 Hi everyone, welcome. My name is Priya Chayya and I am the Associate Director of Content here at the National Transfer and Historic Preservation. This year's Preservation Month theme is People Saving Places and is our way of giving a national high five to everyone during the great work of saving places in ways big and small all while inspiring others to do the same. Today I'd like to invite you and welcome you to From Inspiration to Inspiration, one of our signature events for this year's Preservation Month. Today you guys are very lucky, you get to hear from some amazing preservationists. Since 2011, the National Trust has awarded the American Express Aspire Award to emerging leaders in the preservation field and so we've brought together six of the past awardees to share their success stories, lessons learned, and biggest hopes for preservation in the years to come. I'm going to let all our panelists introduce themselves briefly but for longer bios you can visit savingplaces.org slash preservation hyphen month and then we'll do a little icebreaker followed by a conversation with the group. So to get us started I'm going to reintroduce myself before I hand it off to Tyrone and so here goes. Hello my name is Priya Chayya and I save places primarily through the written word. At the National Trust I share the stories behind the people and places that make up our full American story. Go ahead Tyrone. All right my name is Tyrone Anderson and I save places by creating place making in art events around our historic landmarks. Hi I'm Allison King and I save places by making sure people know where they are in the first place so I can motivate them to rally around them and save them if needed. Hi I'm Josh Rogers and I save places by coaching and training people who have been underserved by the traditional financial institutions so that they can make investments in historic buildings and neighborhoods that help them build wealth and build incomes while saving those places. Hi I'm Jordan Ryan and I save places through my work archiving built environment materials and working on research and interpretation projects involving housing neighborhoods and planning policies and issues. Hi everyone my name is Allison Tinnellomo and I save places by hanging off of them to make sure that they're structurally safe and make sure that they're helping the community out and act as a building enclosure consultant. Hi everyone I'm Rosalind Sagara and I save places by bringing people and resources together to find solutions to community challenges and opportunities. I'm muted the nature of virtual meetings. As you can see everyone is coming from very different places and so I thought to kick everything off we're going to do a little icebreaker and what I've asked everyone to do is share with us a historic place that they wish more people would know about and so we're going to start with Cerellian. So the historic place I chose was a Freedmen's Town in Houston Texas on the fourth ward. I actually learned about it from a previous national trust virtual conference and for those who are not familiar with Freedmen's Towns those were areas that were settled by former slaves after the Civil War. So it was really great just to see you know the architecture and the work that went into you know the school buildings, the churches, those homes at those times when individuals were getting free. So I didn't know about it until I heard at the trust and I thought that's something that more people should know about. I'm going to do a little screen share here to show you my spot. This is in Phoenix, Arizona and this is the Phoenix Financial Center by W.A. Sarmiento who is an architect commissioned to build an amazing bank complex in the 1960s and I mean just look at this thing it's amazing it's a complete work of art and it's total design and I just love it because of its first of all its artistic beauty is unrivaled I mean concrete expressionism amazing but also it helps tell the story of Phoenix and the the boom of growth that we had here in mid-century which is really kind of our it's our time and I've chosen this place because it is really representative of many commercial properties here in Phoenix that are eligible for historic preservation and some protections but have not really taken that step yet it's a very common story here in Phoenix and so we you know like to keep an eye on these properties and make sure that the owners know what they have and appreciate what they have. I've got a vintage interior here because the interior was designed by some local architects Ralph Wyatt and Frank Martin who were interior designers and the interior has been refurbished and taken back to what it still looks like today and we can really thank Shepley Bullfinch for doing that in their architectural offices there in one of the rotundas and then another group aboard projects has also renovated the other rotunda so that's my space and I love it my favorite place in all of Phoenix. Allison I love the stained glass. That's by Glass Art Studio and they are a nationally acclaimed artisan glass studio that was in Scottsdale in mid-century and they did churches and civic buildings and all sorts of commissions nationwide in that very kind of mod style. And the inspiration from my background actually too they were they were very much an inspiration when I was creating artwork. Awesome Josh. So I picked a place that's really played a significant role during all my time here in Macon. It's Ogmongi Mounds National Historical Park and it's one of the few places in North America that's been continuously inhabited by humans for the last 12,000 years and one of the coolest things in it is a super unusual amenity in North America which is this building that's over a thousand years old and we're in the middle of this campaign to have this have this elevated to George's first national park a campaign that we've been working together with the ancestors of the of the area and the Muskogee Creek Nation. So I'm