For museums · universities · foundations · cultural institutions

For institutions — donor trips, scholarly programmes, curatorial fieldwork

Programming that works for the institution as well as for the traveller.

Heritage and Routes designs and operates programmes for cultural institutions whose travel work serves a specific mission — donor cultivation, board engagement, faculty research, acquisition trips, scholar exchanges. The architecture of these programmes is different from leisure travel. The metrics are different. The reporting back is different. We have built our institutional practice around that difference.

Institutional travel works differently

Why a different conversation with us

A museum donor trip to Cape Coast is, at one level, a journey to Cape Coast. At another level, it is a five-figure investment in a relationship with a donor whose gift may be seven figures. The programme has to do two things at once: deliver the cultural experience the donor signed up for, and create the conditions where the curator or executive director who is travelling alongside can have the conversation that the trip is, structurally, in service of.

We understand this. Our programmes for institutional clients build in time for what the brochure does not name — the slow dinner where the conversation happens, the morning when the leadership of the institution has access to the scholar in a way the rest of the group does not, the closing day debrief that becomes, for some travellers, the moment the gift takes shape. We do not advertise these mechanics. We design for them.

Programme types

What we typically deliver for institutional clients

Institutional comparables and partnerships

The institutional landscape we work within

The institutional clients we are positioned to serve — and where appropriate, the comparables we benchmark against — include the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Fondation Dapper, the Mucem, the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and university departments of African Studies, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Black Studies in North America, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium. We are also positioned for foundation work — Mellon, Ford, Open Society in Africa, Andrew Mellon, Henry Luce.

On the African side, we work with the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, the Université de Lomé, the University of Cape Coast (centre for slavery memory studies), the University of Ghana Institute of African Studies, IFRA-Nigeria, and through CIRESC (CNRS-EHESS) for the broader francophone network.

Tell us about the institutional brief.

First conversation, with the curatorial or development office, no obligation. We respond within 48 hours.