People, Places and Stories

Social sustainability in present multicultural Europe is a challenge. Mutual understanding, communication & cooperation between (ethnic) groups, participation, equal opportunities and feelings of unsafety are issues in many societies, stirred up in recent years by migration & refugee peaks and terrorism. Inclusion, sense of belonging, identity building are the result of meaning and value making processes of individuals and groups trying to relate to their environment. Heritage and heritage identification processes play a crucial role in this. They can be used to revive nationalistic narratives and to sustain barriers by focussing on its traditional, ethnic, territorial elements or it can be used to revive inclusive narratives and to build bridges by focussing on participation & contemporary meaning making processes of all people feeling related to the heritage. The latter is the core of this project. The 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage established a societal cross-sectorial cooperation to increase the awareness of the crucial role of culture and heritage for social inclusion and European cohesion. Heritage (cultural, natural, tangible and intangible) is put forward as a vehicle for addressing social challenges and as an ideal ground for sustainability-development. In this view cultural heritage is not seen as a ‘valuable relict of the past’, it does not only relate to our cultural and historic roots but it also relates to present habits and to our value frameworks, as a group of resources which people identify as an expression of their constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions. The FARO Convention Action Plan (Council of Europe, 2018) emphasises the new roles of cultural heritage in society: to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European social & cultural space, to integrate heritage into social, environmental & economic processes, to develop heritage as a rich & meaningful interdisciplinary learning environment. All these roles crystallise in one of the key concepts of the Convention: heritage communities. “Heritage communities are self-organised, self-managed groups of individuals who are interested in progressive social transformation of relationships between peoples, places and stories, with an inclusive approach based on an enhanced definition of heritage.” They are the ideal context to develop key competences such as cultural awareness, civic competences and learning to learn.Therefore the People, Places and Stories (PPS) project focuses on the capacity building of heritage communities as a socio-cultural space for creativity, learning, participation & inclusion. The project wants to raise the civil society capacity to exploit heritage as an environment and resource for sustainable development. PPS will analyse what competences are needed for heritage community capacity building and develop a training curriculum for the stakeholders involved in order to improve the number, quality and impact of these communities on society as foreseen in FARO. The project targets heritage professionals, community mediators, participatory planning facilitators, adult educators, policy makers, citizens and communities. Outputs will be: a good practice overview, a set of competences to implement FARO for stakeholders at grassroot level, Continuous Professional Development (CPD) modules in a blended learning modality for the target groups, competence validation at the level of the facilitators, a CPD blended learning course, a heritage community-based (competence oriented) learning model, an open badges system to validate the learning of the participants (community members).Thanks to PPS heritage professionals/facilitators and policy makers will be better prepared to encourage and support an integrated & participatory approach to cultural heritage, adult educators will gain deep understanding of the competence-oriented training and validation potential in heritage settings and will be better prepared to exploit cultural heritage assets as a rich learning environment for competence oriented place-based learning, citizens and participants will gain personal and social competences for a successful engagement in socio-cultural processes.The heritage sector is still stuck in CPD approaches aiming at safeguarding, protecting and presenting heritage. For the first time CPD will focus on the implementation of the new concepts and roles of heritage as in Faro. Its key concept: ‘heritage communities’, encompasses a rich bundle of learning opportunities and a great potential to address socio-cultural issues. Peoples, Places and Stories combines this with an innovative CPD approach focusing on competence-oriented training offers, blended learning and validation of non-formal learning, using a state of the art approach & online suite of instruments.