Social distancing has challenged cultural organisation’s ability to run operations as usual. Organising events and maintain the link between the artists and audience have been something difficult to implement in 2020. As a non-profit association operating in the cultural sector, the IYMF relied on creativity and innovation for offering an alternative way where artists and audience can always meet.

After several months of reflexion and co-creation, the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation is proud to announce that its own virtual concert hall, concertwithyou.com, is finally online!

The initiative aims to provide musicians and artists with new opportunities to share music and arts by broadcasting videos of recent performances on a regular basis. Every two weeks, three performers from different artistic horizons will be showing on concertwithyou.com which gives visitors the chance to discover new artists while contributing to the artists’ promotion.

All content will be available to everyone for free on the website. However, visitors could choose to make a charitable donation to support the project. All donations collected will serve at funding new exclusive videos, especially dedicated for being published on the website, and remunerate artists for their performances.

Following the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government (Belgium) announced on June 12, 2020 that the tax deduction for donations made in 2020 is increased to 60% of the amount donated. This means that for every 40€ donation, donors would only pay 16€.

Creativity and flexibility have been the main assets for non-profits to be able to overcome challenges drawing from the pandemic. As mentioned in this article, today more than ever, non-profits need to be supported to be able to continue playing their central role in our democracy: encouraging social cohesion.

Throughout concertwithyou.com, we truly hope to raise awareness on the need to reactivate the sector, re-establish broken links with audiences, trust and connection and face the drop in cultural participation.