Read the reflections on our 2024-2025 Annual Report from Stephanie Grant, Director of the Cultural Protection Fund.
It feels impossible to reflect on the year without first acknowledging what has been happening in the places we work. There has been so much grief, instability, aggression, violence and loss impacting the people and communities that we are striving to support. This has especially affected our partners and has been at the forefront of all our efforts, actions and conversations in the Cultural Protection Fund team. My deepest and heartfelt sympathies are with everyone who has lost something in these wars. I can but care, and hope and try to support in the way that is available to me and the CPF, through the distribution of this fund to protect vital cultural heritage.
Remarkably, but not surprisingly, we also have many positive things to share from this year. The first signs of impact appeared from our successful pilot programmes in South Asia – where houseboats, recipes and valuable ancient collections are better protected and more prepared for the threats of the future.
In Ileret in Northern Kenya, the site of some 1.5-million-year-old hominin footprints in an area known as the ‘cradle of humankind’ have been protected and revitalised. Most importantly, the site has been handed back to the local government ensuring that the community will have an active say in how it is managed and promoted.
We heard a wonderful story from Mosul, Iraq. Amir Safar, a musical mentor in the Mosul Maqam project, was separated from his santur instructor in 2003 when the war started in Iraq. Amir was reunited with his instructor twenty-one years later whilst working on the CPF project.
In December 2024 we came together in Jordan, with many of our funded projects and partners, working collaboratively with International National Trusts Organisation and Petra National Trust. This gathering enabled people from all over the world to highlight and discuss the challenges and opportunities for heritage protection. It was a dream to be part of that partnership – in a strong, all-women team of curators working tirelessly to create an inclusive platform on which a diverse range of voices were heard. You can read more about this conference in this report.
I travelled from the conference to the West Bank, my first ever visit, to see the incredible work being done by our Palestinian partners. To see how our CPF projects bring communities together through heritage, against the backdrop of check points and separation walls keeping them apart, was equally inspiring and heartbreaking. A couple of months later, the film No Other Land won Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards. The film was co-directed by Palestinian lawyer, journalist and filmmaker, Basel Adra and photojournalist and farmer Hamdan Balal who were both trained in heritage research and documentation as part of the CPF-funded On Our Land led by Coventry University. The film is a documentary of the Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the south of the West Bank, where villages have faced forcible displacement and violence. The young filmmakers faced and continue to face unimaginable risks to tell their story.
What is shared in this annual report is that despite barriers, people strive to protect what is valuable to them. The Cultural Protection Fund exists to protect more than just the past. Cultural heritage is a living thing and part of how we understand and define ourselves. Through protecting it, we make sense of the world as it is now, address global challenges and improve livelihoods for the future.
Continue reading our 'Message from the Director' in our latest annual report.
