The short answer: this site is bought to you by the European Regions of Culture Campaign Organisation. Our organisation is working with partners in Cornwall and other rural regions of Europe to connect and celebrate European rural culture. Our ultimate ambition is to make the case that there should be a new designation like European Capitals of Culture for rural areas, potentially to be called "European Regions of Culture". If you have a project which has potential to work with European partners, please contact us using the contact form.
EROCCO evolved from Cornwall Arts Marketing, an EU Objective One funded Project. EROCCO is part of Cornwall Arts Centre Trust Ltd. charity no. 292138 and a company limited by guarantee and registered in England & Wales no.1727731
The long answer: We are a cultural organisation working with other agencies* to improve the profile and investment of the cultural sector in Cornwall. We had an idea in 2003 that there should be a European Regions of Culture designation, and that if Cornwall were to win it the resulting celebrations would look very different from those seen in European Capitals of Culture programmes. Understanding what that difference is and how we can work together to get the best result for Cornwall has been the group's collective journey since then.
The first step of this was to ask the people of Cornwall what they wanted to celebrate about Cornwall's culture - you can find the results of this on the "What does Cornwall mean to you?" part of the site, and on www.youtube.com/cornwallculture
We worked with UK think tank, Demos, to understand this feedback. This report gave us some signposts as to exactly how Cornwall's culture differs from that of cities. During the last 10 years the creative industry sector has commissioned a number of reports which now means we have a lot of data about what the cultural sector constitutes, how much economic value it contributes to Cornwall and how effective the investments that Objective One made were (If you would like to see any of this information please ask us).
Download a copy of the Demos Report here (79k pdf)We realised that if we were going to win our case with Europe we needed to prove that other regions in Europe also had enough cultural activity to merit a European Regions of Culture scheme, but also that the scheme would work very differently from the urban model. So we started looking for other regions of Europe that we could work with to start to test some of our ideas. The first regions we will be working with in a project starting Oct 2008 are South Ostrobothnia (Finland), Kujawsko-Pomorskie (Poland), South Denmark & Vidin (Bulgaria). If you have any links with these regions we would love to hear from you.