Bringing Sustainability into Conservation Education with The UCLA/Getty Program
A word from our founder and president, Jaimie P. Cloud:
One of the many things I love about our work is that I learn so much from my collaborators and co-creators who want to “sustainablize” their curriculum and practices.
I just finished working on a project with The UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, entitled, “Embedding Education for Sustainability in Cultural Heritage Conservation Education”. The Getty Program received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEH) to implement the initiative because conservators and preservation specialists are in a timely and critical position to be global leaders in sustainability. Their work with collections connected to communities of design, technology, science, art, Indigenous culture, and other humanities disciplines are all key parts of the sustainability equation—a concept fully embraced across the field.
Yet through their research, and their own experiences as educators, they knew that despite conservators best intentions there are deep and persistent structural barriers that prevent them from fully integrating sustainability in practice and in educational curricula. The grant was designed to identify and break down the barriers in both practice and teaching that prevent their sector from fully embracing a more thoughtful, balanced, safe, and ultimately carbon-neutral approach to the conservation of fragile cultural heritage collections worldwide.
Our project was focused on mitigating barriers for incorporating sustainability principles into graduate conservation education. Our strategy was to develop tools that could be utilized in curricular planning and syllabus revision. On one of our projects I collaborated with the UCLA/Getty team to find alignment between conservation and sustainability education competencies to aid in interweaving these conceptual frameworks. See the article in the January 2026 edition of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) News for the story of our journey, and see the results of our journey in the document entitled, “Integrating Conservation and Sustainability Competencies”. Both documents are displayed below.