The Staff Exchanges in European Cultural Heritage Trusts (SEECHT) project offers opportunities for professionals from within the National Trust movement to share their learning and contribute to a more open and welcoming European heritage sector. The project delivers a system of secondments for Europe's future leaders of heritage trusts, offering on-the-job training by shadowing their contemporaries in other European contexts. Having learnt from their neighbouring trusts, participants will deliver projects that broaden access to all segments of the European public, whilst also welcoming members of heritage trusts from other countries as part of the reciprocal visiting programme. A toolkit, to be shared widely among European heritage organisations and policy makers, will capture the incredible strength of variety possessed by European heritage trusts, and provide the blueprint for continued collaboration between project participants.
The project sought, through networking and sharing knowledge, to build the capacity of European heritage NGOs to engage with the widest possible audience. The partners wanted to learn from one another’s experiences engaging and mobilisiing the public through visitation, membership and volunteerism in order to build capacity for a more open and welcoming heritage sector. There was a particular focus on methods to increase visitor numbers from underrepresented groups within society, as well as members of other European trusts within the INTO reciprocal visiting programme. It was desired to capture this learning in a toolkit of best practice case studies, sharing this with staff from the partner organisations and beyond to diffuse the learning as widely as possible.
The project partners came together in a shared belief that civil society heritage organisations have a key role to play in protecting European heritage sites for current and future generations. There is a current trend across Europe for the NGO sector to become more prevalent in national conversations about heritage site management, increasingly taking on and running sites directly, with the support of the public. One innovative model used for this is that of a National Trust. Our project partners are all members of the International National Trusts Organisation, which was also a partner. INTO is an international forum for sharing knowledge and is the main international heritage membership body for organisations with direct responsibility for management of sites. Embedded within the National Trust in England, INTO enables the sharing of expertise between National Trusts across the EU and globally, meaning that our partners share a common purpose in engaging diverse audiences. INTO members have recently developed a reciprocal visiting programme, which allows members of one trust to access the membership benefits of others. All the participating organisations wanted to learn from each other’s approaches, and share knowledge across the partnership to improve and diversify access. In the current atmosphere of increasing mistrust of institutions and societal division, initiatives that provide shared cultural spaces for Europeans from all backgrounds to share their love of heritage and place have high importance. The project also sought to share best practice in engaging underrepresented audiences, strengthening audience development.