Over the summer, CLIR’s team submitted a proposal for the MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious 100&Change initiative, which awards $100 million to a single project aimed at solving one of the world’s most urgent challenges. This global competition, held every few years, seeks innovative solutions with the potential for lasting, transformative impact.
Our proposal, titled Re:Mind: Connecting Life to Knowledge During Climate Destruction, is a practical, large-scale project aimed at saving and sharing cultural traditions and knowledge that are at risk of disappearing due to climate change in Africa, Oceania, and Central America. As the climate crisis escalates, this initiative safeguards invaluable artifacts and cultural heritage, ensuring they are preserved for future generations.
Re:Mind is a three-phase project that’s not just about preserving artifacts–this project will create an online platform where students, teachers, and communities can learn and share knowledge. By using advanced technology to digitize these cultural stories, songs, and traditions, Remind will make sure they are no longer hidden and can be easily accessed by people around the world.
The project’s key goals include:
- Long-term preservation and access to rare and unique cultural and scientific artifacts.
- Demonstrating a scalable method that shows how global collaboration and technology can mitigate the effects of climate change.
- -Creating a model that encourages collective responses to climate crises through the preservation and activation of cultural heritage.
Building on the success of our Hidden Collections Africa project, Re:Mind extends this work to new regions, ensuring that cultural heritage remains a vital part of the global climate change conversation.
For more details on the Re:Mind project, visit remind.clir.org.