About the project

We all know that the world is changing faster with every day and it is easy to lose the roots. What yesterday still was ordinary life, today becomes habit, tomorrow will be the past. We want to help to preserve yesterday’s world by making it known and by appreciating those who can introduce it to us.

Who?

Within the European Union Programme for adult learners (Grundtvig action Learning Partnership)six organisations from Poland, Greece, Spain, Estonia, Portugal and Latvia dealing with oral history preservation have initiated the project „Grand- treasures” in 2011.

What is the aim of the Project?

The aim of the Project Grand is to create a partnership of organisations focused on preserving oral history and to promote an intergenerational dialogue in Poland, Greece, Spain, Estonia, Portugal and Latvia. We want to support the process of sharing stories of Treasures with members of our local communities.

GRAND TREASURES – What is it?

We understand Treasures as eye witnesses, people who have lived a significant life story or maintain an antiquated culture or knowledge and are ready to share it with others. They describe the reality, which is already gone or likely to disappear, they describe the past of places, families, professions, traditions. In some of those stories we can discover very important parts of our identity. That is why they may play a crucial role in understanding identity and roots and may be an important part of self awareness for each individual.

Additionally – people carrying those stories are disappearing, they pass away, taking cooking recipes, remembrance of historical events, melodies, dancing figures and different kind of family stories with them. Not sharing them with others. The reason for this is very often that their stories are not valuated by themselves and by their community.

Activities

Within the partnership we want to share good practices of how to identify stories, collect them, preserve and organise them and of how to share them with the wider public. We want to do it through study visits organised within partnership meetings, meetings with experts and eye witnesses = treasures themselves. In the same time by using good practices we will learn from partners in our local communities through local projects. Local projects will be different depending on resources and local circumstances of each partner and experiences we have with the topic. Those will be: festivals, workshops and meetings with eye witnesses, but also publications, storytelling, and living libraries.

What will be the main results?

Main results will be: strong partnership between partner organisations, common grand – archive online to share stories from different cultures, website of the partnership – through which we will share experience of our project and good practices within the topic of preserving oral history and culture with others. Important result of local projects will be also higher awareness and recognition of Treasures and their life stories in communities. It is important to promote intergenerational dialogue on a local level.