The cooperation between the sister organisations AEC and ELIA has steadily grown in recent years which manifested increasingly in concrete projects, such as the ELIA Academy 2019, which is fully open to AEC and ELIA members.

In the field of advocacy, ELIA and AEC often joined forces, also in collaboration with other partners such as Cultural Action Europe and the European Alliance for Culture, which proved to be very effective in the past year.

ELIA and AEC initiated an advocacy action thanks to which the acronym STEM is replaced by STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as key parameters for European educational policy documents, such as the funding guidelines of the European Social Fund ESF+. Thanks to the networks’ actions, there has been increasing attention on the topic of artistic research by the European Union’s institutions dealing with cultural and educational policy.

Because of this continuous collaboration, ELIA and AEC feel it is important to make a gesture towards Higher Arts Education institutions that are members of both networks. From 2019 onwards, these institutions can apply for a 10 % discount on their annual membership fee. More information on the application procedure and the conditions is available below.