With the new academic year, we’re pleased to report on progress with Phase 2 of the North-East Culture Initiative (NECI). We’ve got some new staff members working with us to push forward initiatives on our key themes of:
Language and Education
Music, Song, and Story
Skills and Crafts
Tourism
Research
We have agreements and partnerships in place with key organizations and are working on others, and our new development workers are full of great ideas and energy.
As part of Phase 2, we’re already running some great projects, such as, Home-Hame-Дом-Dom, which aims to create cross-community dialogue in Buchan, and our newly launched partnership with Visit Scotland providing solidly researched local information to attract tourism to the North-East. Both of these projects are funded with European grant monies and built on local partnerships.
Here in the Elphinstone Institute's Archives, we’re working on making our treasure trove of North-East tradition more accessible to the general public.
Our key activities over the next few months include public consultations to find out more about what people would like to see in a centre for North-East culture, and looking to build partnerships with even more local organizations and individuals, so that all of us working in North-East culture are pulling in the same direction and not duplicating each other’s good work.
As Phase 2 continues, we look to build on the successes of Phase 1, begun back in 2016, when we worked with a group of academics from across the University to develop this large-scale initiative, building on the Institute’s 25-year track record of close cultural engagement. We tackled the Language issue in 2016, holding a Doric Language Day in 2016, which drew more than 80 attendees, to discuss the way forward for Doric and North-East Scots. We identified education, the media, government support, and local business and industry, as four key pressure points for campaigning, and the day gave rise to the North-East Scots Language Board, now formally constituted as The Doric Board.
