Why the assistance-based model in culture stopped working

For years, culture in Chile—and in much of Latin America—has been treated as a field of exception: a fragile, subsidized sector that stays alive thanks to the efforts of creators and managers who resist however they can. We resist precariousness, the intermittency of funds, and grant guidelines designed without a strategic vision. But resisting, however heroic, is not a policy. And the assistance-based model upon which we have built our entire cultural institutional framework is no longer just insufficient: it is an obstacle.

I say this with the experience of having founded TRAMA, an organization that decided from its inception to operate without structural subsidies or donations. Not out of arrogance, but out of conviction. If culture wants to hold a real place in a country's development—in its economy, its public policy, in everyday life—it cannot depend on charity or institutional paternalism. It must prove, with facts, that it is capable of creating value, employment, meaning, and concrete transformation.

And it does. We have seen it in our own initiatives: creative laboratories that transform schools with high dropout rates into spaces of belonging and affection; collective curatorial processes that restore legitimacy to depoliticized heritage debates; alliances with international actors like Qatar Museums that have placed Chile on the global cultural cooperation agenda. None of that was born from a state fund. It was all the result of methodologies, networks, and the will for cross-sector articulation.

The problem is that the assistance-based model not only fails to incentivize this: it punishes it. It penalizes autonomy, discourages innovation, and ends up rewarding dependency. If a project is delayed by the very public apparatus that funds it, it is sanctioned. If it manages to survive through its own means, it is forced to return funds as if it had failed. This is exactly what we faced recently with the early termination of the CORFO project we led: despite having met the objectives, expanded internationally, and generated new jobs in the sector, we were accused of non-compliance for not fitting into administrative deadlines. The logic was not to evaluate results, but procedures.

This approach is not only unfair: it is suicidal. Because there is no sector more powerful for the future than culture. Not as an ornament or a consumer good, but as soft infrastructure that allows us to imagine other ways of living, producing, and coexisting. But for that to happen, we must transition from a survival model to a development model. Filling out forms or surviving the annual grant call is no longer enough. We need public and private financing systems that invest in processes, that measure impact beyond attendance figures, and that understand that culture is not an expense: it is a long-term investment.