 Hi everyone and welcome to today's live session on the national impact agenda framework in action three approaches to leading change. The overarching goal of the session is to continue advancing the ideas that were elevated during the national impact agenda, and to advocate for a strategic change in the preservation field. We really hoped to demonstrate that everyone plays an essential role in creating positive change in the field of historic preservation and today we wanted to profile the experience of three amazing organizations. My name is dig out and I'm the senior director of research and development at the national trust and I'm here to moderate the session and introduce our three amazing panelists who are members of the first ever national impact agenda leadership cohort. But before I introduce them, I wanted to share a little bit of background and context on what the national impact agenda is, and what the goals are of the leadership cohort. So, as many of you may recall, we released the national impact agenda at the 2021 pass forward conference, and since then, think this has proven to be a valuable tool, particularly a strategic planning tool and a guiding framework for the national preservation movement. And the ideas in this framework were really a culmination of a year long engagement process that reached over 700 individuals connected to historic preservation in some way. And along over the course of the year we spoke to grassroots organizations, big city planners, state historic preservation offices and other national organizations, among many other affiliations. So if we could go to the next slide. The seven goals that emerged out of this process from growing collaborative networks to a truer history were synthesized from the broad range of feedback that we heard. And these goals aspire to represent a steady state positive outcome for the preservation field. We really wanted to elevate what we've heard most frequently across different groups from a wide range of perspectives and synthesized this list in a way that would be resonant and relevant across many sectors. So these goals and additional content associated with them are published on our website, which you can find a link to in the chat. So you can explore this content a little bit further I won't go into it too much today because I know each of our panelists will be talking about their own work and sharing a bit more about about each of these goals and how they are linked to what they're currently focused on. So we kind of like to start off by taking a quick poll to see where all of you in this zoom room are focusing your work in each of these areas. So in just a moment, a poll, a single question will pop up on your screen. And the question is, which of the seven goals speaks most directly to your preservation work right now. Feel free to choose as many as you like. And alternatively, if you see a goal, or if you have a goal that you don't see reflected in these choices, feel free to enter it in the chat, or if you aren't sure where it might live in this framework. We'll give a moment for the responses to come in. Okay. We've hit about majority. So I'm going to share the results now. So it looks like there is, I mean, it looks like there's a lot of representation across each of the seven goals here. 57% of people in the room responded that they're really focused on engaging the public 50% are focused on growing collaborative networks. 57% sorry, I'm reading these in real time and it seems like they're still shifting are focused on inclusive movement so it's really great to see such broad representation across each of these focus areas and what we've really learned through this process is these goals are not mutually exclusive they're all very interconnected and all of our all of our panelists I think will also illustrate how interconnected many of these goals are to one another. So thank you for participating in that. Let's go to the next slide to continue building on this work. We have convened the first leadership cohort to help participating organizations apply the national impact agenda to their work. Another goal is to help organizations use this framework use the ideas within the framework to guide decision making on future programs to help build their case for why it's important to expand in a particular direction, and to also share what organizations learn to inspire others to lead change and preservation. And so we wanted to bring this cohort together to give people space to share best practices, as well as some of the challenges they're facing and innovations that they are that they are advancing in this way that is inevitably part of this work of leading change. So, I think we've we've had our first meeting so far, and it's been a valuable experience to just be in fellowship with other organizations that are on similar paths that are advancing these shared goals, 10 esteemed organizations from across the country volunteered to join the leadership cohort. We have a statewide we have local and national nonprofits, and we have groups from both the public and private sectors with broad geographic representation. So today, we asked three of these organizations to show us how their work is linked to this to to the national impact agenda. And as our panelists present their work today, please input any questions you have for them in the chat, we'll have a Q&A at the end of this session and give them the opportunity to respond directly to any questions you have so please share them in the chat as we go. Our first speaker today. Next slide is Cara Newport. Cara is the chief executive officer at Phyloli, a National Trust historic site in Woodside, California. Hi Cara. And under her leadership, the