The collection? What is it?

It is a door leading to an exchange for the benefit of present and future generation

To celebrate Hostelling Internationa' s 100th anniversary, the Secretariat has received a grant to achieve three objectives:

• accumulate and upload a collection of works by travelers who have visited a UNESCO recognized World Heritage Site ;
• take stock of hostels near World Heritage sites and;
• propose to travelers packages allowing them to combine the visit of a World Heritage site with notions of protection and promotion within an educative program, a natural extension of hostelling's mission to provide access to travel and education.

The collection will allow travelers who visited World Heritage sites to freely share, through a website designed for this purpose, creations related to heritage sites in order to pass them on to all inhabitants of the world and to future generations.The website offers travelers to contribute to the collection, create a virtual community, increase interest in the discovery of world heritage and promote hostel stays in order to develop international tourism based on World Heritage sites.

In the longer term, the goal will be to create a community, both real and virtual, organized around a network that will include travelers as well as approximately 1,200 youth hostels located close to some 878 UNESCO recognized world heritage site.

For travelers, this translates into shared experience and values of respect among peoples, protection of environment and heritage, peace and understanding, which can launch a reflexion about the universal heritage to be preserved and may give rise to a genuine dialogue between cultures.

Making contact with a heritage site should not be reduced only to the visit of a site built long ago and somehow protected by its surrounding community, but should become an experience both for those who visit and for those with whom this experience is shared.

That which has been passed onto us by previous generations will reach its full value provided we, in turn, pass it on to future generations with today's tools, (scanned drawing, photos from a cell phone, poems that may have been inspired by legends heard from local residents, etc..) uploaded on internet with various sensitivities from across the world yet having a common point, the rich legacy of UNESCO recognized heritage sites.

In an analysis prepared by Maïthé Levasseur entitled: Explanations and Reflections on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO, the author mentions that to be protected, living heritage must meet certain criteria such as:

• Being passed down from generation to generation;
• Being constantly recreated by communities and groups, depending on their environment, their interaction with nature and their history;
• Providing communities and groups with a sense of identity and continuity;
• Promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity;
• Complying with international instruments on human rights;
• Meeting the requirements of mutual respect between communities and of sustainable development.

She mentions, furthermore, that a living heritage is manifested, among others, in the following areas:

• The oral traditions and expressions (myths, songs, games, etc..);
• The arts;
• Social practices, rituals and festive events;
• The knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;
• The know-how linked to traditional crafts.