really hoping that comes to fruition and more people will come experience this deeply resonant place that's been home to humans for so many millennia. That's super cool. I know the National Trust has been working with you guys on that project. Yeah just a couple of years ago it was elevated from a monument to a National Historical Park and that was a large part because the National Trust involvement in helping us advance that. It's a special place and I think some of our prehistoric areas in the United States have been undervalued for far too long and obviously underrepresented the types of places that we choose to preserve and promote. So I'm really excited about the future for for Ogmogi Mounds. Yeah that's awesome. Tyrell I wonder if I know the Freedmen's Town has a website if while everyone is presenting if you want to see if you can pull that up I know they have some images and not a lot but that might be a thing to show. Yeah I looked at their site and I don't know if it's under construction because the main page is just one person in the area and it kind of focuses more on the woman than the buildings. But yeah I've been hearing a lot about that place as well. From other people who grew up in the Houston area especially they have like a nice soft spot in the area for that and they're really glad the work is being done around this day but. Yeah and it's so close to downtown. I wish I'd seen it when I was in Houston for a past forward a couple of years ago but for the next trip Jordan. Yeah my favorite sort of unknown space in Indianapolis is Central State Hospital. It's the state of Indiana's first mental hospital. It opened in 1848 on the west side of the city. Unfortunately closed in 1994 as part of the national trend of deinstitutionalization but I really want to talk about the old pathology building which now houses the Indiana Medical History Museum. It's this remarkably well preserved research laboratory that really saw the transition from Victorian era science and medicine to the progressive era's birth and development of psychiatry and neurology and it's so unique with its original furnishings and equipment records and specimens. There's nothing like this anywhere else in the country. You really have to go to Europe to feel something like this and even the historic landscape is still evident. This was a place of outdoor leisure. It was one of the places that offered a degree of freedom and autonomy to the patients in the hospital. It was part of the moral treatment which was an ideology and approach involving how to treat mental disorders. Thinking about how asylums had handled patients by restraining them and confining them and isolating them and the moral treatment aimed to understand how our physical environment can enhance treatment and you can still get little glimpses of this beautifully landscaped campus. It's still kind of hidden under the brush and between the bushes and in the trees and you can really understand sort of that standard of care the hospital was trying to provide to patients in its early history. Well I think I found an image of it so I'm going to try and share it real quick. This is it right? Yep that's it. You can see what it looks like. It looks like there's this great sort of website that tells you things about it. That's the Medical History Museum's website and we have a page on there called Voices from Central State where we'll be putting up more content related to the hospital in the grounds as I do some more research for them. Very cool. Roslyn. Did we skip Elson or you want me to go? I guess I'll go. I'll go. Go ahead Roslyn and then we'll go back to Ally. Sorry. I'm going to share an image. Can you see that? Okay so the site that I chose is a two-story craftsman style residence in South Los Angeles known as the Hangsudan or also Young Korean Academy and this building was built in 1910 but the the connection to the Hangsudan starts in 1929 and the Hangsudan Organization was an important cultural organization in the early 1900s for the Korean American community. It was founded by Korean patriot An Chang-ho who was leading efforts back in Korea to fight Japanese colonial rule and so the organization's mission was to build civic and political leadership capacity for Korean independence movement back home but kind of rallying people in the States and so the organization was founded in San Francisco in 1913 and then it moved to Los Angeles a year later. Eventually the organization was able to acquire this property first they rented it and then they purchased it. This property is near the USC and was recently purchased by a development company that intends to build a co-living kind of apartment student housing project so the community learned about the threat to this property last year and so the Los Angeles Conservancy in partnership with Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation submitted an application for local landmark designation to slow down the process of development here and to really see if the current owner and community members which includes the existing LA chapter of the Hangsudan Organization could negotiate potential, hopefully acquisition of the property. There's interest there but this property has changed over time. The property is over 100 years old so there have been some changes but a lot of the historic fabric still remains and we believe the preservation outcome is possible here. There are very few landmarks, local landmarks in Los Angeles that represent the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and so we really see this recognition as important to important right now and so we're really hoping that this designation is successful and we are still in the process right now. It's a little bit about my site. A really cool site. Only three sites. It's a very small number and so I love the work that's going into trying to protect that place. I'm going to actually show a picture real quick of the Freeman's town that I found so let's do that really quick