Creating opportunities for regional growth through promoting Cultural HERitage of fISHing communities in Europe
The main objective of CHERISH is to improve regional development policies to protect and promote cultural heritage in fishing communities in order to boost attractiveness of these regions for businesses, citizens and tourists.

Fishery communities in the EU share the same challenges with regard to climate change, tourism pressure and the transformation of the European fishing industry. The EU recognizes the valuable role of their cultural heritage for sustainable development and stimulates increased efforts to better position and profile the fishing communities, including it’s intangible heritage, like myths to daily practices, traditions, ecological knowledge and crafts. Through the development and implementation of new strategies utilising cultural assets of fishing communities new jobs and new products or services are created as well.

Interregional cooperation and policy learning will allow exchange of experiences on the development of policy for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage in fishing communities via the integration of the lessons learnt into the regional policies.

The exchange of experience among the CHERISH partners is an interregional learning process that follows three sequential steps:

1. Identification and analysis of potential good practices;
2. Interregional Learning & Exchange of Experience Events, including site visits & study tours;
3. Development of Action Plans.

Project results are shared at regional, national and EU level, through Stakeholder Group meetings in each partner region, a photo competition which will be on show in each involved country, participation in the Policy Learning Platform of the Interreg Europe Programme and through Interreg Europe events and other relevant European networks, like the Coastal and Marine Union (EUCC). CHERISH will also be online with website, Youtube movies and social media.