Our Solution.

Our solution provides capacity-building programs for communities that collect, document, preserve, and share unique cultural heritage before it is lost. The beliefs, values, and behaviors captured in those artifacts and traditions can then be applied to build resilience in the face of climate change.

Technical capacity–including staffing, training, and infrastructure–currently inhibits the stewardship of cultural resources within Africa. Re:Mind is designed to address this gap in Africa and other regions of the world where the climate crisis threatens culture. The project will not only impact cultural heritage preservation, it will profoundly affect populations vulnerable to climate-related disasters by focusing on capacity building in those areas. By empowering communities to shape how their own heritage is captured, described, shared, and maintained, their knowledge and experiences can be preserved even while the environments surrounding them change beyond recognition.

This project aims to serve:

• Regions immediately vulnerable to climate-related disasters;
• Local communities taking ownership of their cultural heritage; and
• Stakeholders interested in promoting cultural understanding and collaboration.

Benefits and outcomes include:

• Preservation: A significant increase in the amounts of preserved cultural heritage within at least 200 communities, with a particular emphasis on communities facing climate threats.
• Capacity building and training: Community-led preservation initiatives will receive technical and practical support through training programs, ensuring they have the skills and equipment needed to preserve and share their cultural knowledge effectively.
• Global understanding and collaboration: by promoting the dissemination of endangered cultural heritage through fellowships, exchange programs, and symposia, the project will cultivate a worldwide network well-positioned to collaborate on cultural preservation as well as community and climate resilience efforts.

To ensure progress is being made, we will track:

• The number of community-led preservation initiatives established and supported;
• The increase in the number of preserved cultural heritage items documenting climate-threatened populations;
• Feedback from stakeholders on the effectiveness and impact of the project’s training program;
• The perspectives of participants and stakeholders on the project’s longer-term impacts.

To ensure sustainability, Re:Mind will develop a scaling-up plan to support a minimum of 100 additional community-led preservation initiatives across the globe over the decade following its implementation. This expansion will entail establishing additional strategic partnerships with governments, universities, national libraries, funding agencies, and community-based organizations.

By monitoring the above indicators and by consistently collecting and addressing feedback, we will assess the progress made through Re:Mind over the initial five-year period and make adjustments as needed, ensuring that community needs are being met and the solution is adaptable to new climate-threatened populations.

Meeting each community “where they are” enables us to address their specific needs, hear questions before they become issues, and successfully adapt and gauge progress. This links to positive outcomes through tracking audiences and narratives that emerge from the knowledge platform.

Technical Processes

Our scalable digital preservation frameworks and training modules are designed to safeguard and provide long-term access to cultural heritage content. Our approach employs modular service-oriented architectures to ensure scalability, flexibility, and collaborative maintenance. The framework comprises five primary components: Hosting, Metadata Management, Digital Object Store, and Digital Preservation Services.

• Hosting: Assists organizations in sharing new digital collections
• Metadata Management: Utilizes Apache Solr and Airflow for metadata harvesting, extraction, and transformation
• Digital Object Store: Employs S3-compatible services and local storage/replication for scalable, cloud-based object stores Preservation Services: Implements OAIS reference model and LOCKSS principals for ingest, validation, and replication

Our approach also incorporates distributed LMS components to deliver online courses to multiple audiences in multiple languages.

Indigenous data sovereignty is a critical component in the design and implementation of this work. Our approach prioritizes community-led decision making, data ownership, and control, ensuring communities have agency over their cultural heritage and intellectual property. This is balanced with adopting appropriate international standards, including data capture, semantic interoperability, preservation interoperability, legal interoperability, computational interoperability, and data reuse and sustainability. This approach ensures efficient management and long-term accessibility of large-scale cultural heritage collections while adhering to FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).