just so we can see. This is just I believe one of the buildings with the marker and I think this is an older image. I know that they are doing a lot of work on the town right now, right? Correct? Yes, there's the reason why I love the area so much was you still see some older homes but some are re-had to their original condition and the area around it where some towns were some homes were torn down or actually getting new homes built. I mean they're of a newer style but the area is not being completely forgotten so there's hope there to preserve a lot of their older structures. I just want to make sure that we can see everyone's site. All of these are really great. Does anybody have any questions for each other about the sites that were shared? I mean I'm the one who's obsessed with stained glass now and also about sites that fill in the gaps in the narrative which as I mentioned in my introduction is something I really love. Jordan's site is amazing. I did have the opportunity to visit on accident. I was trying to get into the asylum and found out that cops were very heavily in that area and we ended up at the museum and we didn't want to leave. It's an amazing space. Yeah, I think we still have Ali. You have to go, right? Sorry if you guys hear a vacuum cleaner going in the background. Someone designed a vacuum system but I guess my historical site or location would be the closer neighborhood on the lower west side of Chicago, Illinois. It's just north of my house where I live right now in Bridgeport and I think it's a very interesting neighborhood especially with the concept of communities trying to survive with justification the evolution of how the neighborhoods worked out. Originally it was a Bohemian neighborhood so it was primarily Czech and Slavic and then I believe in around the 50s, 1950s is when the Mexican army moved in. So with my involvement with landmarks Illinois and the Department of Buildings Historic Commission for the State of Chicago, we were trying to do a landmark designation on the 18th district corridor which is their main business corridor and we were also trying to protect a series of murals that were from the Bohemian era of Pilsen as well as the Mexican neighborhood and it's interesting to see the storytelling and how again the community evolved over the years and sad to say we didn't get a lot of support within the community to landmark the district or the murals but you know we're hoping that a lot of gentrification will happen overnight we're hoping that you know the historic concept or appreciation of the different cultures and heritage to just stay there. You know my mom actually immigrated to Pilsen when she came to Mexico so it's kind of a dear place to my heart and you know even when she comes into town and we kind of look for the house that she lived in you know it's demolished so it's just the story of an anchor point for the community and just seeing again how it's progressed over the years and a really good place for her tacos of Europe coming to town. Awesome Ali I think I wanted to show one of the murals so I'm just gonna me just pulling up things on the internet is just what I do. So I think this is an example of one of the murals but if you just google the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago and look at images on google you're going to see a whole bunch of different awesome murals that Ali was talking about which I think are really really cool to see. But yeah I love the personal connection as well which is great. So I'll circle back again like does anybody have questions for anyone about sites about any of them? I just wanted to say thank you for sharing all these ideas because when I travel across the nation I put these places on a map and I pinned them and I'm like I'm gonna go there and it's just so neat to know about these little hidden places that were places hiding in plain sight that you know neighborhoods or streets you might not turn down and I think that's part of the importance of the work that we do you know evangelizing these special places is to make sure that people know where they are and what the access is like you know is it is a private property is it you know can you just walk up and go or do you need to keep your distance because the cops are circulating around you know there's so many issues of access to the properties themselves that we have to navigate as urban explorers and curious folks who like to see things up close so thanks for giving us some really cool places to pin on the map. Great um so for the book of the conversation I came up with a prompt but obviously as we talked earlier you don't have to talk through everything if you don't want to um but I thought it would be nice to ask you all because so much has changed over the last two and a half years of the pandemic and all of the ways we do our work as historic preservationists so I wanted to ask if you wouldn't mind sharing something you learned something you relearned and something you unlearned from the last two years um just just to sort of give us a sense of how things have gone and I know as you guys answer that question you'll tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do in your day jobs as well so um I don't know if anybody wants to start. I mean I'll start but you know so for so I'm president of decay devils and that is it seems like a full-time job but I've uh I'm a manager at US Steel and I've been a manager for this company for 13 going on 13 years so in my free time we do the nonprofit work and we want to just get people to set it about the community so during COVID uh two years of you know kind of being isolated we learned as organization just how to be more creative uh things were going we had like a a repetitive like a routine we do XYZ every single year we just stick to the things that work and we got our formula we got our recipe is we can't mess it up and COVID put everything on the pause so by being more creative we began to implement uh bike rides uh historic