Following the success of Heritage Without Borders’ recent international projects in Turkmenistan and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has now been awarded funding by The Headley Trust to run a conservation summer school in Albania.
Heritage Without Borders (HWB) is a newly established social enterprise founded at University College London that matches museum and conservation professionals with people who need help to conserve, interpret and use their heritage.
Through HWB, communities in countries lacking heritage resources can tap into specialist skills and practical training that would otherwise be impossible to obtain due to financial and geographical constraints. Meanwhile, qualified volunteers from the UK engage in an active collaboration with their hosts, which leads to an exciting exchange of ideas.
This experience gives HWB volunteers an experience that radically changes their outlook and transforms their future employment opportunities.
In September 2011, HWB ran a conservation summer school at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
There were 26 attendees from Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Serbia, including students from the local Institute of Archaeology. The course was run by three skilled HWB volunteers, including a professional conservator (Dominica D’Arcangelo) and two conservation students from the UCL Institute of Archaeology (Nicola Harrison and Carmen Vida).
The week-long course in Sarajevo gave participants the opportunity to learn about how preventive conservation is relevant to their daily work and provided practical solutions to their issues around collections care with funding and space shortages.
Dominica D’Arcangelo, HWB Co-Director, said: “HWB operates a unique model where collaborative problem solving, communication and cooperation provides the key to long-term sustainable solutions.
“In Sarajevo we learned first-hand how building a professional network extends benefits beyond the immediate group of project participants. It has also become apparent in HWB’s first projects that students and heritage professionals who are early in their careers value the opportunity HWB gives them to build their confidence and skills.”
The Headley Trust was so impressed with the success of the project in Sarajevo that they have agreed to give HWB £25,000 to carry out a further summer school in Albania in 2012.
As HWB is a social enterprise that’s currently registering for charitable status, it depends on grants and donations. In January 2011, it also received a grant from UnLtd, a charity that supports social entrepreneurs.
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