Orta Okul 2025
What Does Your Community Need?
What Does Your Community Need? responds to the growing exclusion of marginalized communities from arts education in Berlin. The rise of far-right politics, shrinking cultural budgets, and a weakened civil society at the end of 2024 have made access to inclusive and culturally relevant education increasingly urgent.
What Does Your Community Need? supports community-rooted, participatory, and socially engaged artistic practices. The goal is to move away from institutionalized, Eurocentric models of arts education by asking: What do communities actually need? What spaces, tools, and knowledge systems are missing today—and how can we co-create them?
We are working with five facilitators to develop educational formats rooted in their communities. Through mentorship, training, and coordination support, we aim to foster artistic spaces that respond directly to local realities.
The program is still under-construction! The selected projects for 2025 are:
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Mentorship in participatory and socially engaged art
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Training with an expert of your choice
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Support in working with institutions and communities
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Documentation and visibility through our channels
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Documentation and visibility through our channels
Also see:
Open Call (+++expired+++)
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Deadline: June 1, 2025
We’re looking for 5 facilitators to design and lead community-rooted, socially engaged, and culturally relevant art education programs in Berlin.
We specifically encourage community-based artists, art educators, cultural workers, activists using artistic methodologies, experts in areas such as diversity, anti-discrimination, and social justice within the arts and culture field.
Selection Process
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This was Orta Okul’s first-ever Open Call, and as artists and cultural workers ourselves, we put a lot of thought into making the process as accessible and transparent as possible. Therefore, we would like to share some details about how the selection was made, should you be interested.