organization has flourished as a vibrant cultural center for the Bay Area communities serving over 400,000 visitors each year. Cara has an extensive history and working in leadership positions with a variety of cultural organizations, including public gardens across the country from Philadelphia and Charlotte. And she will be followed by Hector J. Bradesia Hernandez Hector is a conservator specializing in architecture and monuments, and the founding director general of the Puerto Rico Conservation Restoration Center. And he is also an adjunct professor in preservation technology and historic building materials conservation at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. And to round out the conversation, we have the executive director of preservation Austin, Lindsay Darrington. Lindsay brings 15 years of preservation experience to her work at preservation Austin, both as a professional and an advocate. Since becoming executive director in 2019, she has led the organization through its first strategic planning process in seven years and helped shape a new more inclusive mission and vision to guide their work. In the context of the rapidly changing city that is Austin, Texas. She began her career with the not in profit landmarks Association of St. Louis in 2007 and has worked as a preservation consultant with projects from St. Louis to New Orleans. So please join me in welcoming all three of our panelists and without further ado, I'll turn it over to Cara to begin her presentation. Great, thanks. I'm going to just take a second to share my screen here. Okay. And D thanks. Thanks for that introduction. And I was thrilled to see that kind of a balance in everyone's interest in the impact agenda. I was so excited when I first learned about it because I think that it does provide us a wonderful, common community developed framework to to align with and that's always. It always really builds enthusiasm and can support the cause of preservation and all the other causes that go with it so I am going to talk about how finally our organization is leading change so to to frame that I just want to give a quick background. My mission is to connect our rich history with a vibrant future through beauty nature and shared stories and I think those shared stories are really kind of the focus of what I'll be talking about today. And we envision a time when all people honor nature value unique experiences and appreciate beauty and everyday life and I think, you know, for us what has emerged since we developed our vision statement is that valuing unique experiences is the heart of a lot of the efforts that we're making around inclusion and welcoming and engagement. And appropriately by lowly, the name is fight for a just cause love your fellow man, and live a good life Fi L O L I so it comes from this wonderful motto which was Mr. Bourne's credo, and I think is really appropriate for these times in these discussions. We're 654 acres, 16 acres of formal gardens, 654,000 square foot Georgian revival house, we have a board of 2580 staff and operating budget of over 10 million and 400,000 visitors so we're a bigger organization in the preservation world and mid sized nonprofit and some of our other industries. And we cross a lot of different barriers. And we developed our strategic plan in 2019. These were our cross cutting principles and I think they're really relevant to the impact agenda diversity equity accessibility and inclusion sustainability and organizational excellence. So what I'm going to do is just talk about a few ways that we intersect with the impact agenda. First of all, and really important to us as an inclusive movement. We began our efforts in 2019 we were part of the American Alliance of museums facing change initiative. And, and that was really focused on diversifying our board because in the museum world 100% I'm sorry more than 60% of the boards were 100% white when they did their assessment. And then five willies was very close to that statistic so we really wanted to change that. And we wanted to change it in part to align with our existing demographics are regional demographics are very diverse and five willies visitation is very diverse for younger than than folks might imagine with the majority or the central crux of our visitors are between the ages of 1844 years old with families. And we're very diverse in our representation. And we wanted to make sure that we were not only diverse in attendance but we're we were representing that diversity in our leadership and our board and our staff, and in our programming and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that make sure that we're, we're not just diverse welcoming inclusive and and that we're supporting equity among our, all of our audiences. The other national impact agenda item is growing collaborative networks, and this has been part of really for us the diversity and inclusion discussion we recognize we couldn't do this alone. And, and for us it started really actually started with marketing and and really in, you know, investing in the communities that we wanted to invite to come. And that started for us with Chinese language radio and then really grew from there to many languages of advertising, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and, and, and different partners to go along with it but probably one of our most critical partners is the Ramita Shaloni Association. They're the original peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula prior to the arrival of the Spanish they had numbered over 2000 people, but that you know Spanish the Spanish colonials really decimated that the coastal native population and so we only have a very small number of direct descendants that