bike rides through different neighborhoods throughout our city and that was a way for us to social distance yet still speak to the historic landmarks why they're important and also talk about the different organizations in those specific areas that are you know doing great things and being able to allow people to see it like up close and personal so we were still able to share and inform the general public about what's going on in the city we also created four books and published three so we were very active on that ends like well you sit in the house you have time to write you have time to pull these things together because we're not hosting events so we actually use that time to create these events I mean these books the four things is a children's book that will come out next year about preservation and all of that income that we do for our books it is in turn our version of foreign fundraising because we can't do things in person we can still sell the books online and get people excited about this is what we've done in the past lead up to this point and you know let to know about the future I had to relearn how to do more with less that was a little bit tough because we had the woe is me moment the world is coming down where our bank account is dwindling and so we had to get real creative on how to just do more with less and we kind of leaned on social media for that because it was free our pictures were free we have social media access so let's talk about things that we've done before and things we like to do and engage our core audience in that way and the biggest thing that we had to unlearn was accepting things from word of mouth so we had a lot of money earmarked pre-covid and we kind of put some other things on the back burner because we thought we had some guaranteed funds to come in that were going to come in and that wasn't the case because people and rightfully so had to move their funds in different orders to support the pandemic and other people who needed those funds more than we did so that was just something that we just sat to unlearn and said no until you see a contract or something in writing keep pushing forward 110 percent don't take the foot off the foot off the pedal so that's what we have on our idea and gerry you don't mind what Tyrell just said I mean we had a really similar experience I think one of the things I unlearned was taking for granted how delicate our situations are right I mean you really take for granted living in a safe neighborhood living in a functional economy living with the democratic norms and all this and the rule of law and it was I mean it was terrifying when when things started to collapse and we had business owners working walking in for the first time and had never laid off anyone did not know how to lay off anyone and they were looking to us for answers and and so one of the things we learned was was all the federal relief programs and all the unemployment programs so that we could try and set as soft a landing for everybody as possible but I mean one of the thing that I'd say I relearned from that experience is how much partnerships matter and how much you know small businesses and family operated shops and the homes that we choose to live in are such an integral part of preservation that if you can't find a an ongoing functional economic use for these places it's it's really really tough to secure the next generation for any of these resources and and it just became a really acute moment where that was that was really a serious concern that that that a lot of our historic buildings weren't going to have um uh viable economic uses um going forward and so um it's made me a lot more conscious of how important it is that that people understand the choices they make on a day-to-day basis in the places they choose to have a business in the places they choose to make a home and and when they can when they can prioritize um having those uh necessities take place in historic buildings it really enriches the cultural life for everybody and I do think the people who make those choices um have a higher degree of uh social responsibility uh for each other because they see some of the interconnectedness and in the world a little bit more easily um and so I think there have been a lot of silver linings coming out of it and uh and the one I really I will always take away is is what a great responsibility we have to help take care of each other so I can go um off with Josh um I think with my job it's been going non-stop even during the beginning of the lockdown but I think from what I had to unlearn and kind of relearn is being more empathetic um and working like Josh said it's a team building um because that's my profession you know I have to learn how to communicate with other architects other engineers owners developers and even homeowners you know I've had a handful of owners call me and say we have a historic home and our building's falling down like what do we do um and just learning to kind of take a step back and just kind of my best to help them and guide them full process and just trying to reassure them that you know we're in a safe place I'm not here to like you know hurt their their house or you know hurt financially just trying to help them so that was something within last years I've been you know unplugging and relearning how to work more with different types of professionals and more types of communities even for owners and trying to help them as best as I can um and you know it's just I think that's something that kind of goes with our profession is just you know using our background or education or experience and just trying to do tools and anchor points for people is something that's really key that I've been I've been learning a lot big time and I guess nerdy nights you know with things I have been learning it's just about no more about materials so it's been an interesting couple of years I'll add to to what um folks have been sharing um I think you know agree with everything