The Wasl program wrapped up its pilot edition with an online meeting held on 17 and 18 March, 2021 attended by the participants members of the Culture Resource team, and Fatin Farhat, a member of Culture Resource’s Artistic Board, a cultural policy specialist and an expert in cultural project management. Participants presented and discussed how their various collaborations unfolded and the challenges they faced along the way, especially under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic which prevented travel and, therefore, precluded such activities as exchanging field visits, face-to-face meetings and in-person consultations. They also exchanged views on the administrative and follow up tools that Wasl made available to participants.
The meeting concluded with a participatory discussion of the program’s peer-to-peer learning approach and its concept of collaboration, and other subjects related to cultural work in the Arab region at the organizational and individual levels, and at the level of networking and collaboration.
Wasl launched its activities in late 2019 as a pilot project that brought together 10 cultural organizations from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. These organizations received the program’s support to carry out five collaborative projects addressing the following themes: presenting folk myths through comics, audio and textual documentation of women’s experiences, knowledge sharing among children using photography and letter writing, dance and performance as means of information exchange among young people, and understanding cultural work and cultural policies through collaborative studies involving cultural workers and artists.
