LIVING HERITAGE

Living Heritage was a grant making and capacity development program aimed at enabling local community development in Southern Europe through the promotion of sustainable culture and heritage initiatives. In Romania, the Living Heritage program was implemented by the Environmental Partnership Foundation (Miercurea-Ciuc) and the Romanian Carpathian Foundation in partnership with the King Baudouin Foundation from Belgium.

The program's aim was the long-term support of local development through community involvement in the identification, conservation and sustainable use of heritage related resources.

The program awarded grants for pilot projects and at the same time encouraged capacity building through trainings and technical assistance for the existing and potential beneficiaries of the grant.

The Living Heritage program helped communities to see traditions and local values not only as heritage of the past but also, more importantly, as a resource for their future development and a factor of change. Communities were encouraged to define on their own the local values they wanted to keep alive.

The program awarded grants to 40 projects with a total value of more than 993,000 RON.

The palette of the successful projects funded by the program was very colorful. Thus the famous Rope Street of Brasov was renovated, the very first mineral water museum of Romania was built in Tuşnad, Dumbrăvioara - a village in Mureş county - was proclaimed the "Village of Storks", and the list could go on and on.