Our Mission
Our mission is to promote access to tangible and intangible heritage in Barbados and the Caribbean by connecting people, resources, and institutions through educational and cultural initiatives. We are a non-profit organization that specializes in facilitating synergies and collaborations around diverse projects by bringing together cultural heritage institutions, grant-making agencies and people.
HeritEdge was established in February 2018.
What We Do: HeritEdge for All
We help cultural heritage institutions, grant-making agencies and people come together around projects that would not otherwise be possible. We specialize in seeking grants, developing proposals, and managing projects in the cultural heritage sector.
Most cultural heritage organizations (1) have many projects but limited resources (funds, time, or staff) as well as the knowledge and experience to dedicate for this purpose. On the other hand, many grant-making agencies (2) have available funds and want to channel them to accountable organizations and projects that will make a difference. Furthermore, there are high school and university students, retirees, and cultural enthusiasts (3) that have time and skills to offer and would directly benefit from initiatives that reinforce local capacity building.
1) We help institutions
- Seek local and international grants to fund their projects
- Develop winning proposals for these projects
- Assess their collections in innovative ways that will be attractive to grant-making agencies
- Select people to create efficient teams in order to execute the projects
- Manage awarded grants and complete projects in an accountable and timely manner
- Reach new, diverse audiences through innovative public history projects
2) We work with grant-making agencies
- By offering projects that fit their vision, guidelines and expectations.
- By ensuring that their funds have been put in good use and are accounted for
- By managing the projects in a timely manner
3) We mobilize people
- Professionals: Find projects that utilize their expertise to the best
- Students: Earn course credit; do internships (paid and unpaid); gain knowledge, work experience and transferable skills
- Volunteers: Contribute their enthusiasm and passion into actual cultural heritage work that matters
How We Do It
We start by listening to you. We identify needs: needs of an institution, needs of a collection, needs of a group of people. We work together with you to understand what will work best.
We work with three “pools”:
1) Pool of projects:
- Existing projects: Projects that an organization has already planned
- “Project bank”: Projects that an organization might not have noticed. We help organizations see the potential of their collections
2) Pool of grant-making agencies:
- We identify potential funding agencies by matching projects with available grants.
3) Pool of people:
- Our staff: we help guide, manage, and execute a project
- Professionals: we identify other potential experts to collaborate with
- Students: we are particularly keen to develop local capacity. We break projects down to specific chunks of work and turn them into tailored internships for high school, undergraduate or Master’s students who want to gain experience, by practicing transferable 21st century skills. We guide students at every step of the way: we clarify targets at the beginning of the internship; we review their performance regularly, and provide them with feedback. Students not only get to do an internship, but gain project management experience and will feel they contributed to the success of a project.
- Volunteers: We break down projects in chunks and are particularly keen to engage volunteers and enthusiasts who would like to devote their energy to cultural heritage work.
