As part of the strategic plan for 2021-2025, we have reviewed IE’s mission statement and developed a new one to help us focus as we move forward.
IE’s Supervisory Committee and Management have been working towards the new five-year strategy for Interpret Europe. Some of you even took part in a couple of workshops, one of them being the mission statement workshop on 27 March, and we greatly valued your input.
The revised mission statement is the first ‘tangible’ result we are pleased to now share with you.
It reads:
Empowering all who inspire meaningful connections with Europe’s natural and cultural heritage to shape our common future
Compared with the previous one, it is a bit more future-oriented and it stresses the positive effects of heritage interpretation on European society.
The brief explanations below help to qualify the intended meaning behind each of the terms in the statement.
Empowering: IE enables the interpretive profession by giving them the tools to make the most effective use of interpretation.
Inspire: Emphasises the positive influence of interpreters to move, guide and make people feel something – the ‘magical’ side, or alchemy, of the profession.
Meaningful connections: Connections between people and heritage that they can (re)discover, relate to and which really matter to them.
Natural and cultural heritage: Natural or cultural? There may still be two schools of thought, our focus is on advancing both types of heritage in unison.
Our common future: Rooted in sustainability, this term originates from the Brundtland Report. Given recent trends, its relevance is undimmed. It highlights a collective benefit and provides IE with a springboard to emphasise, when relevant, that our actions contribute to our common future in terms of sustainability, tolerance, inclusiveness, active citizenship and so on.
Europe: While IE is an international organisation, fostering the European project is also part of IE’s purpose.
We hope you feel comfortable to continue sailing under this flag together, while we’ll continue working on our strategic plan in the upcoming months and update you on that next time.
To cite this article: Supervisory Committee (2021) ‘IE’s new mission’ in Interpret Europe Newsletter 2-2021, 5.
Available online: https://interpret-europe.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Newsletter-Summer-2021.pdf
