The Heritage Management Organization (HERITΛGE) is happy to announce a series of online training workshops for heritage professionals and caretakers for 2024-2025. 

Online Workshop Calendar 2024-2025

Introduction to Heritage Interpretation for Site Managers | 01–03 October 2024 

Master the principles of high-quality heritage interpretation and gain hands-on experience in implementing them at your site/organization in order to create meaningful and unforgettable experiences for visitors. 

Engaging Communities in Cultural Heritage | 11–13 October 2024

Understand the community engagement process,  a key heritage management strategy.  Master the challenges of working with local communities discern between communities and audiences and understand audience segmentation, get introduced to ethnographic approaches to creating collaborative research-based programs, and learn the methods and techniques of oral history to elicit and document tangible and intangible heritage.

Conservation III: Preventive Conservation (pilot)  | 15-17 November 

A pilot workshop only open to heritage managers that have previously completed Conservation II: First Aid for Finds. 

Interpretive Writing for Natural and Cultural Heritage | 25–27 November 2024

Learn how to write text that grabs and holds the reader’s attention. Discover and practice a wide range of techniques to engage visitors and master the techniques of interpretive writing. Participants will work to become a HERITΛGE-accredited Interpretive Writer, after successfully completing, and being assessed on, the exercises and activities.

Project Management for Heritage Managers | 13-15 December 2024

Gain the skills and knowledge to  run a successful project from inception, through the planning and implementation phases to closure. Create a work breakdown structure, a critical path diagram and a Gantt chart. Research potential funders and write a grant application. Improve personal time management skills. Learn to think critically, identify risks and create solutions. 

Organising Temporary Exhibitions from your Collections and Touring Strategies | 14–16 February 2025

The focus of this workshop is to give you the skills to ensure temporary, touring and partnership exhibitions can enhance and promote your institution’s mission, create new audiences and mutually beneficial partnerships. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own exhibition ideas to the workshop for discussion and development.

Communication Strategy and Strategic Marketing for Cultural Organizations | 07-09 March 2025

Join a focused learning experience that provides a systemic approach to successfully attract key audiences’ attention through traditional, new, and social media. Acquire a working guide to effectively communicate news, initiatives, and announcements of your organization and manage communication around a crisis or issue.

Successful Fundraising for Heritage Managers: Strategies and Best Practices | 28-30 March 2025

Start-up and build an organization’s contributed revenue to increase its impact in the world. Participants learn best practices and apply them to create the case for support and letter of inquiry for their own organization or project. Workshop sessions combine live and asynchronous lectures, case studies, class discussions and interactive exercises.

Conservation I: Introduction to the General Principles of Cultural Heritage Conservation | 4-6 April 2025

Learn the fundamentals, the ethics, the evolution, and the contemporary international context of conservation. At the end of the course, participants will be able to understand the potential of conservation, together with the processes which are necessary to maximize it.

Strategic Planning for Heritage Managers  | 9-11 May 2025

Successful strategy can lead to success and this course will provide participants with the tools and methodologies to successfully formulate and implement strategy in organizations managing cultural heritage. Learn the methods and tools of strategic analysis that will enable you devise and evaluate alternative strategic choices and comprehend the demands of a strategy implementation project.

More workshop dates will be announced soon. To apply visit our Executive Leadership Training page. 

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Ethiopian heritage managers completed a HERITΛGE Strategic Planning for Heritage Managers workshop online in late November. The trainees consisted of heads, directors, and experts representing the regional bureaus of Tigray, Somali, Oromia, and Amhara.

The workshop was led by Dr. Alexandros Papalexandris, Assistant Professor at the Athens University of Economics, and is part of the HerMaP Africa which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place Program. This was the second HerMaP Africa workshop to take place in Ethiopia and focused on these specific regions with the primary goal of increasing the capacity of the local Culture and Tourism Bureaus for strategic planning.

During this 3-day training, the participants got acquainted with the notion of strategy and understood why having a strategy is crucial. They had the chance to reflect on the mission and the vision of their bureau and set up strategic goals for the future. They identified different shareholders, and they analyzed the micro and macro environment of their region, using tools such as SWOT and Porter’s analysis. Finally, they learned how to recognize critical success factors in developing and implementing an effective strategy. As a result of the workshop, participants were encouraged to set up a business plan for the Culture and Tourism Bureau of their region, in collaboration with their teams and staff members.

“As Head of the Tigray’s Culture and Tourism Bureau, I found the workshop very helpful and at the same time challenging because it intensively encouraged me to be more critical of what I am trying to develop in my region, especially now, that we are in a post-war, post-crisis period and we are trying to re-operate our office,” said Dr. Atsbha Gebreegziabher, Head of the Tigray Culture and Tourism Bureau.

“The workshop was quite informative and very participatory,” added Selamawit Getachew from the Ethiopian Heritage Authority.

About Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.

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