Tamara took park in a one-week curatorial research micro-internship in June 2022, hosted by the University of Oxford National Trust Partnership team and co-supervised by Secretary-General of the International National Trusts Organisation (INTO), Catherine Leonard.
In June, I completed an internship exploring how INTO’s member organisations have been responding to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. As an international student at Oxford keen to better understand the heritage sector, I found this project particularly fascinating.
The aim of the project was to complete a database listing the recent projects that INTO’s member organisations have been working on which are focusing on at least one of the SDGs. INTO had last compiled a document about their members and the SDGs in 2018, thus I focused on projects that ran between 2018 and 2022.
I soon met Catherine Leonard, Secretary-General at INTO, who set out the database and the type of information they were looking for. With her advice, I decided to compile both a database, with the aim of offering INTO a general overview of how their members had been responding to the SDGs, and four case studies, in order to better describe how these types of projects were carried out.
The database covered 50 projects by organisations in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, thus including a wide range of INTO’s members. To compile this, I based my research on the websites of each INTO member organisation, looking for projects tackling any of the SDGs. As my analysis of the database later pointed out, the most popular SDGs among the organisations were no. 13 (Climate Change) and no. 4 (Quality Education).
The case studies I conducted focused on four specific member organisations to describe how each of their projects had been contributing to the SDGs in depth. As an international student from Italy and Germany, two of the ones I chose were the Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano (FAI) and Kulturerbe Bayern. The other two organisations are the West Africa Shared Cultural Heritage Trust and the National Trust of Zimbabwe, which I selected for the broad range of SDGs covered by their numerous projects. To gain more information about these projects, I interviewed a member of staff of each organisation: Alessandra Varisco (Manager of International Fundraising and Development, FAI), Bernhard Seidl (Deputy Managing Director, Kulturerbe Bayern), Ṣọlá Akíntúndé (Founder Trustee, WASCHT) and Sharon Waterworth (Vice Chair, NTZ). I would like to thank all of them for taking the time to respond to my questions and offer feedback on my research throughout the internship.
Completing this internship was an eye-opening experience into the systems and operations behind Global Heritage Policy and the wider heritage sector in general, and overall an exciting opportunity I am glad to have had.
Tamara Di Marco is a third-year undergraduate student in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Christ Church, Oxford.
Find out more about the National Trust Partnership here.
Find out more about the TORCH Heritage Programme here.
