For over one year, Mazars has been sponsoring the UNESCO World Heritage Programme and “Vocations Patrimoine”, an association chaired by the well-known palaeontologist Yves Coppens.
The purpose of the joint project is tremendous: enable students all over the world to implement best practices’ audits and benchmarks of the sites registered by the UNESCO World Heritage Programme (830 sites to date). An important step of the project took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, mid-April 2007.

One of the 2007 grant recipients in the “Vocations Patrimoine” Programme is an Ukrainian student, Iryna Kravets. She spent six months in Edinburgh. Her purpose: study the management of the Old and New Town areas in Edinburgh in order to compare it with the management of the Saint Sophia Cathedral site in Kiev.
In order to close Irina’s six-month period of investigation and study, “Vocations Patrimoine”, the UNESCO and Mazars decided to promote this initiative, at the occasion of the Scottish Heritage Day.

Mazars set up a press conference and a “clients and partners” event at the Edinburgh castle in order to highlight this sponsorship programme. More than 100 Mazars clients and partners in Scotland had the opportunity to discover Iryna Kravets’ enthusiasm and passion for her study subject. Our winner underlined how such benchmark surveys were of use for promoting and highlighting the value of the World Heritage Programme . “The management of such sites”, she said, “is not limited to the best conservation of the places or of the monuments, but it has to be designed in a wider context, in order to take into consideration the dynamic relation that exists between the site itself and its environment. In that perspective, the way Edinburgh preserved Old and New Towns areas in a half-million inhabitant, growing city is rich of key learnings for a city like Kiev”, she said.

Peter Jibson, Mazars’ Associate in Edinburgh and Glasgow (photo) took an active part in this event, which David Evans, member of Mazars’ Group Executive Board attended as well.

Christian Manhart (photo), Head of Communications and Partnerships for the World Heritage programme at UNESCO stated that the sites list was enriched every year. This situation is a good illustration, according to Manhart, of how it is necessary to identify sites managers able to deal with their mission in all its dimensions, not only the strict conservation of a monument or a landscape.

Muriel Bachelier (photo), Head of Communications, presented the sponsorship strategy for the Mazars Group.

At last Beatrice de Foucauld (photo), the General Secretary of “Vocations Patrimoine” pointed out the project's stakes and the importance of sponsorship for its achievement, Mazars and the Axa Group being today its leading sponsors.