Create Together in 2023

Our main wish for this year that has just begun is to celebrate the abundance of ideas, innovations and, above all, inspiring actions that we have been accompanying to shed new light on our future. In a context of unprecedented crisis, our role as a foundation is focused on supporting those actors who work to build a fuller collective horizon, respectful of people and ecosystems. We take responsibility for financing, helping to grow, making visible, telling and giving voice to these “desirable futures”, as well as demonstrating that together we are capable of positively facing the environmental and social challenges of our time.

Sowing the Momentum

Our two historic lines of intervention, Citizen Art and Sustainable Food, contribute to building this desirable future by enabling all people to participate on their scale and collectively to support change. With a view to multiplying their impact and their ability to inspire, the Foundation promotes the enhancement and dissemination of these experiences through initiatives such as the Committed Artist Award. The five winners of the last edition, who are the Spaniards Basurama and José Suárez ‘El Torombo’ and the Frenchmen Eric Minh Cuong Castaing, Valérie Mréjen and Mohamed El Khatib, Barthélémy Toguo, proof of the transformative power of art in cities, schools, nursing homes, depressed neighbourhoods or care centres.

Nurturing Links

We believe in a society that places people and the planet at the heart of its project and that invites responsibility and care for others. This is precisely the spirit of our work against food insecurity, which is affecting an increasing number of people, both in France and in Spain. In response to this reality, we are witnessing the deployment of new forms of access to sustainable food for society as a whole, all of them based on common values, and with the premise of placing the public involved at the centre of the actions and ensuring that the access offered is not stigmatising.

In this context, during the first quarter of the year Ana Moragues and the University of Barcelona published Feeding a sustainable future, an extensive study on food insecurity in Spain that provides clear data: 13.3% of Spanish households experience food insecurity.

For this reason, nurturing ties is also offering spaces for meeting and dialogue. Thus, on October 27, our first sustainable food meetings in Spain took place, under the title of unoconcinco and with the participation of nearly 600 attendees (both in person and online) including actors in the sector and the media, we talked about the realities we are currently experiencing and the challenges that lie ahead. unoconcinco will bring together the main actors of the food system in Spain every two years and we hope that it will become a space for connection between two worlds and a catalyst for collaborations in favour of the food transition.

encuentro-estatal-julio-albarran-15-scaled-5

It is also essential that this attention to ties is prolonged over time and is based on a relationship of trust. In this sense, our Cartae individual and collective accompaniment programme provides projects with tools and resources for their development, consolidation and change of scale. In this sense, throughout 2022 there have been more than 130 beneficiaries of this program through 20 different accompaniments.

The recently concluded 2022 was a productive year. We were able to hold a new edition of our biennial call for Territorialized Food Systems (SAT), which has given us seven projects, of which five give continuity to previous work. This mature call supports those projects that design and implement local food policies to move towards a more sustainable food system. In addition, the new health context allowed for new face-to-face meetings such as Terralimenta, a program that publicizes and promotes the work of Local Action Groups (LAGs). Looking ahead to the 2023 we are facing, we are launching the conquest of agricultural cooperatives: during the first quarter we will identify a group of 10 or 12 cooperatives with which we will work, then, a roadmap for the transition of each one.

From the Foundation we have not only supported the implementation of new projects and given continuity to others but we have also promoted studies and research that, after several years of work, we have been able to present in public. One of them has been a guide for the incorporation of farmers and ranchers published together with CERAI under the title #ReGeneraciónRural. In this framework, we have also launched the podcast Que viene el lobo by Nuria Pérez and following in this wake, this year the second season of How do we eat?, the podcast of the think tank Alimentta that guides towards sustainable food. And, of course, we cannot forget our White Paper on sustainable food in Spain, which has surpassed the barriers of the Foundation itself.

Cultivating Joy

On the path of transformation towards greener, more inclusive and fulfilling societies, it is also important to celebrate victories and cultivate joy. In addition to our sponsorship mission, in 2015 we created our impact fund “FDNC-SFS” in collaboration with Quadia. Together with them, we have launched the Tiina programme to support early-stage projects, aimed at innovative actors in the art and food sectors, which we inaugurated in 2022 for Spain and will also be launched in France at the beginning of this year.

Cultivating joy also means creating bonds and connecting people from different groups. In the context of Citizen Art, we celebrate a new call for Alliances for a Cultural Democracy, an initiative with which we promote an accessible culture. The six projects selected in this second edition will launch artistic mediation processes that promote active participation of citizens in cultural life. On the other hand, last November we had the opportunity to hold a meeting with some of the projects to collect experiences and learnings that will be part of the first Carasso Notebook on Cultural Democracy.

Undoubtedly, it has been a year in which we have experienced many illusions and joys with Concomitentes, a project that we promote from the Foundation and that promotes the creation of works of art between the civil society that commissions them and the artists who produce them. We have also launched the second edition of Complement Directo, a program of scholarships and accompaniment carried out by hablarenarte for 14 mediation students in different Spanish universities. And to expand the impact, in 2023 we will launch a process of capitalization of this program with the help of the Autonomous University of Madrid. In addition, we cannot forget that in September we launched, together with the Reina Sofía Museum and the hablarenarte association, the second call for residencies of the MAR platform for mediation and new institutionalities.

unoconcinco-alimentacion-sostenible-272-12

Create Together

With the renewal of our team in 2022, we have set ourselves new goals in terms of sustainable food and citizen art, with climate and social justice challenges as the common thread of our next strategy (2024-2028). In the field of sustainable food, we will approach agricultural production and soil as a point of connection between the food system, climate change and social justice. Regarding citizen art, we will work for the first time with the ACTS Network with the Grapa project, we will have a pilot project around expanded artistic education with a focus on mediation together with the Teatro Real and we will accompany cultural institutions such as the National Library or the National Museum of Decorative Arts in their mediation and cultural democracy projects. Thanks to a significant increase in the budget, in 2023 we will be able to explore new actions and test new philosophical approaches, better adapted to the context of multiple crises in which we currently live.

It is you, volunteers, partners, teams, friends, with whom we compose an open, bold, altruistic and trustworthy philanthropy to respond to the challenges of our time. A challenge of great magnitude but within our reach. Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. The Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation wishes you a wonderful year 2023.

The Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation congratulates 2023

Create Together
Sowing the Momentum
Nurturing Links
Cultivating Joy

As every year, from the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation we have the collaboration of an artist to send our best wishes for the new year to our ecosystem. On this occasion, we have had the strokes of the illustrator José Fragoso who, starting from a haiku, turned these four phrases into a digital composition that strongly transmits the ideas of the initial composition.

From Fragoso’s work, the graphic company Perricac understood that animation had to come to life through paper. In this way, with cut-out paper each of us can build our own tree that shows the force of nature. In addition, it is accompanied by a diptych on carrot seed paper with the haiku printed on it that symbolizes that the best way to start the year is by planting good wishes. We imagine a 2023 creating together, sharing knowledge and with nature at the center, being the one that sows the bonds that cultivate joy, values that are collected in this original greeting.