we know about that are engaged, but fortunately we have Jonathan Cordero, who is the leader of the Ramita Shaloni peoples and he's by Lily's indigenous advisor. He's a paid partner and that's really important to us is to pay our partners for their work. And he was really critical in helping us develop our land acknowledgement so this is our entire land acknowledgement by the top portion is is the public portion that we talk about the Lampton tribe that was the tribe that was actually on the filial property. There's a village site here and the Ramita Shaloni people who were in this region. And, and then we, we also had go on to say that we are talking about the impacts of colonialization and then the adverse effect that it had on the indigenous peoples. And in those injustices and what we're doing to be a sanctuary for healing and honoring this historic truth and so this is part of the telling of the unsolved stories but it's also part of the new partnership of providing a space and a place for this conversation. In addition to the Ramita Shaloni, we are also working with Cafe Eloni. And this is the Cafe Eloni leaders who put the cafe together but they also do more than just present great food they came to our property and collected dog bane from our community. So the dog bane was used to make baskets and other tribal materials and, and there's an existing dog bane patch on our property that we believe was cultivated by the original tribe tribe that was here in their village site so it's pretty great to have that continuum. So climate resilience. This is very important to us being in California. We really have a lot of work to do with lands management, sudden oak death, as you can see has decimated our forest, which then causes an increased fire load. This is our backyard. This is the mountains literally behind the historic house at Phyloli and, and so we are really very aggressively engaging in the discussion of climate action. We have a natural resources management plan so that we can preserve the unique ecosystems while revitalizing them and making sure that we protect our historic structures so for us. The climate conversation is starting with land in order to protect and preserve the, the built landscape as well. We've been telling a truer history, expanding the stories to tell that truer history. We also have a cultural landscape report and this ties to our indigenous story but also the Spanish settlers the Mexican rancheros the early American and early California story. We're very much a California story but this cultural landscape report allowed us to really understand our own history, so that we're able to tell that story better so we invested in this as part of our master planning process. And actually, our, our greatest, our greatest connection with the national impact agenda is an engaged public we have over 400,000 visitors, and we really want to do a better job of storytelling so the way that we brought it together this year was with an exhibit called blue gold the power and privilege of water. And while the Bay Area was originally financed by gold water is really the resource that is most valuable to us right now. And so we did an exhibition on this that connects our history to Monica modern climate action water has been always been a discussion on the finally property from indigenous times. That's why there was a village site here that's why the both the Spanish and Mexicans settled in this area. And, and, and so we had that continuum that we can talk about the past present and future with the current drought that we're experiencing. And it gives us that cohesive narrative, and then it allows us to look anew at the stories through our current context which the lens is a little bit different right now. And it really allowed us to engage in our visitors own experience so we did some visitor interaction. These are little droplets on an historic mirror like how can you engage in the water story take a picture of what you can do. And we created interactives within the historic house and use this historic houses story telling platform. We had interactive spaces soundscapes qr codes and we even invited people to come in and take a side on the water the great water debate. And so this is the great debate, we had different newspapers that we created that told the stories from different perspectives from the naturalist perspective of how water came from damned reservoirs down from Mr. And so this is the great perspective who owns spring Valley water company so he definitely was interested from the government perspective of how they wanted to monetize and manage and ensure equitable access to water and from the people side. So at some point in the teens and the early teens, water would have been about $300 a barrel, and, and that's a lot of money, even in modern times so imagine if that's your only access to water and that's how you had to get it. I also talk about the privilege of water that exists today existed historically and exist today in San Francisco housed people have a substandard plumbing, and in California, 88,000 people don't have an operating toilet we don't think about this a lot, but, but people live in this scenario and that's just the how I mean that's numbers for the house community we also have a substantial unhoused community, and, and so the access to water and pump plumbing is really a privilege that we take for granted. And what did we learn from this we learned that for this was an interesting one 48% of our attendees said that the exhibit inspired them to make a change on their own, the remainder said they were already making changes so. So really 100% were were supportive of the ideas. They felt that this exhibit connected to their own lives but a whopping 98% set felt that it made sense for finally to do this exhibition so this was really aligned with our community need. And this also aligns with the study that was just completed by welcoming consulting and an association with the American Alliance of museums if you're not following this it's a great resource. And you can see here that you know no matter where you fall in the spectrum history museum historic site natural history museum. A lot of the frequent museum goers think that climate change and climate action should be a discussion so our exhibition was both history and climate action and aligned and engaging the public. And similar, similarly, they, they think that this is the kind of discussion that should be had. So I think that I think that this is living sustainably. I think that engaging the public and sustainability are really close allies right now so important centers of the national impact agenda. So it's, it's, it was important to get this welcoming study as I was preparing for for this presentation today. So that concludes my contribution and I'll turn it over to Hector. Good afternoon everyone. Nice to see everyone here and then share a little bit of a screen here. Good afternoon, my name is Hector Berdeci Hernandez and I currently lead the central conservation and restoration of Puerto Rico, a new nonprofit regional conservation center serving the Caribbean region. In this presentation, I will discuss our recent efforts to create what is now a conservation center for Puerto Rico, including the learned lessons and approaches from this short experience and how they align with the goals settle in the national impact agenda. But first, we have to consider that the center was founded considering specific complex challenges, while attempting to solve, or at least deal with some with some of them collaboratively. The purposes of this set of challenges are the environmental and climate conditions of tropical climate, which is different from the template climates that we used to deal with no traditional heritage. Also climate change and that which will be severe for the Caribbean region in the coming decades, but also recent natural disasters, both hurricane storms and earthquakes. This combined has an impact on our heritage specifically for the Caribbean region. But also we have to consider the social economic context, and also that is also linked to the research training and practice. We have to consider that they're Puerto Rico there's the lack of economic resources for preservation work and cultural institutions, this cultural institutions, museums, associations are usually often community, often community based. There's also a lack of update public policy tools, lack of technical expertise and personal, but also we have to consider the political complex in Puerto Rico we have language barriers, for example, the majority of the population, we all speak Spanish. So that also prevent us from accessing resources from the US and also technical expertise. Also, awareness of proper management and preservation and which inadequate management or conservation work or preservation work is costly or difficult, or our projects are driven by last minute decision making processes. So it's rather than a planned approach. So that is usually difficult for us to develop preservation projects. Also, there is a lack of research. A lack of research I want to talk about this is more of research targeted to our specific tropical context and specific economic and social context. Existing research often focuses on perspective from disciplines such as social and political history and archaeology, but not preservation. But also we have to consider that there are no academic training and professional degree programs in preservation. There are two specific pilot programs, but universities are dealing with them. They'll not have the necessary expertise or economic resources for to promote these programs. And also, at last, we have tapping access to information and research papers. Even though we are in our early stages, our projects and current work has been guided by the following lessons and approaches, aligning with the goals of the national impact agenda framework. The first approach has been acknowledging and embracing our context, both from a social economic and cultural standpoint. We as one of the main goals for the conservation center. The first step was access assessing available resources both technical and financial, but also we ask ourselves what our degree needs, how we can prioritize. And lastly, we ask ourselves what opportunities do we have for available those three questions or these three aspects were key to developing our current project. The lessons learned from that process have led us to think and ambition the development of an adaptive approach to advance the preservation field in Puerto Rico through the conservation center. This adaptive approach prioritize a field assessment of needs to guide our decision making process and foster impact projects. These projects are based on the needs assessments and relevance. So, we have, I'm going to show today four specific goals within the national impact agenda. And one of them is climate resilience. Different scientific studies point out that climate change disproportionately have impacts the global south. Climate threats include sea level rise, intense periods of rain and flooding, more intense heat and humid environment. Nevertheless, the catastrophic effects of natural disasters, such as stronger hurricanes make our cultural heritage more vulnerable. This climatic phenomena of course on an annual basis. The purpose as an unprofit organization is to assist in the recovery efforts and promote the adaptation