DE-BIAS project community engagement resources

The DE-BIAS project aimed to promote a more inclusive and respectful approach to the description of digital collections and the telling of stories of minoritised communities. Community engagement was central to all activities in the project, to enable community members and cultural heritage professionals to better understand topics and contexts, and facilitate stronger relationships between the cultural sector and minoritised communities. Learn from the project’s experiences and explore some of its resources to help you get started increasing participation in your own context.

The philosophy at the heart of the DE-BIAS project was directly linked to the idea of cultural inclusion. It placed emphasis on the engagement of individuals and communities not only as audiences, but as actors and active stakeholders and creators of culture and cultural heritage. Underpinning this approach was a strong belief that local communities or communities rooted in a specific kind of heritage can detect biassed terms, explore and propose new interpretations of these terms and of the description of the collections in a broader sense.

If you want to know more about the concepts and European policies behind this approach, the following resources provide you with an entry point for more exploration.

Policy Models

Cristina Da Milano, President of ECCOM, presents how European policy models around cultural heritage evolved from the 1950s to the early 21st century and how they have been applied in the DE-BIAS project. You can also access the slides.

Community engagement

Cristina Da Milano, President of ECCOM, shares how community engagement relates to the concepts of access, representation, participation, and audience engagement. She outlines five key strategies to consider when embarking on community engagement activities. You can also access the slides.

The project developed a Community Engagement Methodology which offers a blueprint for cultural heritage institutions looking to engage communities more effectively and equitably. The methodology provides a detailed framework for conceptualising, planning and evaluating community engagement activities, ensuring they are inclusive, safe, and trust-based. Download the methodology and read about its creation below.

Over the course of the DE-BIAS project, partners held workshops to bring together community members and allies who were involved in building the DE-BIAS vocabulary. Below you can watch short recap videos where the organisers share approaches, practices and lessons learned from the workshops, and how you could use these approaches if you were organising your own events with communities. 

• Community engagement capacity building event run by the French Ministry of Culture (MCC): Discover this webinar for French cultural heritage institutions, which related to the management of - among others - collections on France’s colonial past.

• Community engagement sessions run by the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF): discover how the DFF worked with the Jewish community with a focus on identifying antisemitic language during two dedicated workshops.

• Community engagement session run by the European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) and ECCOM: discover how the two organisations ran workshops focused on discriminatory language concerning gender and sexuality in cultural heritage and particularly the digitised material contained in Europeana.eu.

• Community engagement session run by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL): discover how KUL ran a workshop for the Belgian cultural heritage sector on the topic of stereotypes and bias in cultural collections from the colonial era.

• Community engagement sessions run by Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV): Discover how three co-creation sessions with the Dutch Surinamese community saw participants review and rework archival descriptions .

• Find tips to help you create and improve your own way to develop collaborative work with local communities, based on the DE-BIAS project’s experiences, in our Recommendations for Community Engagement.
• Revisit the recording of the final DE-BIAS event held on 28 November 2024 during the Heritage Horizons - Europeana Project Week, which presents the topic of bias and potential ways to address it from a variety of perspectives, including the perspectives of minoritised communities.
• Dive deeper into the work of engaging with communities with the project's report on bias types and patterns - Typology and DE-BIAS Vocabulary and community interactions.
• Read more about DE-BIAS’ approach to community engagement and work with relevant communities: