The first actions of the REACH project were to establish its online presence and build its network of Associate partners, and use this foundation to discover the results of prior projects for evaluation, and from them identify themes, strong practices, transferable elements or noticeable gaps. Ultimately, 128 cases of good practice were evaluated, providing, a comprehensive list of participatory and resilient CH practices.
Having considered the work of these projects, the findings informed the development of a conceptual framework, and together with content from the REACH conference in Budapest, a series of participatory models were developed, to be tested by four participatory pilots (Minority, Institutional, Rural and Small towns' heritage). In parallel, workshops that addressed the underpinning themes of management, (re-)use and preservation of CH, as well as resilient CH, were held to gather perspectives from a broad range of stakeholders, with their results also used to refine the project’s participatory models.
Throughout the project, good practice cases continued to be assessed, some of which were refined to become best practice case studies. Evaluation of activity took place to identify evidence of resilience in CH, comparing theory and practice, and ultimately making a series of recommendations. Given the project’s remit to develop and test participatory models, further evaluation took place that compared the pilots, and ultimately identified a number of common CH related participatory themes, once more outlining a series of recommendation for use by other interested parties.
Throughout the project, details of the all strands of its work were shared via the REACH website, reach-culture.eu its blog and through multiple social media channels, ensuring that findings and results were disseminated to the network that had continually grown. The open-heritage.eu website was also populated during this time to include a series of resources, tools and policy papers, as well as REACH good practice cases, to provide a base for CH sector-wide collaboration.
In addition to open-heritage.eu the project team took its requirements as a social platform seriously. With the remit to bring together relevant heritage stakeholders’ representatives from research communities, SMEs, heritage practitioners of all kinds, as well as policy-makers, to participate in a symposium in Brussels and collective video call; the main objective being to establish a coordination structure that would strengthen the voice of the CH community and provide a place to share result and best practices and maintain the work and impact of projects after they have ended.
