Saadet Güner / Jale VELIBEYOGLU
(Friends of Cultural Heritage (FOCUH) Association, Istanbul, Turkey)
It is impossible for societies to protect their cultural diversities, tangible, intangible and oral cultural heritage without an appropriate protective environment for them, The conservation of cultural heritage is “the real and primary investment” of sustainable development of the countries. Cultural heritage are the heritage of the nations, humanity and the next generation. Hence cultural heritage should be conserved to address these concerns.
After the World War II, many inter governmental institutions were founded in the World to determine the strategies and policies to conserve the cultural heritage all over the World. The international organized civil society getting together in a Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to work on the protection of the cultural heritage is considered as one of the important partners for the definition and implementation of these strategies and policies. They take also an important role to define and to raise public and political awareness for the protection of the cultural heritage. In parallel with the foundation of the international NGOs, national organized civil society gathered under different NGOs umbrella to protect cultural properties. National NGOs are deemed as the important social structuring to reach the national and international funds allocated for the protection of the cultural heritage. EU and World Bank Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP) Funds are allocated to them as the samples to these international funds.
In the first part of the paper, it is talked about briefly the intergovernmental organizations and international NGOs. In the second part of the paper is given some information on national NGOs in Turkey that they utilize international funds to organize the projects for the protection of the cultural heritage in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
Purpose: The main purpose of this work is to incite the society to get together in a Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to utilize the international funds in order to protect the cultural heritage.
Methodology/Approach: It is planned to reach the objective by raising public awareness through different communication tools to utilize international funds in order to protect the cultural heritage. The audiovisual presentation in this Congress is considered as one of important communication tools.
Results: The increase numbers of national NGOs and utilization the international funds by the NGOs to protect cultural heritage is the results expected from this work.
Keywords: cultural heritage, Turkey, EU grants, World Bank Grants