that's been said also um it resonates a lot um I think um was interesting even though like you know where we experience you know this global pandemic I think that the passion for for historic places didn't go away you know like it may not have been top of mind you know survival was top of mind but I think that um the the interest and passion for historic places at least with the folks that you know I interact with on a daily basis through through my job at the conservancy but also through through other other communities um I think that I I didn't see that go away you know I saw those communities kind of interact differently you know um share information differently you know I think um identified better efficiencies to to do the work that um to continue the work um during the pandemic despite challenges so um I think um that was something that I think was really hopeful in terms of like you know that there are still a lot of people who care um even when things got really difficult okay um I can relate a lot to what Terrell was saying too about the just the whole collapse that happened when when COVID happened and the loss of revenue and income strains and different um priorities that people had so when that started to affect my own practice which was tourism based were decimated I don't know if you've ever processed 500 refunds before but it's heartbreaking um and so um I I decided at that point you know what what can I do and and what how can I continue my work and in other ways and and you know rely on my other strengths which are journalism and reporting and um content creation as it's now called today so um so you know after the initial shock and and and and you know after the months passed and we realized things were never going to be the same again um I really started to turn my focus inward and do some internal housekeeping with my business and the way that I present information to the public just like you know Tyrell said we wrote some books you know um I didn't write a book but I did continue to do a lot of research and to do a lot of field work that was very distant and also book oriented and archive oriented as well lots of archiving and so um I you know in a way it was a blessing in disguise because I needed to do some housekeeping I needed to tidy up the website which is now 19 years old I mean the the internet is a different place than it was 19 years ago and so in terms of of what I had to to relearn was something as boring as search engine optimization because if people can't find your content they're not going to know it exists and and SEO is different today than it was 19 years ago Google changed everything about four or five years ago I don't know if you've noticed but they did and we've had to make changes to keep up with that to make sure the public is able to access our content so um that was my big boring project last summer when was to do search engine optimization of my entire website to make sure Google could find my content again and um you know that and that's a real issue that we have in in digital archiving in the digital humanities is the internet and those search engines those for our catalog that's how it accesses you know our content so that was my super boring relearning thing that I had to do um the learning part I had to do is to learn video because that was the only way I could communicate with my people anymore was through social media because I was doing extreme social distancing I was teaching full time online you know in my day job and all of those things so um video skills are always good to having your arsenal so if you don't if you're not willing to learn them get an intern who will and who will teach you all the ropes because video is the way that people want to consume information today we can write all these beautiful articles and you know micro blogs and things like that but video is just where it's at and I don't think it's going to go away and um and then the other thing I learned to do was to embrace short format journalism a little bit more on my Instagram because I've always been really into my Instagram for like reaching out to the public and that's it's that's how we safe places guys is like people DM me on Instagram and they're like do you see this and I'll go do a drive-by and I'll go see it and you can check up on its condition that this is our hub social media is our in Phoenix at least our hub for communication um so I looked at you know I already had a pretty strong presence in Instagram and was always posting my work in the field I didn't have any more work in the field really I wasn't going out and making visits like I used to um so I really got inspired by Alice Ross sworn Ross sworn I don't know I'll write you her name down in chat but she's a design historian as well and she she micro blogs on her Instagram and does these amazing IG live events and things like that and I just got inspired by the way she was doing longer format captions that were really informative and very seriously researched rather than just me out on the fly typing about Ralph Haver or something um so I switched over to doing that kind of format of um micro journalism and people loved it they just ate it up and it's been it's been a great growth hack to reach out to new audiences because it's shareable content and um I've always wanted to make that change and the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to sit home and type my Instagram captions so thinking back to everyone's comments about the economy taking a hit you know I was laid off from what I thought was my dream job and I had to really unlearn my own job description I guess after getting laid off you know working in an archive in a library in a museum that's not the only path for an architectural archivist I had to be curious and take some risks and I found so much fulfilling work out there working for myself like yes I'm still archiving now for the city's planning department but I'm also researching landscape and natural history