straight places to withstand current and future climate impacts. CENCOR is currently developing three specific projects directed to assist the recovery process after Hurricane Fiona. One of them is an emergency assessment program for collecting institutions directed to museums, archives and library in partnership with the Puerto Rico Alliance of museums and the conservation center for the historic artifacts. Additional support has been provided by the American Institute for Conservation. Another project that we are planning is a survey of effective properties in the southwest side of Puerto Rico and an occasional and research program for property ownership partnership with Paraguay. There is also a third project that we got funding from National Endowment for Humanities. It's a climate mapping for cultural heritage project. The NEH has funded a two year project to develop a climate mapping tool that can help cultural institutions and individuals prepare for natural disasters in the coming set of climate change. The project includes the development of original communities of knowledge in the US and CENCOR will host the Caribbean regional community of knowledge and their other projects related to climate change in 2023. Our goal is modernize expanded tools and we at the conservation center seek to transform any project into an opportunity for building capacity, training and promoting professional development opportunities. This is key to fostering technical expertise for the preservation and management of collections and historic buildings. These initiatives must try to complement academia and research. And also we have to consider that the context pushes us to do more with less. Fostering low cost common sense practice such as preventive maintenance using available materials and equipment and evaluating their performance is key to adapt traditional methodologies and practice for Puerto Rico. We have developed several training efforts, one of them was a training project to repair the senate chamber of the capital of Puerto Rico, which we train the staff of the capital of Puerto Rico superintendent's office, and it was focused on a specific restoration and repair works for their mental plastic. This ornamental plaster ceilings were built in 1947. And we trained the staff there, they would know knowledge about preservation, how to repair and to maintain those historic assets. The project was the architectural salvage project on the sixth floor of Normandy hotel is one a story hotel from 1940s. We provide training to architecture and fine art students, and they worked as preservation technicians under supervision of preservation professionals. And there's a third project that is archaeological study for the second respect the school center where we were able to provide training opportunity for young emerging archaeologists, but also, sorry, but also we are focusing on growing collaborative projects for us, establishing external collaboration with individuals and institutions that can help support initiatives is essential. We don't have all the expertise inside so we need to create relations with professionals who can access with their expertise on different projects. Another project right now that we're working on is a prayer with campaign for historic trades on developing history trades educational resources for from K to 12 in Spanish. The project is a heritage stewardship program for paper book and photographic collections in Puerto Rico, this project in partnership with the conservation Center for Art and History artifacts, and we're developing a two year education program for staff cultural institutions for the preservation paper books and photographic collections, which include includes two internships and several professional development workshops. The project that we work is the same then we get the nomination to national register of historic places was a training opportunity for students architecture students at the polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. And we also have a small project in which we host students from the University of Pennsylvania graduate programs or preservation. And that's what we're looking for, we're looking to promote research education awareness of preservation Puerto Rico. And lastly, I wanted to also talk about our strategic outreach and that we have called from heritage to conservation. One of the goals that we have to do, or things that we have to do at the beginning was to identify our audience. We find out that our educational content needed to appeal to the public to promote awareness for addition how to preserve it. At the same time, we wanted to promote the development of technical content to support the needs of emerging conservators and conservation professionals. This was critical to building a local body of knowledge in the field. Next month, a fellowship program that will provide an opportunity for students and emerging professionals to work on small research projects created to the preservation of building sites and collections. This research will lead to developing online educational content in the Spanish language targeting both public and professions. And so we are in the early phases of the center. We learned that innovation is a synonym for breaking through innovations disruptive, but innovation is also adaptation on flexibility. As we start small, the center will adapt at its growth as often preservation projects do the national impact agenda framework is a tool that has helped us to continue developing for current and future initiatives. And now I'm going to pass next speaker. Hi I'm Lindsay Darrington I'm executive director of preservation Austin so I will take one moment to share my screen. Thanks