Beschreibung der Einrichtung

„macuco“ is an association that is based in Vienna. The name means multiple alternative culture collective. A general objective of macuco is to bring together artistic and cultural forms of expression and sociopolitical topics. The association was founded to support active people in putting their project ideas in areas of youth work, education, art and culture into practice. Therefore macuco is a platform to transform ideas into projects.

We founded the association as we have been active in these areas for many years. We are connected to other groups, people and institutions working in these sectors. The aim of macuco is to build a structure that functions as a catalyst and networking hub of collaborative support, knowledge transfer and exchange.

Before the creation of the association in 2016 some of us were active in different informal and formal groups. There we did a lot of projects over the last 8 years. The biggest group of members of macuco before were a part of an association called „re:active“. This association did stop working in 2016 because of personal problems within. For those who wanted to continue working together macuco gave the possibility to do so.

Mostly we are cooperating with other groups and formal associations. We were developing, planing and implementing projects and events in the areas of youth work, education, art and culture. The foundation of macuco in 2016 was the step from an informal group towards our own legal form as well as bundling activities and knowledge.

Our working methods diversify depending on the size of the project. Thereby we use open as well as closed formats. We follow approaches within project management, theory and methodology which aims towards empowerment and participation. A central approach thereby is to have accessible activities by pro-actively reducing financial and discriminating barriers for participants and project partners. This is happening by flexibly and freely chosen financial contributions for activities and events as well as for example by exclusive offers for LGBTIQ+ people.
(Explanation: LGBTIQ+ is an inclusive acronym encompassing all minority sexual and gender identities, as well as atypical biological sex or intersex people.)

Besides our own activities, members of our association are supporting (young) people by consulting and producing and publishing info material. We also coach other people in implementing their ideas and projects.

macuco is pro-active, networking and cooperating with local, regional and transnational organizations, associations, NGOs, NPOs and informal groups. We work together with initiatives from different fields, which are mainly culture, art, education and self-organized youth work. We are open to many forms of collaborating, but have a clear boundary towards organizations that have sexist, racist, in general discriminating and/or extremist right-wing positions or who support in distributing information of this kind. Since two years we also have a networking focus on working with associations and groups based in Eastern Europe. Besides the core fields of our work, we are cooperating in areas of environment protection and environmental education, migration and refugees support and human rights. We are working on future collaborations and development of our network.