cheFare english version

cheFare is committed to transforming society through culture by creating new generative connections between institutions, organizations, and territories.
It collaborates with cultural centers, libraries, museums, and archives to stimulate dialogue with society, fostering democratic access to culture and supporting local organizations in strengthening their capacities, seeking funding, and enhancing their work.
Together with artists, writers, designers, and cultural operators, it designs cultural interventions, with particular attention to territorial relationships, participatory processes, and frontier themes and languages. With public administrations and funding bodies, cheFare develops support pathways to assist local organizations, tools to identify the cultural energies of territories, and strategic plans to harmonize them.

The focus is always on building transversal skills and cultural design, enhancing active community participation, and producing culture as a driver of innovation rooted in territorial specificities.

Identifying specific needs, involving expanded stakeholder groups, and redefining the cultural positioning of organizations—all aimed at creating measurable and lasting impacts.

cheFare supports organizations in strengthening their capacity for evolution, growth, and impactful action. It does so through empowerment processes in which individual autonomy and cohesion mutually reinforce each other so that decisions, responsibilities, and rules emerge from a relational, conscious, and co-constructed fabric. 

For cheFare, organizational empowerment is based on creating contexts where choices and rules are conscious and shared, responsibilities are distributed, work is clearly structured, and everyone’s contribution is valued. Work methods and processes are always central, serving as scalable and replicable tools.

Working on governance systems, roles, and capacities is an act of cultural transformation. It’s about creating conditions for dynamic adaptation to changing contexts, integrating innovation and sustainability with a long-term perspective. 

The goal is to make organizations autonomous, capable of adapting, innovating models, and navigating the complex environments in which they operate. In this framework, organizations become agents of change—able to translate complexity into generative strategies.

cheFare works to promote a free, open, rooted, and democratic society.

It focuses its activities on empowerment and capacity building—providing project beneficiaries with the tools and resources needed to act autonomously and face complexity.

For cheFare, empowerment means facilitating the emergence of individual and collective capacities through culture as a developmental element.

It starts from the assumption that people and groups already possess capacities and resources. cheFare’s role is to remove the obstacles preventing their emergence. To do this, it's necessary to bring order, recognize resources, share or create common languages, understand contexts, manage conflicts, and develop listening and observation skills.

With the spread of digital media, the communication landscape has become complex and multifaceted. On one hand, this has opened up vast opportunities for audience interaction and engagement; on the other, it has introduced a new challenge: the sheer volume of information, which often saturates users’ attention spans.

Organizations must not only tell their story, but do so in a way that withstands the fragmentation that characterizes today’s communication flows.

Narration, therefore, is not just storytelling—it is a strategic construction that must be calibrated both to the content itself and to the context in which that content is published. Stakeholders are no longer passive recipients, but active participants in a communication ecosystem where building and maintaining relationships becomes essential.

For cheFare, telling stories is not merely a way to convey values and objectives—it is a lever for creating an ongoing dialogue that acknowledges and enhances the complexity of actions and impacts. In this way, practices and stories can make a substantial contribution to ongoing cultural transformations, rather than serving as static portraits of them.

cheFare develops cultural projects together with major international institutions, small local organizations, public administrations, and publishing houses:
artist, designer, and writer residencies; participatory artworks; collaborative magazines and publications; live performances and events.

cheFare’s cultural project design aims to facilitate the act of speaking out and to stimulate transformative imagination, building interdisciplinary bridges between different perspectives and languages.

cheFare develops strategic support pathways with cultural and social organizations: public administrations, museums, libraries, associations, cooperatives, cultural enterprises, and foundations.

Strategic support is a structured process that retraces an organization’s past, captures its present, and builds navigation tools to help it become strong—and remain so—in the years to come.

Each strategic support process is different because it is built around the organization we work with: its history, its values, the knowledge and skills it embodies, and its aspirations for transformation—of itself and of the world.

cheFare facilitates the planning, production, and management of cultural and social initiatives, with the aim of activating and circulating the collective intelligence of territories.
It does so through structured co-design processes that draw on knowledge and techniques from curatorship, economics and organizational studies, sociology, and many other disciplines.

These are projects developed with communities, focusing on territorial change, inequalities, active participation, and organizational transformation.
The primary goal is to help residents and organizations equip themselves with the tools and skills to speak out, influence public agendas, and give economic and social sustainability to their visions.

To create culture, you need to study and experiment.
That’s why cheFare organizes training courses, labs, and workshops focused on cultural project design:
on project analysis and writing; funding systems, economic sustainability, and work organization; relationships with audiences and scenes; experimenting with languages and managing communication channels.

cheFare has always connected theory and practice because, for us, knowledge is the engine of transforming the world.

cheFare conducts qualitative and quantitative research on emerging phenomena in the fields of culture and social sectors to gather firsthand data.
This is done through online and offline surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews.
It also processes data collected from cultural funding calls, second-level networks, and institutions: targeted analyses that provide a broad overview to identify new areas of intervention and territorial policies.
The outcome of this work is the production of research reports designed for diverse audiences, from institutional leadership to the general public.

cheFare is also involved in third mission projects and communication of research carried out by universities and institutions, using three methodologies.
The first is the editorial production of texts that address the complexity of results without oversimplifying them, making them accessible to wider audiences.
The second is the organization of live events that experiment with new formats and languages.
The third is the development of integrated communication strategies and pathways across the web and social media.

cheFare designs and implements communication projects and campaigns for social and cultural initiatives.
This always starts with a deep listening to needs and a clear identification of objectives, with constant attention to balancing digital and onlife experiences.
It identifies audiences, amplifies resonance and reach, and expands networks and possible alliances to increase the effectiveness and impact of cultural pathways and projects.

cheFare publishes books, magazines, article series, and podcasts that explore key aspects of the cultural debate.
It works on storytelling paths, photographic and narrative reports, and participatory stories that map places and histories, bringing to light the underrepresented cultural heritage of territories.
It also leads cultural debates on themes of cultural transformation, together with a network of hundreds of researchers, artists, policymakers, and writers, in partnership with publishing houses and cultural institutions.

cheFare designs and produces live events with writers, artists, researchers, activists, and policymakers.
The formats used are constantly evolving, as each time we interpret the meaning of places and audiences: festivals, roundtables, traveling series, book presentations, lectures at universities and cultural centers.
From small seminars in villages to major initiatives at leading cultural institutions, the goal of cheFare’s events is always to connect worlds, translate knowledge, and open up possibilities.