Museums: opening roads into the community
To foster, research, safeguard, raise awareness on, and acknowledge the artistic, natural and technological heritage of national museums, and promote cultural exchanges with the community.
In accordance with cultural goals set by the Venezuelan state, involvement of social actors was encouraged within popular sectors and communities to foster a sense of identity and territoriality in them. Following these humanist and social principles, several projects were implemented within educational and community bodies to move forward in the area of communal transformation. Given this context, the development of cultural cooperation agreements and training activities served to promote the transformation of service-oriented social groups committed to achieving social change and activating new processes within the cultural economy, such as cultural services and goods, socio-productive training, and public management of cultural spaces, from a museum perspective, as a tool to shape up an identity and promote available natural, cultural, and material resources. The implementation of this cooperation agreement with the communities was carried out following three thematic lines, which were used by museums and cultural institutions belonging to the National System of Museums to showcase their projects:
- The museum as a place for engagement, inclusion and the appropriation of one’s culture and heritage;
- The fostering of creative thinking and spaces for shared discourse; and
- Socio-productive training and development
Between 2013 and 2016, an average of 3,500 educational and museum-related events took place across the country, covering a wide range of subjects, such as art, photography, architecture, science, collective knowledge, and traditions. In addition to this, 15 interagency cooperation agreements were signed among national and local government entities and organized groups within the population to manage community museums.
The agency received an average of US$ 172,000 per year, under the regular national budget and supplemental appropriations.