The Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage, the European Heritage Strategy for the 21st Century, the Faro Convention and Towards an Integrated Approach to Cultural Heritage for Europe agree that cultural heritage is intrinsically related to personal wellbeing and human identity and a rich but underrated and under-resourced social and economic good.The CHARTER project will create a lasting, comprehensive sectoral skills strategy to ensure Europe has the necessary cultural heritage skills to support sustainable societies and economies. The project will use strategic collaboration and innovative methodologies to bridge the gaps between educational and occupational systems and employer needs, to reduce skills shortages, gaps and mismatches, and overcome the paucity of cultural heritage statistical data. The project’s 21 full members -plus its 7 affiliate partners- from 14 EU states are leading academic/training, employer and policy stakeholders in the European cultural heritage sector.The project will collect strategic data on the five knowledge areas of the call to identify core and transversal competences, including digital, technological and green adaptation skills. It will research existing programmes, identify gaps and propose capacity-building models and mechanisms for formal education and training (using the EQF and EQAVET frameworks), non-formal and informal learning, and professional mobility. It will carry out regional pilots to test and validate these approaches. It will analyse sectoral dynamics and map stakeholders. It will propose occupational task descriptors for occupational and economic frameworks.CHARTER will build a durable cultural heritage skills alliance in Europe by mainstreaming the project’s methodologies, outputs and outcomes, maximising their impact and creating multiplier effects at the European, national and regional levels, to enable Europe to sustainably protect, promote and enhance its tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

ECHOES aims to create the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) as a shared platform for heritage professionals and researchers to access data, innovative scientific and training resources and advanced digital tools co-developed by the heritage community according to their specific needs. ECHOES will bring together fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage (CH) field, which consists of various actors from different sectors and disciplines, into a new community around the Digital Commons. Going beyond the strict focus on assets and the mere digitisation of Heritage, ECHOES intends to generate a visionary paradigm shift in the CH field. Adopting a holistic approach, ECHOES will also enable digitising the existing knowledge of Heritage objects, whether tangible or intangible. It will create a digital environment enabling collaborative analysis of CH assets, facts, and phenomena. In this environment, actors – humans or Artificial Intelligence – can develop their interpretations, thereby enriching the knowledge of CH and their surroundings. The digital environment proposed by ECHOES will empower users to interact with, manipulate and enrich Digital Twins, leading to new, jointly developed scientific knowledge. The ECCCH built by ECHOES is anchored in the principles of Open Access and Open Science. It thus promotes inclusion and democratises access to knowledge and digital assets, which are understood as public goods by and for all. This digital environment will allow the creation of a new generation of heritage objects, the Digital Commons, which are semantically rich and collectively produced – we see this as “the heritage of tomorrow”. At the end of the project, ECHOES will deliver a single platform to integrate results of EU and national projects on CH. The ECCCH will be sustainable thanks to its inclusive legal entity, which will be created before the end of ECHOES.