for a 58 mile section of a river and two counties for two tourism groups I'm curating a history of housing discrimination exhibit for a fair housing advocacy nonprofit I'm looking into stigmatized land and sites of trauma for the state's first mental hospital related to an unmarked but identified cemetery sites so in a way I just had to think these were just really complicated reference questions and I'm really really enjoying sort of unlearning what I was capable of and applying it to being a small business owner and that's been great as far as learn learning that where you live matters going back to what Josh said if any of you familiar with the national fair housing alliance they have this great infographic called where you live matters and I think it's really critical today when we think about the last couple years and being kind of tied to our homes and everything about our quality of life is inherently tied to where we live and what we have access to in terms of jobs in transit in health care you know we have food deserts we also have credit deserts and bank deserts so thinking about housing and sort of that fair housing and housing discrimination side and applying that to preservation has been where my research has been going and I've learned so much in the last year thinking about where you live matters this is amazing I'm just listening to what everyone's talking about and obviously there are a bunch of different common themes right there's this idea that we had to become more flexible in our work over the last two and a half years also more creative and then also just this general awareness we have about the flaws in preservation but also in recognizing just like Jordan just said where we live matters and what's missing when you don't live in a place that has access to these different things that preservationists talk about like walkable neighborhoods or access to good food places and I'm thinking about the work of the main street center main street America and things like that and I just really love hearing about all this and then it all comes back to what Roslyn was saying with how like even when we were stuck at home people were still looking for ways to to talk and see and visit historic places I know so many people who ended up in national parks because those were open air spaces where you didn't have you could socially distance and I think that emphasizes just the power of place and the importance of all the different works work you do and then I think the other sort of thread I heard throughout everything was the importance of empathy and kindness and how we treat and work with each other as Ali was saying but changing the way we talk to one another and so I really really appreciate all of you sort of talking through those various themes um did anybody have questions for anyone's comments besides me sort of stepping up everything that was a really good job nice work Jordan can you clarify did you say you started your own business are you a consultancy now yeah yeah I work with a lot of architects developers and planners on land use change over time it's you know hey we have this unused public plaza we want to build a hotel on and it's like well you demolished four historic hotels 40 years ago you know it's same use so it's a lot of kind of amusing land use and change over time but I also still do some archiving and a little bit of more museum exhibit kind of interpretation but everything's kind of centered on the built environment place using the archives a lot of neighborhood and kind of quality of life and housing policy so it's I'm kind of a space case I'm kind of fluid but it's all over the place but it in a way it just kind of connects in my brain and everything's just sort of I always tell people I'm not a hoarder I'm an archivist it's different I'm just sort of hoarding all these different collections and resources and connecting the dots and trying to get people excited about this dark context of place so that can be better stewards of the future yeah and Jordan actually is by the time people see this event Jordan wrote a great piece for us about the importance of city and municipal archives it should go up this week that the week we are recording this which is the end of April and then I know that Terrell wrote something for us when he got his award and so that's also available and so like I said that bio sheet that that link on the preservation month page I've linked to all these various pieces that I think a lot of you have written for us over the years just so people can read more about all your work and I've also made sure to link to all your websites so we're almost out of time but I thought maybe we we'd sort of collectively end on the question of joy and hope and you know I know the pandemic's not over and things are still hard and we're dealing with a lot of different issues about looking at our systems to make them more equitable but I thought maybe we take a moment and talk about what brings you joy and what hope do you see in your work for the future and again we don't have to go in the same order that we've been going in but if someone would like to start feel free to unmute yourself and go ahead I guess joy wise for last year I have been doing a lot of presentations for cast iron it became a material that I really love to work on and of course my co-workers and a lot of contractors were getting a little bit scared on how nerdy I became with that material but it's fine but it's great because I've been doing a lot of presentations with architectos with the structural engineering association I recently did a big presentation with my co-worker in Denver for the steel conference and what the great is saying and it kind of ties to my love and joy of metals but I'm impacting a lot of people that might not know the type of profession that I do in restoration work and a lot of you know students or even people I have one good friend that runs with me you know she works for an accounting for access and accounting