Nieuwe Instituut Receives Faro Grant for National Curriculum for Heritage Futures
Nieuwe Instituut has been awarded a grant from the Cultural Heritage Agency’s Faro Implementation Agenda to develop a three-year national curriculum for heritage futures. Thanks to this funding, the institute can collaborate with a diverse network of heritage partners in the Netherlands and the ABC and SSS islands of the Dutch Caribbean to deliver an extensive, hands-on workshop and training programme addressing urgent issues in contemporary heritage and archiving.
17 May 2026
Why was this grant requested?
Archive and heritage institutions are increasingly confronted with fundamental questions. Who is represented in archives? Who determines what is preserved? How do ownership, control and care relate to the communities for which the heritage is meaningful? In short, if heritage belongs to society, how can society get involved? How can heritage institutions broaden their traditional role as ‘gatekeepers’?
Nieuwe Instituut applied for funding for a national programme to support heritage professionals, donors and creators in developing more equitable, transparent and participatory archival practices.
From research to practice
The curriculum draws on more than five years of research, experimentation and collaboration on projects such as Collecting Otherwise, Disclosing Architecture, Memory of the Designed Landscape and the The Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD). Through these projects, the Nieuwe Instituut has developed practical methods and tools in close collaboration with communities, heritage institutions, designers, and educational organisations.
A key outcome of this collaborative work is the translation of theoretical knowledge into accessible toolkits and manuals, based on recognisable case studies and relatable questions from practice. They include the How to Archive Better series by NADD and the Collecting Otherwise manuals. These publications invite readers to start archiving and/or to approach archives differently, paying attention to restoration, diverse perspectives, justice and underrepresented voices.
National workshop series and train-the-trainer programme
With support from Faro, these tools and knowledge are now being shared and scaled up nationally through a series of hands-on archive workshops. Taking place in all regions of the Netherlands, including the ABC and SSS islands, the workshops will be led by partner organisations, Nieuwe Instituut and a new generation of regional workshop trainers.
The workshop series is aimed at heritage professionals, makers and community archives, regardless of their level of experience. The practical and interactive sessions encourage collaborative learning and experimentation, and enable participants to apply the toolkits to real-life situations in their everyday practice.
The workshop themes are:
- Donors and heritage institutions: Archival Care Rider
- Makers and personal archives: How to Archive Better
- Networked archiving: Do’s and Don’ts
- Collections, colonial narratives and multivocality
- (Re)evaluating collection standards: Curating Decay
- Archiving digital art and culture
A train-the-trainer programme has been incorporated into the curriculum and will run alongside the workshop series. In the first year, heritage professionals will undergo intensive training to enable them to lead workshops within their own networks and communities. This will create a sustainable, decentralised network of trainers that will help to structurally embed democratic archival practices in the Dutch heritage sector.
The content of the workshops and the train-the-trainer programme will be developed over the course of this year. The workshops will take place in 2027 and 2028.
Collaboration within a broad network
The curriculum is being developed and implemented in collaboration with a wide range of partners, including archives, museums, universities, academies, independent heritage organisations and knowledge holders. The organisations involved include: Sound & Vision; the National Library of Aruba; the Aruba National Archives; the TextielMuseum; the Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland; the University of Amsterdam; the Reinwardt Academy; Counter/Narratives; the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art; Harriet Morley; Prospektor; the Geschiedenislab; LI MA; the Stichting Monumentum; and NADD’s Archive Doctors.
Heritage participation in accordance with the Faro Convention
This initiative has been made possible in part by a financial contribution from the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency’s Faro Implementation Agenda. The scheme encourages the heritage sector to align heritage care more closely with the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention, which puts people and their relationship with heritage at the heart of its approach.