Who are we?

Born out of the COVID crisis, Feed the Culture is a citizen-led platform providing social support to the cultural and creative industries in the Brussels region. In May 2020, within a few weeks, cultural professionals from various backgrounds came together and organised the first food distribution exclusively for cultural professionals (current or future) in the Brussels region, without restrictions on status, discipline or language.
Faced with a lack of response from the public authorities, the objective was clear: to provide a sustainable, practical, immediate solution with no restrictions on access and free of charge.
The initiative therefore came from the sector itself, which organised itself.
On 6 June 2020, 50 people turned up at the SeeU site hangar after a post on
Facebook.

And the machine never stopped.
Five years later, 250 distributions and 30,000 cultural professionals and their families have been helped.
At the height of the crisis, up to 300 people joined the distribution lines, accompanied by nearly 25 volunteers. The distribution then lasted three hours.
The principle was simple: for €1 per person, people could choose the products they wanted from a social grocery store: pasta, tinned food, meat, yoghurt, cheese, fruit, vegetables, etc.
The Feed the Culture team collected unsold items from supermarkets every week and redistributed them.
For the first two years, the non-profit organisation did not ask for any proof of eligibility, but for the following three years, it required a student card from an art school or a contract, invoice or payslip from a cultural profession.
In total, FTC distributed nearly 1,300 membership cards.
Feed the Culture moved from one temporary location to another in three municipalities (Ixelles, Forest and
Saint Josse) and relocated four times in five years. Its last location, measuring 200 m², was near Place Rogier.

In June 2020, FTC added a new service: the option of consulting a psychologist in individual sessions. Eight sessions are offered at a price of €11.

After five years, the needs remain as significant as ever. Worse still, the sector is exhausted,
demoralised and still labelled as “non-essential”. To take things further, Feed
the Culture launched a study at the end of 2024 to initially assess existing social action
aimed at the cultural sector in the Brussels-Capital Region. The next step was to consider offering them a new, concrete and useful solution.
Together with the company Supper (responsible for the study), FTC is proposing the creation of a social branch exclusively for cultural professionals in the Brussels region.

With the absence of this government in the Brussels region, combined with the new policy of the Minister of Culture, FTC can no longer finance its actions and will permanently stop food distribution on 28 June 2025.