"United for those in Needs: Learn, Open, Care, Keep - the Museum Mediator as Diversity Integrator" - the reason the project partners chose this title is based on the fact that people with special needs are everywhere, while their needs are more or less recognized and accepted by the society where such people live. It is not a chance that we chose these four verbs, which define our partnership. We want to LEARN, from each other, we want to share our knowledge, and thus we shall become all better. We want to OPEN our eyes, our minds, so that we become as adaptative as possible to the target audience's needs. We want to show them that we CARE, they need to know that they can count on us. We want to KEEP doing this after the end of the project, as we are convinced our project is a sustainable one. Since the project is a continuation of a previous project that the leader and three of the project partners undertook together, we decided we should try to take the concept of Museum Mediator to the next step, so that it answers the challenges of the contemporary world. This new level is one where the museum/ cultural specialist becomes the Diversity Integrator. The contemporary society needs to be inclusive, integrative, it cannot afford to leave people aside, whatever the reason of discrimination. We have reached such a phase of civilization where everyone should have understood that each person has its rights in this world, that sometimes providing equal opportunities is not providing the same tools to everyone, but the same perspective, meaning if a person is tall and can see everything and one is short and cannot see because of somebody or something taller that hinders the view, then the shorter person must be provided "higher heels", or a stool, or a table to step on, so that the view he/she has access to is similar to the one of the taller person. This is a metaphorical way of speaking about the rights of people with special needs. But their rights should not be metaphorical, should not elliptical, they should be provided in full by all civilized societies! This is a project about the qualitative experience persons with special needs are entitled to enjoy in museums and cultural organizations in the contemporary society. Museums are vectors of societal development, are catalyzers and have an exemplary role in shaping consciousness. Therefore, museums should act for assuming this role actively and in our particular case, the project teams wants to create the context for providing better experiences in museum environments for people who generally are prone to various forms of exclusion (for medical or social reasons).
We wanted to LEARN, from each other, we want to share our knowledge as partners, and thus we shall become all better. We wanted to OPEN our eyes, our minds, so that we become as adaptative as possible to the target audience's needs. We wanted to show them that we CARE, they need to know that they can count on us. We wanted to KEEP doing this after the end of the project, as we are convinced our project is a sustainable one. Contemporary society needs to be inclusive, integrative, non-discriminatory. Providing equal opportunities is not providing the same tools to everyone, but the same perspective, meaning if a person is tall and can see everything and one is short and cannot see because of somebody or something taller that hinders the view, then the shorter person must be provided "higher heels", or a stool, or a table to step on, so that the view he/she has access to is similar to the one of the taller person. This is a metaphorical way of speaking about the rights of people with special needs. But their rights should not be metaphorical, should not elliptical, they should be provided in full by all civilized societies!
Our aim in applying for this project was to contribute to providing equal opportunities to all museum users, irrespectively of their medical/ mental/ social condition. That is why the acronym of the project was suggestively chosen, UNLOCK, as the short name for the whole title "United for those in Needs: Learn, Open, Care, Keep. The museum mediator as diversity integrator". Today's society is diverse, and so are the needs of the people composing it. Everywhere we look around us, we can see people that are similar to us to a certain extent, but not entirely. If similarities make people come closer to each other, differences on the other hand produce the opposite, they separate, they segregate. That is why our intention through this project was to contribute to reduction of all kinds of discriminations that unfortunately can still be found in contemporary societies. People with special needs are everywhere, while their needs are more or less recognized and accepted by the society where such people live.