for your patience. Okay. So, again, Lindsay, I'm here in Austin, Texas with preservation Austin we're a city wide nonprofit. Oh I need to actually go to presentation mode sorry guys. I'm sorry D one second. Okay, D I'm sorry, what can can you see my screen. I'm trying to minimize it so I can also see my notes. I can't see your screen and I was seeing it a minute ago. And we also have a backup on our tech side I believe we can pull up the slides if you need. I am thoroughly confusing myself so thank you everyone for your patience as I get this all pulled together. No problem. Okay, I will just swing it without the notes then okay. Alright so the work that I'll be sharing with you all today focuses on really four of the seven agenda goals from the national impact agenda, so inclusive movement, a true history, equitable communities and then modernized and expanded tools. So we just talked about the city of Austin, we were just ranked the fourth hottest real estate market in the country, what this emerging trends in real estate 2023 report termed a supernova. So you can imagine how that feels changes on everyone's mind right now it is what people are talking about constantly. And it is having a city wide impact on us all. The city's population is really growing, and that's coming with pretty transformational changes will rebuilding our highways we're trying to build a new light rail system, and then all of this is superimposed on what is historically been a very segregated city. Local state and federal policies have contributed to this development over the past 100 years, starting with our cities 1928 plan that did a lot of, you know, positive things in putting a planning document into place for the city. We also created a very finite boundary through the center of town, so they could not implement racialized zoning at the time and felt like city planners could get around that by creating a Negro district in East Austin. Thinking okay we'll just provide city services for folks who live in this part of town for black families and will deny them those services elsewhere so this is everything from schools to parks. And so that very quickly shaped the segregated part of town, where black families relocated to to have the same kind of services that the rest of us rely on every day. Mexican American families were not outlined in the plan or we're not cited or called out in this plan, but this had the effect of moving that community into East Austin as well. So you end up with a highly segregated history and this concentrated part of town that holds the history of these communities today. And because of years of systemic segregation. A lot of redevelopment is now focused on that part of town and displacement and erasure of these communities and their history is a real problem that we're facing. So this is the environment in which we are doing our preservation work today as a city wide nonprofit. It's what we are adapting to and it really makes this work of inclusion. It's not a fad it's really essential to doing the work that we do. Our city is facing some existential challenges moving forward, and we really all have to have as many voices at the table for going to do this work well and effectively. So a little bit about preservation Austin. We were established in 1953. So a lot of the work that we're doing involves shifting the gears of this very old organization, and not necessarily changing what we do but changing how we do it. We have some wonderful, you know, long term programming that we've been doing for decades we have a spring homes tour we do an awards program we give away matching grants on a biannual basis and we also do a lot of advocacy. Our mission is that we exist to empower Austinites to shape a more inclusive resilient and meaningful community culture through preservation, and we're small. As of this fall we now have four full time staff and a budget of about a half million dollars, but that's very new we started the pandemic with half of those numbers. So two full time staff and less than a $300,000 budget so what we're doing is using our resources very carefully to to affect change. In 2020 we adopted a strategic plan that we're still implementing now, and part of that process involved listening to 25 stakeholders from outside of the organization, and they provided us with a lot of amazing feedback about our work. What was germane to this discussion was the feedback that we received on diversity and inclusion. And what we heard was that low diversity is a major challenge for preservation Austin that there is a definite perception in our community that we currently serve a narrow affluent and white audience. And people are calling on us to, you know, look at affordability and inclusion and equity in our work. And one of the standout quotes from this from this feedback was I believe in the mission but I think that they have some blind spots with compromising and in regards to race. So for us how do we take that feedback and work to not just change the perception but change the reality of our organization and to really work been pulled back on some of these challenges that we face internally. Let's start by showing what we've done with our leadership. We set a strategic goal of representing Austin's diversity by 2025, and that crosses our board or committees and our membership, but specifically with our board. We looked at our nominating process and decided okay let's look at our current demographics on the board, and compare it to the best city demographic data that we have which at the time was from 2017. So we identified gaps in each nominating cycle works to close those gaps and over three of these cycles we've increased racial ethnic representation on our board