Global Cultural Leadership Programme gathers in Brussels young leaders from around the world

The Global Cultural Leadership Programme (GCLP) is the main training component of the Cultural Diplomacy Platform, an EU-funded project to enhance EU’s external cultural relations. The GCLP’s main objective is to support young cultural managers emerging on the international scene to develop and strengthen their cultural leadership skills.

Through its framework, content and methodology, the GCLP improves the skills of cultural managers, helps them developing collaborative peer-to-peer learning and network building. The programme offers a set of learning modules, tools and manuals for practice-based learning, giving the participants opportunities to build meaningful collaborations at the global level and enabling them to develop fresh inputs into international cultural collaboration practices.

The activities of the GCLP engage participants in an experience of international networking in a lean, practice-based and easily replicable learning framework. 40 participants of the GCLP were selected each year: 30 coming from the partner countries of the EU and 10 coming from different Member States. The participants of the GCLP are young operators from all branches from the cultural sector with a leading/senior position in their organizations.

Over the last few years, the GCLP has:

• Established a recognisable training brand on a global scale;
• Started to grow an international network of international young cultural leaders, managers and practitioners;
• Fostered cooperation between local cultural operators in the partner countries with the EU Delegations;
• Built a community of 120 cultural operators committed to cooperate and create synergies.

The previous editions of the GCLP took place in

• Valetta, Malta (2016),
• Athens, Greece (2017) and
• Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018).

The fourth edition of GCLP took place in Brussels from 23 to 25 October 2019. For the first time, the event gathered alumni of previous GCLP editions coming from EU Member States and EU’s strategic partners with the aim to strengthen the GLCP community of cultural leaders and foster project cooperation between EU and non-EU participations.

Testimonials from participants of the programme

Norton Ficarelli (Brazil) is the Associate Director at Instituto Pedra, a non-profit association that develops projects in the cultural heritage sector. As a participant in the 2017 edition of the GCLP, Norton found GCLP to be “a great opportunity to enhance his network be closer to European culture institutions and a great training for his work back home in Brazil”.

Jarrod-John Du Plooy (South Korea) is a media specialist who works in broadcast media on the topic of the rise of South Korean cultural diplomacy. “Culture and cultural diplomacy play a huge role in what I do every day and it would have been impossible to do those and complete the projects without a network that was vast and wide and in part that I made at GCLP”.

Mohit Dhingra (India), an architect and educator with specialization in conservation from India: “GCLP did not only gave me a global outreach, but also a stimulating peer-to-peer learning processes which I am practicing in my country through educational institutes”.

Find out more

• Find out more about the European Commission's proposal to develop an EU strategy to international cultural relations.
• Find out more about the Cultural Diplomacy Platform.