For Them and By Them: Involving Stakeholders and Communities in Interpretation

Last week, the Heritage Lottery Fund approved a grant for a project I’m planning that involves young people in the heritage of my site, and its interpretation.  I am hugely excited about this.  For one thing, the project is all about interpretation as facilitation, as I explained in a recent post [1].  The other aspect of the project is that the participants will also create a piece of interpretation of their choice.

This is something I’ve always advocated: that as interpreters, we must involve stakeholders and communities.  This goes far beyond simply asking the (local) community for their stories, an approach for which Bella Dicks criticised interpreters.  To involve stakeholders and communities is to acknowledge that heritage is heritage because of the value that they give it.  It is about ensuring that the heritage we seek to interpret and manage (or protect) is not treated as separate from the daily lives of people but instead continues to make a beneficial contribution to our society, nationally and internationally.  In fact, when I wrote my application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for this latest project, this was one of the areas they specifically asked about: what contribution will this project make? What are the benefits it will bring? What is the heritage in this case, and how to will this project enable people to participate in it, and share it?  Who are the people, the stakeholders?

These concepts, ‘stakeholders’ and ‘communities’, and also the ‘benefits’ that heritage and its interpretation are meant to bring to both, by now are central to British (and EU/UNESCO) heritage legislation.  However, I feel that interpretation discourse still needs to go some distance before it catches up with these developments.  For a start, we need to really engage critically with some of these key terms – stakeholder, heritage, community – and reflect on what impact our understanding of them has on our practice.  We also need to gather more hard data on what we do, and how well (or not) we do.  As funders and policy makers increasingly define what they expect of heritage and its interpretation with regard to stakeholders, communities, and people, we need to be able to speak their language, and provide evidence for the impact our practice has – especially in terms of benefits.  And consideration of benefits brings us right back to stakeholders, communities, people.

I can’t wait to start this project at my site.  I’ve done a lot of stakeholder and community-driven and considered interpretation before, but this offers a real chance to try out stakeholder involvement in its purest sense.   And in fact, I feel so strongly about this, that I contacted the UK Association for Heritage Interpretation to see if they would support a conference on this topic.  They said yes, so I am currently organising the conference at my site.  After all, benefits to people, especially pride and self-confidence, are at the heart of the vision for my site. I’ve had many interesting conversations about this topic with fellow interpreters, but also with fellow researchers, heritage managers, funders and policy makers.  What this conference aims to do is bring the above together to examine current practice and share insights into the benefits of involving stakeholders and communities in interpretation.

If you feel that you can contribute to the conference, please see the call for papers.  The deadline for submission is 1^st May 2012.  Registration for the conference will open on 15^th May 2012.  Watch this space for further info.

Notes

[1] By ‘facilitation’ I always mean ‘facilitate the performance of/participation in heritage’.