What does sustainability mean for a museum, memorial or organisation working with remembrance? And how can the sector become more sustainable without losing sight of its main purpose: preserving and sharing the stories, places and memories that matter?
These were some of the questions at the centre of the Preserving the Past, Securing the Future Closing Conference, held on 8 September at the European Committee of the Regions in Brussels. After two years of research, training, study visits, peer learning and mentoring, the conference reflected on the results and impact of the PPSF project and considered what comes next.
The event brought together heritage and remembrance professionals, tourism stakeholders, policymakers and sustainability experts to see what had been learned through the project and, importantly, discuss how this can be put into practice.
From research to practical experience
The morning opened with a welcome from the LRE Foundation and the Normandy Region, followed by a keynote from international development specialist Dr Michael Haynes.
The presentations then focused on the work carried out during the project. Partners and participants from the LRE Foundation, mascontour, Juno Beach Centre, Fondazione Campus and the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk shared their main findings, results and experiences from the project.
Rather than approaching sustainability as a set of abstract principles, the project worked with organisations to understand where their starting points the support actually needed. This reality shaped the capacity building and knowledge exchange activities within the project, giving participants the opportunity to explore sustainability practices relevant to their own organisations and contexts.
The experiences gathered throughout this process are brought together in the project’s Sustainable Tourism Practices Handbook, which was also presented during the conference. The handbook includes research findings, case studies, practical tools and recommendations for museums, memorials and organisations working in the remembrance and cultural heritage sector. It will be available online from October.
Connecting practice and policy to foster sustainability
After the coffee break, the discussion moved on to connect the project initiatives with the wider sector. The panel “From Practice to Policy – Lessons Learned & the Path Forward”, was moderated by Matthias Beyer, Managing Director of mascontour, and brought together An Lavens, Director of BELvue Museum and Head of Programme Democracy at the King Baudouin Foundation; Bruno Castro, Policy Officer for Tourism at D.G. MOVE, European Commission; Mike Haynes; and Nathalie Worthington, Director of the Juno Beach Centre.
The conversation explored both the opportunities and difficulties involved in implementing sustainable practices. A key question was how experiences from individual organisations and pilot activities can be translated into approaches that work across different contexts, and how practical experience from the heritage sector can feed into future policy.
This also highlighted one of the strengths of PPSF: bringing people working in different countries and different parts of the sector around the same table. Sustainability challenges are not identical everywhere, but exchanging experiences can make it easier to identify solutions to be adapted and tested elsewhere.
The day concluded at the House of European History, where Anna Troëng, Press Officer and Sustainability Coordinator, presented the museum’s approach to sustainability and its policies. Participants then had the opportunity to explore both the permanent exhibition and the temporary exhibition Postcolonial?, which offered a final reminder of the importance of looking at history through perspectives and experiences that have historically been marginalised.
Looking at the bigger picture
The discussions in Brussels brought the connection between sustainability and remembrance into focus. For organisations working with cultural and remembrance heritage, sustainability is about thinking long-term: how can places, stories, collections and memories continue to be cared for and shared, while ensuring that the organisations behind them remain resilient and accessible to future generations?
For the LRE Foundation, this is also where the next chapter begins. The project has created new connections across the sector and offers practical approaches that can continue to be developed in the coming months and years.
Video recordings of the conference are available here: Resources – Preserving the Past Securing the Future