Firstly, hello! If you’re reading this, it means you’ve found your way onto our shiny new webpage. There’s a little bit more work to do before it’s completely finished, but we hope you agree that it’s looking pretty good so far. But rest assured – just because we’ve got a proper online ‘home’ now doesn’t mean that we won’t be around and about on social media. Far from it. Whether Twitter, Facebook or Instagram are your favourites, we’ve got it covered.
So welcome to our blog! And who are “we” anyway?
“We” are the staff and participants of “Unloved Heritage?” – a programme all about helping young people to connect with heritage, and trying out a whole load of new skills, activities and creative arts along the way. Over the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing from a range of our project staff, our partners and, most importantly, from some of the young people taking part. But for now, let me introduce myself …
I’m Polly, I work for Cadw and I’m really lucky to be leading the Unloved Heritage? programme. It’s not a straightforward project – we have seven small projects (see our web-pages) being run by five different organisations – and I somehow try and keep an eye on them all. I’m also responsible for reporting to the Heritage Lottery Fund, who gave the grant for us to be able to deliver this ambitious project, so it all keeps me busy. Fortunately the five other project officers around Wales are all brilliant – I’ll let them introduce themselves in later posts!
Unloved Heritage? came out of realising two key things:
1 – that young people are the least likely age group to engage with heritage, and
2 – that many people think of heritage as somewhere you visit, maybe a castle or a stately home.
So our programme is aimed at getting young people to think about the heritage that’s on their doorstep, that makes their town or landscape look the way it does. We also needed to make heritage inviting – so we spoke to young people all around Wales and worked with them to put together a programme of activities and events which they thought would be fun and engaging. And so far, so good …
