On 28 May 2025, the online conference “Localising the Sustainable Development Goals through Museums and Libraries III” will be held online, organised by the Latvian Museum Association, the Latvian Librarians’ Association and the Latvian National Commission for UNESCO, with the support of UNESCO Participation Programme and the Lviv Culture Hub in Ukraine.
The aim of the conference is to strengthen the role of museums and libraries in fostering peaceful, resilient, and sustainable communities, by sharing experiences, strategies, and tools for localizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — especially those related to peace, justice, education, community resilience and heritage.
The programme features keynote addresses and presentations from international experts, including Linda Norris (Founder, Creative Futures), Peggy Nzomo (International Library Initiatives Specialist- Senior Associate at the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs, University of Illinois), and Ihor Poshyvailo (General Director, National Museum of Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Museum), Co-Founder of Agency for Cultural Resilience).
The conference will focus on three major themes:
- peacebuilding through cultural heritage and education,
- the role of museums and libraries in community resilience,
- peacebuilding through heritage before, during and after conflict.
Museum and library professionals from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine will share concrete examples of how memory institutions act as agents of positive social change even in the face of war and occupation.
The conference will be moderated by Diana Walters, museum and heritage consultant specialising in peacebuilding, and Henry McGhie, consultant at Curating Tomorrow, committed to understanding and unlocking the potential of collection-based institutions to contribute to sustainable development. They will also be lecturers and mentors in the second phase of the project that foresees online training sessions and implementation of joint peacebuilding initiatives by museums and libraries of the partnership countries.
The conference will be streamed on the Facebook pages of the Latvian Museum Association and the Lviv Culture Hub: https://www.facebook.com/muzeji ; https://www.facebook.com/LCH.Hello. The conference will be held in English.
Context: In 2020, the museum and library specialists of the Baltic States started a cooperation to spotlight and strengthen the unique role of museums and libraries in the implementation of the SDGs. In 2021, with the support of UNESCO Participation Programme, an online conference “Localising the Sustainable Development Goals through Museums and Libraries” was held with the motto: “Ask Your Library!” “Ask Your Museum!” (positioning museums and libraries as reliable and accessible experts of sustainable development). In 2022, Moldova and Georgia joined the partnership and several experience exchange meetings in the partnership countries took place, culminating with the conference “Localising the Sustainable Development Goals through Museums and Libraries II” in Riga and online in 2023. It was during the Riga meeting that the project partners decided to invite Ukraine to join the partnership and to dedicate the next conference in the series to Peace as the key principle of the Agenda 2030 and the key challenge of the region represented in the project.
The project “Fostering peaceful and resilient communities through museums and libraries” is implemented with the financial support of the UNESCO Participation Programme 2024-2025. The conference will be co-organized by the Lviv Culture Hub (Ukraine), created at the initiative of UNESCO and the Lviv City Council, with the support of AECID.
Contact information:
Inga Surgunte
Latvian Museum Association
inga.surgunte@skaidrs.org
+371 29953235