Like any other NGO, especially one that is in the business of sustaining the preservation of the country’s tangible and intangible heritages, funding was an-going issue that worsened as their usual avenues of funding have been limited by the travel ban. However, the council was quick to focus their efforts on the digital platform—an action which Tengku Nasariah Tengku Syed Ibrahim, the organisation’s honorary secretary, enthuses was one that would provide a more inclusive space that could better reach out to both the local and international demographic. This required fast changes to the way they worked, which they succeeded thanks to the financial support from organisations which provided both hardware and software to enable the office team to work in this new environment.

“Places like the Louvre Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have fully integrated themselves into the virtual space long before the pandemic and have successfully managed to expand their reach with it," notes Nasariah. "What this tells us is that if we strike while the iron is hot, we can broadcast our local stories loud and clear to the younger generation, instilling in them a sense of anticipation and to be agents of heritage preservation.

“So, say people attend theatres, musicals and exhibitions online or even take a virtual tour of our Rumah Penghulu Abu Seman (a traditional Malay house of a village headsman built in the 1920s and situated within the NGO’s headquarters at No 2 Jalan Stonor, Kuala Lumpur)—it’s still a two-dimensional flatscreen, and they know it can’t ever beat the immersive experience of seeing it in real life, which is why I think there’s still hope for us because we’d be giving an even wider audience the choice to visit at their own volition to know more. That emotional investment is vital to foster, especially in times like these,” she adds.

While the aforementioned virtual tour of the Rumah Penghulu Abu Seman is still in the works, the council has been organising various webinars with the general public on topics concerning past and present heritage conservations. Vice president of Badan Warisan Malaysia Dato’ Zahim Albakri mentions on-going plans to digitalise the Chen Voon Fee Resource Centre, which was a specialised library and information centre that contained historical texts and images—which he stresses were artefacts that were all the more integral to a building’s cultural significance. “We’re just as concerned with the inside as we are with the outside,” he states.

“What gives meaning to the building’s physical structure? Take for example a family project of mine in Batu Gajah (in Perak); it’s an old family home that belonged to my great-grandfather from my father’s side of the family and while I initially had thought to turn it into a hotel, I decided to do a cultural mapping of the town instead because I asked myself this: ‘Do we need another hotel under current circumstances?’ And this is a mindset I hope we could expound on with others, where we think about the adaptive reusability when restoring our buildings, of what it can become and how we can allow for the community to take ownership of it as well.”

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Suridah Jalaluddin, one of the NGO’s council members, expresses a similar belief. “Ultimately, what Badan Warisan Malaysia really emphasises and hopes for the next generation is to have all private sectors, government sectors, the public as well as individuals themselves to participate in the preservation of our nation’s heritage. We are extremely grateful to the corporate organisations and private sponsors who immediately stepped in to help us weather the Covid storm of 2020 that kept us afloat and survived the year. However, the need for funding continues as heritage preservation and education is an ongoing process. It’s a national concern that requires national attention—we can’t just do this on our own because our country’s history is every Malaysian’s story, and it is something that needs all sectors to play a role in. That’s the support we really need.”

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