HERS – Inclusive approaches to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage

The project aims to:

• Empower Migrant Women: Recognize and celebrate their cultural heritage to foster a strong sense of belonging and identity, ultimately supporting their mental health and overall well-being.
• Build Capacity: Enhance the skills of migrant women to facilitate their social and financial integration into their communities.
• Document Stories: Create a digital platform to preserve and safeguard the intangible cultural heritage practices brought by migrant women, serving as a repository for their stories, traditions, and knowledge.
• Ensure Accessibility: Make the documented stories available to future generations and the wider public, promoting a greater understanding of diverse cultural practices.
• Celebrate Traditions: Organize storytelling festivals to honor the traditions of migrant women, fostering cultural diversity, social participation, and integration within their host communities, thereby enriching the multicultural fabric of society.
• Raise Awareness: Highlight the vital roles that women play within their communities and society at large, informing culturally sensitive development initiatives.

The project will engage in the following activities:

• Participatory Workshops: Conduct workshops aimed at raising awareness about the significance of intangible cultural heritage.
• Data Collection: Implement a participatory approach to gather data related to cultural practices and stories.
• Webinar on Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: Organize a webinar focused on strategies for preserving intangible cultural heritage.
• Mentoring Schemes: Establish mentoring programs that connect migrant women with artists to enhance their skills and creative expression.
• Online Training: Provide online training sessions on storytelling mediums and documentation tools to empower participants in sharing their narratives.
• Design of Documentation Framework: Develop a comprehensive framework for documenting stories, ensuring a structured approach to preserving cultural narratives.
• Finalization and Documentation of Stories: Work on the finalization and detailed documentation of the collected stories.
• Creation of a Digital Storytelling Platform: Build an online platform dedicated to showcasing and preserving the stories and cultural practices of migrant women.
• Storytelling Festivals: Organize storytelling festivals in Larnaca, Palermo, and Athens to celebrate and share the traditions of migrant women with broader audiences.

The project will yield the following results:

• Needs analysis & baseline report on participants’ backgrounds, current status, needs, expectations.
• Capacity building roadmap on safeguarding cultural heritage. 
• Impact report on the projects’ impact on participants.
• Stories Documentation Framework.
• Digital Storytelling Platform.
• Storytelling Festivals.