The first Special Call for Cultural Projects 2023 was closed, in which managers, artists, non-profit associations and MSMEs from all parts of the country sent 127 cultural projects covering the different sectors and subsectors of the cultural area.
The deadline was last Monday, September 25. As indicated in Law 340-19, Mecenazgo opened the call for proposals and, after it closed, the entity informed that they are in the process of evaluation for the certification of projects of national cultural interest with the support of the Specialized Technical Committees.
After this process, the Director of Patronage will forward the projects to the Patronage Council, which will review the projects and decide on their certification of cultural interest.
In this regard, Henry Mercedes Vales, Director of Patronage, stated that “we have received a large number of projects. After a period in which we focused on publicizing the law and training our managers in the formulation of projects, today we can say with great satisfaction that the sector responded successfully to this first call. We are now concentrating on the technical evaluation, as required by the law, to then present the projects to CONME. The Council makes an evaluation based on the impact on Dominican, national, regional or local cultural development in the areas and categories established in the law and decides which projects will be certified of national cultural interest. Next Monday, October 23 of this year, we will announce the certified projects to the country”.
The cultural community has given an excellent response to this first call for cultural projects, whose main objective is to certify projects of national interest so that cultural managers can seek public and private funding for their projects. The selected projects will have a great impact on the strengthening of the cultural sector, the creative industries and citizenship.
Declaration of cultural interest
Law 340-19, in its Article 3, describes as projects of cultural interest, “those programs, proposals and artistic, creative or cultural projects proposed by intellectuals, artists, cultural managers, non-profit associations of the cultural sector, MSMEs and the creative and cultural industry of all genres, related to research, training, education, dissemination, circulation, creation and production in the different areas of art and culture”.
In this sense, the aforementioned article specifies that “to be declared of cultural interest, the potential impact on the individual and collective lives of communities, provinces, cities and the nation in general will be taken into account, and that it is capable of generating quality of life in the citizenship, stimulus in the labor force of the sector, self-management for the generation of business and strategic alliances with official bodies for its self-financing, among other effects attributed to the Orange Industry”.
Regarding the accreditation certificate and term of execution
The law establishes that the accreditation certificate that officializes the declaration of cultural interest is prepared in technical collaboration with the General Directorate of Internal Taxes (DGII), in order to guarantee the security and circulation value of such document (Art. 25).
On the other hand, in Article 26, the law states that the projects declared of cultural interest shall be executed within a term not exceeding two years, counted from the allocation and disbursement of the funds, whether they come from the public, private or international cooperation sectors, or from the Solidarity Fund for Culture (FOSAC).
Source: presidencia.gov.do
