The Democracy & Culture Foundation stands at the nexus of culture and democracy. Its strategy (designed by McKinsey) is based on the impact chain THINK-TALK-DO. Its work runs along two main axes. The one axis concerns running a cluster of three conferences: (a) The Athens Democracy Forum (in association with the New York Times) a global event that debates current and emerging issues currently in its 11th year, (b) The Art for Tomorrow which examines how art changes our subjective view of the environment and thus the environment itself and, (c) Teens ADF, a new conference that started last year as a successful pilot, that aims to give adolescents a voice and to help bridge the intergenerational gap. The second axis concerns running a series of projects under four thematic pillars: technology, climate, migration, and business. The cluster of conferences serves as a space for the incubation of ideas that are then translated into projects aiming to produce specific policy recommendations that contribute to the evolution of democracy. These recommendations are stress-tested by using tools of deliberative democracy, presented and debated at ADF and, then through partners promoted for implementation. Projects include “Re-Imaging the Building Blocks of Democracy”, the Climate Change Hub, The Digital Tool Kit, the ORBIS advanced AI tool for deliberative democracy (under an E.U. Horizon grant), the Democratic Odyssey for an E.U. transnational citizens’ assembly.
Purpose
Our mission is in cooperation with partners to design and help implement policy recommendations that make liberal democracy resilient to attacks from within and without, and to institutionalize these changes without compromising democracy’s ethical values– the rule of law, property rights (including intellectual rights), human rights. We convene, connect and foster collaboration between prominent and emerging voices of democracy and culture. And we aim to become the global platform for dialogue and solutions-oriented activities concerning the evolution of democracy, civil society and the media as well as the role of culture in enabling democracy to flourish through the creation of the Global Hub of Democracy – an undertaking already in the making.