from 9% to 41% of voting directors, and we've also looked at generational diversity. So in 2020, we had one board member who is born after 1980 for the record I'm also born after 1980. And then this year about a third of our board, you know, from the millennial generation and younger. And so why is this important. It's essential that we have all voices the table making decisions about our organization about how we allocate our resources, what histories are celebrating if we're going to truly do this work well and represent our city. Having a truly diverse board increases our credibility, it helps us to better understand the community that we serve. And I think this whole process has shown that you don't have to be to us anyway, you don't have to be, you know, have one kind of background or be a certain age to bring really invaluable networks and political connections that have empowered our nonprofit to really do some great things so I'm very excited about where we are. And this really simple pragmatic, what's our goal, let's go to meet it has been very effective for us. Another way that we've used data, we adopted underrepresented heritage as an advocacy priority in 2020. And we started by looking okay well what's designated. You know what what out there is being honored in our city and so this list that we created did not previously exist, we pulled together okay. How many city of Austin landmarks honor which underrepresented groups how many state landmarks how many national register designations. Pull all this together, and then saw what you would probably expect but now we have the information only 16% of all designations in the city of Austin honor these communities that have historically not been represented within preservation practice so the black community, Mexican Americans, their community women. And as we were looking at this and okay what do we do with this data next we had a donor who was like oh you're doing this. I'm excited by that I'd like to give you money to hire to entrance to dig into this work further. And deciding alright where did these two interns start actually received this gift week before going on maternity leave, which was such a wonderful send off but then had to figure out alright what do we do with it next. So we started with the Mexican American community and that heritage because we're in central Texas that the Mexican American presence in this city is so important and so infuses our cultural fabric, but it was represented among designations so only 16 city of Austin landmarks out of over 600 speak to this history. So it was an easy place to start for us. The interns gathered over 150 pages of research on 25 historic sites throughout East Austin and some downtown. The public place public facing side of this project was putting together a self righted bite toward English and Spanish. This was still during coven. So that was an easy way to get people safely out exploring the city. We collaborated with 16 community members on this project, it was really important that the interns were not just going to libraries and doing and you know researching online but talking to people who have lived this history. And then providing their research to people who can use this, something that one advocate told us was you know we know what's important in our community but this is volunteer work for us we don't do this as a full time job we don't have time to go to the library and do all this research so now we have a lot of that so if one of these sites is threatened, someone wants to access it to write an article this is for community use. And I want to point out to you know there are some beautiful buildings among these 25 sites, but a lot of these sites are legacy businesses and murals that have been restored. And so places that really speak to the city's cultural heritage not just capital A architecture. So what we've been tackling this work is looking at how we can support increasing representation on our city's historic landmark Commission, our HLC, we'll call it that, or HLC consistently racks, lacks representation from key communities. We haven't had a black landmark commissioner since 2014, and at a time when the city's black community is really facing displacement and the loss of a lot of important landmarks. That's a problem that needs addressing. And we have contributed to this system in that council offices that appoint these commissioners often reach out to preservation Austin and ask us for recommendations. And we typically are thinking okay who has a preservation background, and we usually tap our, you know preservation bubble, so people with design backgrounds preservation professionals, realtors, those fields still tend to be very white. This is not intentional but this is part of just how we've always done things and so we looked at all right how can we close that gap. And I think that's something we really changed this dynamic. And by our solution to that was reaching out to the National Alliance of Preservation Commission to talk to them about their camp program. This training is designed for seated landmark commissioners across the country, but they were camp and, excuse me, any BC were great partners they were very excited about offering this not to see the commissioners but in our case to people of color who are preservation in the city to help provide them with the really technical skills that they would need to serve on the landmark commission and to serve successfully. So we actually just had this training in October. So we provided this free commission training to 15 members of the Austin community. Our trainers were wonderful and a PC staff was wonderful. Our chair of our landmark commission tended a couple of our staff