Bacolod: Negrense youth urged to preserve, protect local heritage

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Bacolod City – Negros Occidental Third District Rep. Jose Francisco Benitez challenged Negrense youth to preserve and protect their local heritage, during the three-day Youth Forum Heritage held in Silay City, in line with the observance of the National Heritage Month, which capped recently.

“Be the guardians of our heritage. Heritage is your birth right and our inheritance to you. Its value and significance is for you to shape and form”, Benitez told the youth participants, in a Zoom meeting.

The three-day forum covered lectures, fieldwork and workshops that provided knowledge and tools to the 60 participants from Victorias, E.B. Magalona, Talisay, Murcia, Bacolod, and the Slow Food Negros Community, culminated with a new-found awareness and appreciation of local cultural heritage and commitment to help preserve these cultural treasures.

John Delan Robillos and Maria Lorena Guba, Senior Facilitators of the National Commission for Culture and Arts cultural mapping training and workshops, disclosed that the forum is the first to be conducted in the country, using the new cultural mapping design and guide under the NCCA Cultural Mapping Program, as part of the celebration of the National Heritage Month this May.

In line with the theme “Heritage: Change and Continuity,” the forum outputs – cultural mapping of tangible and intangible local cultural heritage and a Project Development Plan, may serve as a start of a collaboration among local government, youth groups and other community sectors in more purposive programs geared towards the understanding, conservation and use of heritage in community development and nation-building.

Benitez said that cultural heritage is more than just bricks and stones, more than just old buildings and monuments.

“It is a living, breathing part of our collective identity, the very soul of our nation,” said the solon, as he rallied the youth to work together to document, conserve, understand, appreciate, and promote cultural heritage, to ensure that it remains a vital part of our national identity for years to come.

“For in doing so, we honor not only our past but also the future that we hope to build,” he urged the forum participants.

The FHFI headed by its president Armita B. Rufino, represented by Program Coordinators Leslie Neis Noble and Judith Neric, and Angelo Detera of the Program Monitoring and Evaluation Division of NCCA, working closely with the 3rd District Office in the implementation of the Youth Forum on Heritage.

The co-sponsors included the local governments of Victorias, E.B. Magalona, Talisay, Murcia, and Bacolod City. (Gilbert Bayoran via The Visayan Daily Star (TVDS), photo courtesy of TVDS)

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