for a big aviation company and she just said you know what I want to study architecture and I've been helping her you know apply for grad school and stuff like that and kind of giving her some guidance so I think it's tied to the joy of what I do for my job and what I've been learning and trying to educate people about what I do but it's also impacting and influencing other people to realize there's more out there in our profession that you can definitely do so I'm hoping with all the presentations I give you know we can get more people into our different fields and understand the importance of place in the community and our history. I'll jump in for me I get excited mainly when there's youth involvement and any of any site period just kind of thinking about what's that future of preservation going to look like I personally didn't know anything about preservation until probably six years ago at 30 years old so when we do anything and I see youth involvement we just did something in Old Salem with Sarah Marsome when we do our bike rides and when you see neighborhood kids who just they weren't a part of the ride but they see a group of people and they just jump in on their bike and come and listen and enjoy and learn those are the things that get me excited about you know our field moving forward. Yeah very cool and what Sarah was talking about that he did with Sarah Marsome who is also another Aspire award winner was an event with the National Council on Public History and I heard that it was amazing it was a training program on site at Old Salem right? Yes and it's hard to explain it because it was a conference but it I don't know the more intimate setting and you know a lot more one-on-one time with individuals I've got a lot of positive feedback from everyone involved so we look forward to doing more with those and our next one actually is here in Gary at the end of October. I also work with young people I'm a professor so I get to work with young people every day and they're just give me so much life from all of their energy and you know I teach them methods of historical research and how to use history to enrich their lives and enrich their visual vocabulary and how historical themes and kind of the politics of and social aspects of the each era affect how people thought and lived and worked and shaped their lives and you know just seeing them kind of really take that to heart and and to embrace it and to ask the hard questions you know because the questions are hard now it's not easy and they continue to kind of press forward and to to be curious and that always gives me hope. I have a lot of joys from a lot of silver linings that have come out but I mean one of the things I really appreciate is I I think this is durable but I think people have a more of a sensibility about the impacts of their daily choices and as soon as the restaurants and shops in downtown make and reopen these families who are stewards of our most important architectural resources those are the people those are the places that people are most excited about and those are the losses I think they felt most acutely because those are the places that are birthdays anniversaries engagements you know there were we choose to center our lives but I don't know if we were as aware of that as we are now and and so seeing the amount of intention that people are bringing back to where they choose to shop and dine and live has been really really encouraging and I think it may mark a serious transition point that's going to be helpful for the movement going forward. I think what brings me a lot of joy and brought me joy during these last few years is just finding ways to create communities through the work at the Conservancy we launched a community leadership boot camp during the pandemic well we it was planned to launch before you know we knew that the pandemic was happening so it was going to be an in-person program and we did we had to shift to virtual but 58 people have gone through the program since the launch and it's just really exciting that you know a lot of people have taken an interest in learning more about you know how to be a better advocate for historic places so that brings me a lot of joy that you know we're we're able to to be a resource and help empower people in that way. Thinking about joy hope relief you know the last few years have really forced needed conversations to happen it's hard it's uncomfortable it's messy but we need to talk about things like labor equity and pay equity climate equity which you know I read a whole lot about and then wrote a little bit for the trust on you know thinking about pushing back being critical being collaborative we're going to be stronger together the more organized and unified we are and I feel like the last couple years there is more we have more organizing strength the more we connect with different institutions and positions and professions and we're not so siloed so we can really build on each other and work together. So really great point to end on and I'll just toss in my two cents and and that is I get joy from working with all of you I my job is content creation as Allison says but the best part is getting to talk to the people in the field doing the work and sharing your stories and the places you're trying to save so I really really appreciate all of you coming to talk to us and telling us about what's been going on over the last two years and I just remind everyone watching that to get more information on everyone here go to savingplaces.org slash preservation hyphen month but also while you're there check out the other events that are going on this month along with the many many stories that we'll be sharing on savingplaces over the coming weeks. So again thank you everyone for coming this has been so much fun and so great to talk to you and see you all in person and I look forward to seeing you guys face to face sometimes soon. Have a great preservation month. Thanks everyone. Let's have a good one. Bye.