Ensuring that EU cultural, media and civil society funding genuinely reaches local communities, smaller organisations and less-represented regions must be a core objective of the future AgoraEU programme. This was the key message emerging from a series of targeted bilateral meetings held by Csaba Borboly (RO/EPP), rapporteur of the European Committee of the Regions on AgoraEU.
Across the exchanges, there was strong convergence on the need for AgoraEU to remain firmly anchored at local and regional level. Stakeholders underlined that national desks and contact points must continue to operate under the programme in order to guarantee accessibility, guidance and effective outreach in all Member States. These structures were seen as indispensable for smaller organisations, grassroots initiatives and applicants with limited administrative capacity, particularly outside major urban centres.
Participants also expressed strong support for the continued financing of small, bottom-up projects across all strands of the programme. Re-granting mechanisms and two-stage application procedures were highlighted as proven tools to reduce bureaucracy, lower entry barriers and enable civil society, cultural and media actors at local level to access EU funding more effectively.
Discussions further stressed the importance of explicitly recognising cultural rights within the AgoraEU framework, including access to culture and cultural heritage, as well as the right to cultural creation. In parallel, stakeholders emphasised the need to address persistent regional imbalances in access to EU funding, ensuring that rural areas, peripheral regions and less visible territories are fully included in the programme’s implementation.
In this context, all interlocutors expressed a clearly positive and supportive overall assessment of the proposed AgoraEU programme and welcomed the direction taken in the rapporteur’s draft opinion.
As part of his work on the CoR opinion, Mr Borboly met with representatives of Culture Action Europe (CAE), with Mr Ionuț Sibian, rapporteur of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), with Ms Sneška Quaedvlieg-Mihailović, Secretary General of Europa Nostra, and with representatives of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers (DG JUST).
Commenting on the meetings, Csaba Borboly stated: “As The AgoraEU CoR rapporteur, I want to ensure that in the next EU cycle funding does not produce paperwork, but sustains people, communities, and values. Europe starts in villages, small towns, and regions. If culture falls silent there, if the press is muted, if civil communities grow tired, then democracy itself weakens.”
About AgoraEU
AgoraEU is the EU’s proposed programme for supporting culture, media and civil society organisations in the next Multiannual Financial Framework. Building on existing instruments, it aims to strengthen European values, democratic participation, cultural diversity and media freedom across the Union. A key objective of AgoraEU is to ensure inclusive access to EU funding, with particular attention to grassroots actors, local and regional communities, and balanced territorial participation across all Member States.
