This toolkit presents a practical, research-informed approach to social integration through intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with a particular focus on Syrian refugees and displaced communities in European and neighbouring-country contexts. It starts from a simple premise: sustainable integration is strengthened when newcomers are recognised not only through their needs, but also through the knowledge, traditions, skills, stories, and cultural memory they carry. In line with the UNESCO understanding of living heritage, the toolkit treats oral traditions, social practices, rituals, performing arts, and traditional craftsmanship as resources for identity, intercultural dialogue, mutual respect, and community resilience.
Developed through the VERIS CIVIS Open Lab and informed by related fieldwork, the Toolkit for Social Integration through Intangible Cultural Heritage and Safeguarding of Cultural Memory Supporting Syrian Refugees in European Contexts draws on interviews, workshops, immersive heritage experiences, and collaborative work with Syrian refugees, migrants, and internally displaced persons in Romania, Switzerland, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Its central model is organised around three mutually reinforcing pillars:
- Recognition of cultural identity and knowledge;
- Connection through reciprocal encounters between displaced and host communities; and
- Transmission of heritage across generations and contexts. These principles shift integration practice from a deficit-based model toward participation, co-creation, and cultural agency.
The toolkit translates this model into five practical modules:
- Storytelling and oral history to support cultural memory, dignity, and intergenerational continuity.
- Crafts and traditional skills to foster connection, confidence, cultural transmission, and livelihood opportunities.
- Seasonal traditions and social rituals to create shared spaces of belonging and intercultural encounter.
- Creative methods of emotional processing to enable indirect, participant-controlled expression through characters, collective voices, and objects.
- Knowledge transfer from fieldwork to teaching to embed community-generated learning in curricula, micro-credentials, and cross-institutional collaboration, based on our CIVIS experience.
Each module combines learning objectives, expected outcomes, step-by-step activities, facilitator notes, and field-based insights. Additional sections provide tailored guidance for social workers and NGOs, policymakers, cultural institutions, universities, community organisers, educators, and refugees themselves, together with monitoring and evaluation indicators at individual, community, and institutional levels.
Ethics and trauma-sensitive practice are integral to implementation. Participation must be voluntary, informed, and revocable; communities must retain authority over how their heritage and narratives are represented; contributors should be credited and fairly compensated; and facilitators should provide meaningful choice, secure data handling, appropriate psychosocial safeguards, and referral pathways. Used in this way, the toolkit offers adaptable methods for turning living heritage into a practical resource for belonging, social cohesion, education, cultural continuity, and more equitable integration.
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