The THRIVE Project, under Creative Europe Programme, aims to enhance cultural heritage in EU rural areas by promoting local crafts, regional products, and gastronomy through digitization. This initiative builds on the European Agenda for Culture, ensuring the legacy of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. By integrating cultural policies into rural development, THRIVE seeks to counter rural depopulation, boost creative industries, generate employment, and make rural areas more attractive places to live and work.

Empowering Talents to Preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage Across Europe

The THRIVE Project aims to make EU rural areas more attractive for talent by preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH) through digitization and skill development. Led by the Province of Bergamo (Italy), it unites five partner organizations and three associated partners from Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain.

Partners will co-produce, cooperate, experiment, innovate, be mobile and learn from each other in order to generate a model that will be replicable for implementation also in other EU countries, and specific capitalization actions will encourage the adoption of this strategy in further rural territories.

The project focuses on empowering young talents, fostering intergenerational ties, and bridging the urban-rural divide through cultural and creative sectors.

Peer Learning Study Visit in Fundão

The 3-year-long THRIVE project has kicked off with the partner's transnational meeting that took place in Fundão (Portugal) on the 28th and 29th of January 2025. The meeting aimed, on one hand, to establish the project working group between partners and related internal procedures to guarantee sound project management and implementation.

On the other hand, the meeting was the occasion for a peer learning study visit to the Fundão territory to discover its many cultural heritages and strategies implemented in the last decade to attract young talents/workers in the ICT sector. By engaging in a collaborative exchange of ideas and experiences, partners and associated partners had the opportunity to learn valuable lessons from Fundao's innovative policies, drawing inspiration to shape a more inclusive and thriving landscape for talent development in rural areas.

Enter Koprivnica is part of the consortium in this project. In this project, Enter is a leading work package dedicated to talent empowerment. Objectives of this are to facilitate the exchange of global best practices and peer learning to enhance local talents' knowledge and skills about ICH preservation and enhancement through innovative technology. The aim is also to organize "From Storytellers to Digitizers Academy" as a central hub for knowledge transfer, promoting intergenerational bonds, advancing the digitization of cultural heritage, and encouraging the learning of digital skills by talents. Implemented activities will facilitate a dynamic environment for learning, exchange, and co-creation of creative solutions, including activities like boot camp, and to create Innovative Business Ideas that integrate cultural heritage with sustainability and digital technology, responding to local challenges. Through this process mentorship will be provided through a creative business mentorship program to guide emerging talents in developing and implementing their ideas, offering consultancy, feasibility evaluation, and business matchmaking for long-term success.

Funded by the Creative Europe Programme (CREA-CULT-2024-COOP-1).