Welcome to the World Culture Centre

The World Culture Centre is a culture house in Copenhagen (municipality of) with a special interest in and focus on the ethnic minorities, providing a creative platform for various cultural, social and political activities. The World Culture Centre houses approximately 250 ethnic associations, clubs and organizations who all, in different ways, wish to create dialogue, movement, and commitment. Many of the larger organizations and associations have permanent office space in the building while the smaller ones use other facilities provided by the house and have their postal address here.

A lot of events take place in the centre – all organized in close collaboration with the ethnic cultural life in Copenhagen, covering multicultural festivals, lectures, art-exhibitions, concerts, debates, screenings, conferences, meetings and a lot of other activities.
The World Culture Centre has a user board that keeps the overall control with the main purpose of the house, namely to be an activity-centre primarily for cultural life and associations representing ethnic minorities in Copenhagen.

The house came to life in 1993 after some of the large ethnic organizations had put pressure on the municipality of Copenhagen to live up to their pronounced promise to make life better and easier for the ethnic minorities in Copenhagen. The municipality had expressed this attitude for some time without giving them a building to house their activities. In the end they got the building and the house opened under the name Norre Allé Civic Centre.

Eventually, the house has become The World Culture Centre. The name is grand, but rightfully so, in that, this type of centre is unprecedented in Denmark. 

The name also signals a change from originally being a very locally based house to being a centre used by people from all over Copenhagen and suburbs. This development has got to do with the positive reputation we have achieved through providing assistance and aid in the founding process of associations, interest groups etc..

This aid is primarily of a technical nature – for instance we help setting up the judicial framework in the founding process of associations. We explain how to constitute a board, elect a chairman etc.
This assistance is very valuable in the sense, that regrettably, a potential association might never be realised, because of the difficulties concerning the judicial outlining of rules, the linguistic barriers and so forth.

So, being able to help in this process has the positive effect, that rather than JUST letting out conference rooms, we have a dialogue with everybody that uses our facilities.

As a consequence of the quite extensive collaboration in the house, The World Culture Centre has a very elaborate and broad network which constantly gives life to new exciting ideas and innovative projects that contribute to the daily activities in the house.

To make visible, who uses the centre, we have made an agreement with all the associations that every each and one of them ideally are ‘responsible’ for some activities in the café and on the stage each year,  as much as their resources allow. This means finding the relevant lecturers, hiring bands from the country or region and setting up art exhibitions and debates during that week. This concept has been received very positively and the turn-out is a lot of activities without high expenses.

All these activities constitute an open window to the surrounding society and in that sense, our activities, although not specifically intended to be an integrating tool, has integrative effects due to the vast number of people drawn into the house and because of the dialogue created between them during the events – in that sense, all our activities also constitute cultural meetings.

The house in general
The Word Culture Centre contains everything from concert and conference hall, café, meeting, and office facilities, TV-stations and ceramic workshops. The World Culture Centre also arranges festivals, lectures, art exhibitions, concerts, debates, movie nights, courses and meetings etc.

Debate and politics
The World Culture Centre organizes public debates, in collaboration with the ethnic associations, clubs, and organizations based in Copenhagen, that deal with issues such as culture, discrimination, integration, dialogue, tolerance, politics and international matters.

Focus on culture
The World Culture Centre offers a variety of concerts with a worldmusic scope that differs from Argentine tango to West African drum dancing.

Art gallery
Every month we have art exhibitions with changing artists representing and expressing the diversity which defines the ethnic milieus in Denmark.

Movies from around the world
Every month the café is transformed to a cinema screening movies from around the world, which aren’t shown in the commercial theatres in Copenhagen. The movies are documentaries and fictional always with a particular interest for an ethnic minority group or sometimes a travelogue showing a culture thru the visitors eyes.

World music - big venue
In the big venue, called Global Copenhagen, there are about 40 annual concerts with renowned names from the international worldmusic scene. Worldmusic as a term is interpreted in quite a broad sense by Global compared to the traditional conception of what world music is. In that sense you might call Global experimental. This fact results in very interesting concerts that always pack the club.

Café – food from around the world 
From Monday till Friday you can enjoy the international atmosphere in our café. Food and drinks from all around the world are served in an informal and homely environment.

SET OF VALUES:

DYNAMICS
We are the multicultural center of Copenhagen. Here, thoughts and ideas are translated into action, activities, and events. Our partners are artists, organizations, and groups. The World Culture Centre is the natural workpartner when we are talking about worldculture in Copenhagen.

uniqueness
Through openness, respect and  the active inclusion of the multi-cultural, we rethink and create art and culture in the crosscultural sphere.
The World Culture Centre makes room for the creative and experimental. We give the citizens' experiences an extra dimension by using cultural inputs from the rest of the world. Cultural projects in and outside the centre help making multicultural experiences in Copenhagen more visible.

DIALOGUE
We create space and the opportunity for dialogue which helps the existence of worldculture in everyday life. We create dialogue for ethnic groups and multiethnic partners, thus empowering new Danes and nourishing the positive understanding of worldcultures in the indigenous Danish society. Active networks constitute the foundation of our centre and profile. The cultural activities encompass debates on hot topics and dialogue-meetings.

cultural meetings
In The World Culture Centre we use cultural meetings as a dynamic tool solving social problems specifically related to the multicultural society.
Our role as a world culture centre is on one hand to inspire the ethnic groups and organization, making them focus on and create cultural meetings - on the other hand to ensure, that cultural meetings in Copenhagen create a foundation for understanding a respect for the multicultural.