Preserving Endangered Culture

Our aim is to ensure knowledge of the world’s cultural diversity is not lost. Our grants support the documentation of endangered cultural heritage, ensuring it is available to future generations.

We recognize that change is part of the historical processes that shape our cultures, and that true loss of heritage occurs only if we miss the opportunity to record it. Much of the world’s cultural and historical heritage remains poorly known, receives little protection, and is at risk of erasure, leaving our perception of history and culture impoverished and distorted.

Our grants support digital documentation of unique written materials, artefacts, sites, practices and languages which are poorly recorded and under imminent threat. We primarily fund documentation outside Europe and North America, where the need is greatest and resources are most limited. Our projects create partnerships with local organizations and institutions able to secure long term preservation and free access to the records.

Archives and manuscripts

Our grants help digitize at-risk collections. These can include anything written, from ancient religious texts to official state documents, as well as photographs, audio and video recordings, and even born-digital material. Since 2002 we have supported initiatives that together have digitized and published online more than 15 million pages of materials that would not have been available otherwise.

Intangible culture

We support documentation of endangered languages and cultural practices. Our long-standing programme to record at-risk languages has so far documented more than 550 languages around the world. We also help to digitally record endangered traditional practices, knowledge and skills.

Heritage sites

We help to document archaeological sites and buildings. We currently support projects that document heritage sites in Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Northern India, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, China and Nepal. The documentation varies from records based on satellite imagery, to extensive on-the-ground documentation and 3D scans of buildings and the objects they contain.

Priorities

We have updated our grantmaking priorities to reflect technological developments in documentation and digitization. Read more about our priorities here.

Regranting programmes

We have five cultural regranting programmes, hosted by partner organizations. Our regranting programmes support a range of small-scale projects, often developed locally by communities. Read more here.