Asta Pakarklytė. The future of strategic funding of the Lithuanian Council of Culture | Culture

The Lithuanian Council of Culture completed the selection of three strategic programs: “International events”, “Associations, umbrella organizations” and “Cultural organizations”. The latter has the greatest weight and received the most reactions here, so let’s talk about it.

Two first insights following the context and development of the program since 2019. are as follows:

• the program loses its initial optimism,
• the program is highly addictive and has dire consequences.

Optimism

The selection for the third round of strategic funding has just taken place. The number of applications in the “Cultural organizations” program fell from 50 (2019) to 28 (2025). According to this trend, only veterans of the program should gather for the selection of the next cycle, because there are practically no optimistic conditions for newcomers. In the list of recently selected organizations, only one is a true strategic newcomer, other organizations have continued to maintain their strong positions, two have changed their strategic program, and one has returned after dropping out in the previous cycle. Is it important to give newbies the opportunity to grow, and what should be their share? – these are questions of the future.

Is there reason for optimism if some of the leaders of the list from 2019 receive similar amounts? Do what you want, cross the jungle, fly into space, exceed the limits of possibilities, the Lithuanian Council of Culture cannot allocate more than 250 thousand. euros per year. That’s all, here you need to clearly calibrate the expectation that the council can provide a very solid foundation, and further growth depends only on the ability of the organizations themselves to find alternative sources.

In the first cycle, there were 20 organizations – two of which later moved to the “Associations, umbrella organizations” program – so let’s assume that there were 18, the current list – 14. Fewer organizations, although the quota of the program increased by 16.5 percent. from 2019 Of course, this growth has been eroded by inflation, rising wages, and spikes in commodity and security prices, and yet there has been growth, while quotas for other programs have remained largely unchanged since pre-pandemic times.

So why isn’t the current list longer? After all, another 5 organizations scored a passing score! Because the council could no longer increase the quota of the program, it is equivalent to the entire scholarship measure or the quotas of the other 9 cultural programs. And the council did not agree to reduce the sums recommended by the experts for everyone, in general, the opposite strategy was considered, how to increase the sums for organizations with the highest scores.

Consequences

It is not the first time that the Lithuanian Council of Culture has announced bad news that someone is not receiving funding, but this time the reactions are very strong, it is communicated that the loss of strategic funding may result in organizations being liquidated, activities stopped, irreparable damage caused. It is quite clear that the program develops a high dependence and its original idea was a utopia, that organizations will gain sustainability, strengthen teams that will find more and more alternative sources, so that in the future dependence on the council will decrease and newcomers can be added to the list, thus expanding the collective of energetic NGOs network.

The Lithuanian Council of Culture does not have the powers to turn non-governmental organizations into budgetary ones and allocate planned funding. State budget funds entrusted to the Council are distributed only through a tender process, after which even old-timers can drop out of the list. Such cases happened both in the previous cycle and in this one, but after each selection the questions become stronger, do the programs still live up to anyone’s expectations, and what are they today and what could they be tomorrow?

And this question – how best to allocate funds also moves into the future. Shouldn’t it be worth talking about the reduction of cuts and allocated amounts so that the list of organizations is longer and newcomers appear in it? I will only note that our colleagues from institutions related to us from Latvia and Estonia, who do not have strategic financing programs, call these programs of ours very brave due to the balancing between positive effects and harmful consequences.

Strategic funding for this cycle will run until the end of 2027, so there is time for program evaluation, debate and change. There is still time to apply for other contests of the Lithuanian Council of Culture, which main call will be open until September 9. 23:59.