Nätverkstan is a Cultural and Civil Society organisation that provides services and projects within the independent cultural and civil society field. The main focus of the organisation is education and training; bookkeeping, subscription, and accounting services; Media lab with a workshop area for artists; and national and international projects. Nätverkstan has a long experience in organising international exchange and has been a facilitator for several such projects in India, Georgia, Kenya, and Europe. Expertise areas are several: Art and entrepreneurship, Cultural Industries, the relationship between theory and practice, cultural project management, cultural economics, cultural policy, international exchange, and leadership within cultural organizations. Our work has resulted in several reports and documentations. Last year Nätverkstan started a book series to provide knowledge and deeper insights in cultural policy and cultural enonomy with authors like Pier Luigi Sacco, Giep Hagoort and Sarah Thelwall.

Nätverkstan is an important player in the Swedish cultural sector as link and facilitator of contacts between cultural organisations, art institutions, academia, public bodies and authorities and private enterprise. Nätverkstan has 18 people employed and has its base in Göteborg, Sweden. We are part of a larger cluster of activities and cultural entrepreneurs in Göteborg and Sweden. The quality system is based on an organisational structure with a board, a CEO, an executive body, and managers. We work with projects plans and budgets with continuous follow-ups, risk analysis, and action plans.

Nätverkstan has a unique experience in being both an educational organization and a cultural actor with projects and cooperation’s all over Europe, and outside the continent as well. From 2003 to 2007 Nätverkstan organised and managed Globalverkstan, an 18 months long vocational training for civil society organisations, that each year accepted 30 students from all over the world. Since 1999 we have been running Kulturverkstan, a two year long education for project managers in the cultural field. Our results, when it comes to employability, are excellent. Over the years we have developed an educational model that consists of three dimensions: contextual, operational, processual. The first one of course refers to the factors surrounding the project, affecting it and being affected by it. The second one refers to the tools and methods used by the project manager. The third one refers to challenges of management and leadership: How to create a favourable atmosphere in the organisation? How to deal with, solve and prevent conflicts?

Among our partners and customers are the Higher Vocational Education in Sweden, Swedish Arts Council, University of Gothenburg, Region Västra Götaland – as well as a large number of cultural magazines, publishing houses and independent cultural organisations.

www.natverkstan.net      www.kulturverkstan.net