Exploring, discovering, experiencing: cultural education gives children access to exciting opportunities where they can learn and experience things, offering them a wide range of playful options for developing the way they perceive and express the world. The aim is to enhance their personal development, their self-confidence and their skills, but over and above that, cultural education allows them to join in and creates space for new experiences, for dialogue, and for mutual understanding.

The German Children and Youth Foundation (Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung, DKJS) has now set up the Kulturkita Hessen programme in order to consolidate daycare facilities as the settings for and birthplaces of cultural education and participation. In October 2023 it launched the pilot phase with ten Hesse facilities, initiated and funded by the Crespo Foundation.

Kulturkita Hessen is active in three separate areas. The programme supports a wide range of cultural events and activities in and beyond the daycare facility, sets up consultancy services and qualification schemes in connection with early childhood learning, undertakes pedagogical work with children in daycare, and offers professional events on learning in practice, networking and knowledge transfer. 

The programme was developed via a multi-perspectival dialogue with regional and national experts in Germany. It reacts to the excessive strains in the daycare system by taking a multi-professional, networked approach with the focus on processes and needs.