermines a decade of progress in fostering decentralized cultural work across Berlin.
Since 2014, Berlin Mondiale has been an essential network, engaging over 100,000 people, particularly in the city's underserved neighborhoods with significant migration, asylum, and exile histories. The organization has built a dynamic, citywide network of artists, cultural practitioners, and social organizations, enabling collaboration and community engagement more than 8 districts. This sudden funding cut jeopardizes critical educational programs like the ''Jugendkulturinitiative'' and risks dismantling years of work supporting Berlin’s diverse, underrepresented communities.
What Happened?
“We were totally shocked,” said Sabine Kroner, Managing Director of Berlin Mondiale, in an interview with rbb24. “On Monday, we were still planning for 2025 with the cultural administration’s advisors. By Tuesday, we learned that all our funding would be cut. We were expecting a 10% reduction, not a complete shutdown.”
(Source: rbb24, 22.11.24, interview by Lukas Haas and Luis Babst)
What’s at Risk?
Cultural Work in the Margins of Berlin
Over the last 10 years, Berlin Mondiale’s programs have reached around 100,000 people across Berlin. Just last year, 13,000 individuals benefitted from these initiatives. These offerings, already scarce in neighborhoods like Neukölln, Spandau, Marzahn, and Pankow Heinersdorf—areas where there is limited access to cultural education—will now disappear. The cuts will eliminate accessible cultural opportunities for socially disadvantaged youth and residents of refugee shelters.
Loss of Jobs & Stability
Berlin Mondiale’s team of nine faces imminent unemployment, with some staff members at risk of losing their right to stay in Germany within the next 40 days due to visa dependency. Just last year, Berlin Mondiale collaborated with approximately 200 freelancers, many of whom already face precarious working conditions. They will lose crucial sources of income from consultation and work opportunities that sustain their livelihoods.
Disruption of Institutional Change
Ten cultural institutions funded by the Jugendkulturinitiative are supported by Berlin Mondiale to expand their offerings to young people in underserved neighborhoods through anti-discriminatory, power-critical, and youth-centered approaches. This long-overdue transformation will now be halted.
End of (Critical) Networks
Over the past 10 years, Berlin Mondiale has collaborated with more than 2,000 individuals, institutions, and projects across various disciplines. In the past year alone, Berlin Mondiale worked with 180 participants and partners. The loss of this extensive transcultural network, which serves as a platform for mediation, collaboration, and bridge-building, significantly undermines Berlin’s ability to fulfill its commitments to diversity, decentralized cultural work, and cultural education.
The Wider Impact
This decision will undermine Berlin’s ability to meet its stated goals in social cohesion, decentral cultural work, cultural education, and participation. The consequences extend far beyond Berlin Mondiale, threatening the work of Jugendkulturinitiative, Sinema Transtopia, Diversitätsfonds, Stiftung für Kulturelle Weiterbildung und Kulturberatung, and its critical initiatives:
- Diversity Arts Culture (DAC)
- Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung (IKTf)
- kultur_formen
- Servicezentrum Musikschulen (szm)
- Kulturraum Berlin gGmbH (KRB)
- Projektfonds Urbane Praxis