Impacts of culture and the arts on health and well-being
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See in 5 min if you're eligible for Impacts of culture and the arts on health and well-being offering max €26.0M funding💰 Funding Details
Funding Description – HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-09
**What is funded?**
* Coordination & Support Action (CSA) run as a *single* lump-sum grant.
* One project will receive up to €26 million to:
* Establish a permanent EU platform for policy dialogue on culture-health-well-being.
* Produce policy guidelines, practical toolkits, and scalable mixed-method cultural/arts interventions in at least five priority areas (health promotion, mental health of youth, ageing, forcibly displaced people, inequality-linked ill-health).
* Compile a FAIR evidence-gap map and economic narratives (cost-effectiveness, well-being economics).
* Document research gaps, barriers and replicable best practices; generate recommendations for EU external action.
* Undertake wide communication, capacity-building and cross-sector networking activities.
**Form of funding**
* Lump Sum: the EU fixes the grant amount at signature; 100 % of accepted lump-sum costs are reimbursed if work packages are completed. No actual cost reporting.
* Pre-financing (up to ~60 %) followed by interim & final payments linked to WP completion.
**Who is eligible?**
* Consortia of minimum three independent legal entities from three different EU Member States or Associated Countries (HE General Rule).
* Legal entities from non-associated third countries may participate and be funded *exceptionally* in a CSA.
* Required profiles:
* Arts & cultural organisations with proven cross-sector experience.
* Public health / social care bodies, R&I performers, SSH researchers, education & youth organisations, humanitarian actors, policy authorities.
* Data & EOSC expertise for FAIR compliance.
* Exclusion: Chinese legal entities (innovation actions only) do not apply here. Standard HE exclusion criteria remain.
**Budget structure hint**
* Typical successful CSA of this size splits costs roughly:
* 45 % Personnel (platform, studies, evaluation).
* 20 % Sub-contracts & purchase of services (surveys, IT platform, translation).
* 15 % Travel & events (workshops in MS/AC, policy labs, training).
* 10 % Innovation & digital tools (software, data stewardship).
* 10 % Indirect/cross-cutting (management, ethics, gender, IPR).
**Key conditions**
* One project only will be funded – high competition; demonstrate critical mass, EU coverage, and sustainability.
* Software & data produced must be open-source / FAIR and compatible with EOSC & relevant Data Spaces.
* Obligation to participate in Commission concertation activities and align with OMC expert group outputs (2024) and CultureForHealth preparatory action.
📊 At a Glance
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🇪🇺 Strategic Advantages
EU-Wide Advantages & Opportunities for the CSA "Impacts of Culture and the Arts on Health and Well-being" (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-09)
1. Access to the EU Single Market (450+ million citizens)
• Deploy evidence-based cultural-health interventions simultaneously in 27 Member States, accelerating uptake of social-prescribing, museum-on-prescription and creative ageing schemes.
• Create a unified marketplace for digital cultural-health tools (e.g., VR art therapy apps) that comply with EU consumer safety, CE-marking and medical device rules, allowing suppliers to sell across borders without re-certification.
• Leverage EU procurement directives to pilot culture-in-health programmes in cross-border hospital networks and social-care consortia.
2. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange
• Mandatory multi-country consortia enable pooling of arts therapists, public-health experts, migration specialists and creative industry SMEs from diverse cultural traditions, generating richer, more transferrable best practices.
• The project-mandated "dedicated platform" can become the EU hub linking 1,400+ CultureForHealth stakeholders, ERASMUS+ universities and WHO European Healthy Cities network.
• Combine Nordic experience in social prescribing, Mediterranean expertise in community arts for migrants, and Central-Eastern methodologies in trauma-informed theatre for war-displaced persons.
3. Alignment with Key EU Strategies
• Green Deal & New European Bauhaus: promote low-carbon, place-based cultural activities that revitalise public space and improve mental health while advancing sustainable urban design.
• Digital Europe & European Open Science Cloud: ensure FAIR data on clinical and economic impacts are stored in EOSC and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH).
• EU Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health (2023) & Work Plan for Culture (2023-26): provide the concrete evidence base and toolkits explicitly requested by Council conclusions.
• European Pillar of Social Rights & EU Youth Strategy: demonstrate how arts participation reduces inequalities and youth burn-out, feeding into Social Scoreboard indicators.
4. Regulatory Harmonisation Benefits
• One set of GDPR-compliant protocols for sensitive health and cultural participation data instead of 27 national approaches.
• Common Medical Device Regulation pathways for digital art-therapy solutions, reducing time-to-market by up to 18 months.
• Use of EU-wide ICD-11 / SNOMED codes for social prescribing facilitates reimbursement discussions with national health insurers.
5. Plug-in to Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem
• Direct interfaces with over 2,000 research infrastructures federated under EOSC (e.g., ELIXIR for bio-health data; DARIAH for digital humanities).
• Collaboration opportunities with EIT Culture & Creativity KIC and its 1,500 innovation partners for downstream commercialisation.
• Synergies with Horizon Europe missions (Cancer, Climate Adaptation) by providing mental-health cultural components to mission projects.
6. Funding Synergies & Blending Options
• Combine Horizon lump-sum CSA with European Social Fund+ for regional roll-out of culture-in-health programmes.
• Leverage InvestEU Social Investments window for scaling up proven interventions through social-impact bonds.
• Integrate ERASMUS+ mobility grants for training art-health practitioners and Creative Europe support for cross-border artistic productions.
7. EU-Wide Scaling & Impact Potential
• Evidence Gap Map and cost-effectiveness models generated by the CSA facilitate rapid policy transfer through the Open Method of Coordination, reaching all Ministries of Culture & Health.
• Harmonised KPIs allow benchmarking across Member States, enabling the Commission to propose future legislative or funding measures.
• Demonstration of social-return-on-investment can unlock national health budgets (~€1.1 trillion/yr) for wider adoption.
8. Strategic Value Unique to Operating at EU Level
• Critical mass: Only an EU-level consortium can achieve statistically significant multi-lingual RCTs on cultural-health interventions (sample sizes >50,000), impossible for most single countries.
• Cohesion & Values: Project helps mainstream EU fundamental values (democracy, inclusion, cultural diversity) in health settings, strengthening European identity.
• Global Leadership: Generates policy templates that DG INTPA can export via Global Gateway, positioning the EU as world leader in culture-based health diplomacy.
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Bottom Line: The CSA offers unparalleled opportunities to harness Europe’s integrated market, policy frameworks and research infrastructures, translating fragmented national successes in culture-based health into scalable, evidence-backed EU solutions with global reach.
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