Cultural Sustainability Assessment Toolkit

Abstract

The Cultural Sustainability Assessment Toolkit is the synthesizing of concepts learned in the MACS program into a structured yet adaptive approach for assessing the cultural sustainability of communities and using the findings from this research to strategically develop community-led cultural sustainability practices for implementation. Designed through a cultural sustainability lens, the toolkit provides users with an iterative approach to assessing cultural sustainability, monitoring the holistic impact of practitioners’ decisions through cultural sustainability indicators, and guiding project evaluations. This resource can benefit cultural sustainability practitioners, stakeholders of any community interested in supporting their collective cultural identity, as well as practitioners in other fields who want to incorporate more culturally aware initiatives. As no community or scenario is the same, the toolkit is flexible enough to accommodate any context while still providing a structure for progress. By providing toolkit users with resources to introduce cultural sustainability to a community, the toolkit can prompt dialogue contributing to the community’s own revelations about what cultural sustainability means to them and the importance of considering it in local practices. The toolkit adopts quantitative research methods found in natural and social science approaches to develop indicators and variables of cultural sustainability concepts. Building upon ethnographic research, this information can be used to analyze cultural data as a precursor to developing strategies for implementing cultural sustainability projects. Inspired by flexible models, the toolkit is accessible online so practitioners and community members can adapt the different modules to best serve the unique needs of the community with whom they are working. The toolkit uses a case study as a proof of concept and provides an online platform for toolkit users to provide valuable feedback and contribute to dialogue that will further the exploration of cultural sustainability assessment.