France: educational projects at the Musée Guimet

A common goal: welcoming the general public

In the context of cultural patronage, AREVA has supported the Musée national des Arts asiatiques Guimet, a national museum of Asian art, since 2004. The museum is noted for continually enriching its collections by acquiring major works.

In addition to this flagship initiative, AREVA and the Musée Guimet share the same wish: to facilitate public access to culture through the discovery of the living, modern and human setting of historical treasures.

Thanks to this common goal, AREVA and the Musée Guimet have developed a number of educational initiatives to facilitate museum access for those with limited means.

Launched in 2006, these initiatives were put into practice and strengthened throughout 2007:

• Identification and better mutual knowledge between the museum and society
• Scheduling of family activities (the “Summer in Asia” program enabled the museum to discover new community partners)
• Sessions to educate social workers using an educational brochure designed to help them prepare and organize group visits (3,000 copies)

By 2007, 140 professionals and volunteers had already benefited from these training initiatives. Among them:

• Secours Populaire de Paris,
• Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse,
• Petits Frères des Pauvres.

Approximately 800 people enjoyed free visits or participated in a special event following this training.

Around 3,000 copies of an educational brochure were distributed to leaders in the social field to help them organize museum visits with their groups.

A long-term initiative

Due to the success of these initiatives in providing museum access to a new group of people, AREVA wanted to demonstrate its commitment with the implementation of a 3-year agreement (2008-2010).

In 2008, nearly 100 people benefited from training about Buddhism, Imperial China and Japan.

Hélène Baudelet, Public Relations Coordinator at the Musée Guimet

“Access to culture is fundamental for the disadvantaged: it opens up the world to them, awakens their curiosity, and gives them confidence in their ability to understand and to marvel. A visit to the museum is a moment of pleasure, of discovery, of conversing with others. The interactions between children and parents during family visits are extremely rich and youth visits provide yet another opportunity to reach out to the adults accompanying them. The initiatives supported by AREVA play an important role in opening the museum up to the disadvantaged. They are at the heart of our long-term development plan.”