members attended. It was affordable for us it was $1,500 to provide a two topic training covering you know secretary of interior standards certificates of appropriateness the legal frameworks for the work that the commission does. This was covered for us by a grant from the National Trust for a start preservation, but it was a wonderful experience and you know we had some of the basics that we covered and then people said how can you even have this training without talking about demolitions and now we kind of have a nice round of training. Taking all of this. We have elections coming up all of us do but we in Austin have city council elections so we'll have some vacancies on the landmark commission starting in January. So my goal is to, you know, hope that some of the folks who went through this training will be game to be recommended to city council offices to fill some of those seats. And again really start to change that dynamic on the commission. It's really important not only that we're celebrating diverse histories but helping people be in decision making roles that is that is crucial to changing how preservation is enacted in the city. My last project I want to talk about. We are really fortunate to have amazing partners in the city of Austin, including their start preservation office and they are currently working on an equity based preservation plan to replace our current plan which has been in place for the first time in 2021 and 40 years ago this was a totally different town so we need new tools and a new approach to looking at how we can broaden preservation and make sure it benefits everyone. So we had two board members from preservation Austin serve on a working group that helped shape the first phase of this plan. I have a staff member who served in this working group as well and then we help to advocate for funding for its second phase, which will help us to build a new more dynamic approach to preservation from the city's perspective. And one of the kind of inputs to this plan which have say D participated in as one of our experts. We partnered with the city of Austin to put together a ULI technical assistance panel. So this is a tap. What this basically is bringing together many think tank of experts to tackle a problem. So we're looking at how preservation of historic age housing can lead to affordable solutions because Austin is really suffering as a severe housing crisis. But the cold preservation versus density you can't preserve anything is that's going to prevent us from building for affordable housing, that dialogue which dominates a lot of conversations in this city. Is it helpful. So for us as a nonprofit. I'm not an expert in these things. So this was a huge opportunity to bring, you know, D from the National Trust looking at preservation policy. Other preservation policy experts people who work in affordable housing to look at what programs policies and tools could be really put into place to make sure that the preservation of single family housing can be one of the solutions to this problem. So this report is coming out a little bit later this fall, and I think there will be a lot in there that other cities can look at as well. How do we reduce fees and kind of the background processes that make it easier to demolish than to preserve in this city. How, you know, can ADUs and more neighborhood skill density, create more housing without demolishing neighborhoods wholesale neighborhood resources than preparing trust between the city and between people who are trying to stay in their neighborhoods and are currently being displaced. This whole process not only brought together the panel but involved interviews with I think 40 different stakeholders across the city so is really a data informed approach to providing solutions to a problem. That is really weighing on all of us. And for us, we definitely need to have solutions to that problem to be successful. And I think that I had some conclusions but I know we're at 352 so I will go ahead and wrap up my presentation there. It's all I will say is in closing is this has been a lot of change for us as an organization over the past couple of years and it's really shown me that change is hard and takes time but I'm really excited about where we're going and hope that some others can adapt some of these ideas to what you all are working on in your own cities and organizations. Thank you so much to all three of our panelists today I'm just thrilled with the way that you explored so many different dimensions of not just the national impact agenda but just the broader issues that are affecting our society as a whole and really demonstrating that preservation is occurring, not oblivious to these major societal challenges but directly responding to them in in ways that only preservation can so that's really inspiring. I want to share some of the questions that have come through the chat in just the last few minutes of the session, and maybe, maybe we can kind of start with a broader question here, I'm trying to find it. There are a few questions about research and also community outreach and how that has informed your work. How have. How would you say you've approached research that you've conducted in your organizations, particularly with, I mean I think one common theme in in leading change, especially with in the nonprofit sector is doing a lot with few resources. Could you talk a bit about how you approach research or community outreach if that's more of what you've been focused on, and maybe just have each of you, each of you share a bit about that. Maybe Kara we start with you. Okay, I'll go first. Um, so I think that one thing that is was a bit of a challenge we were working when we were working with the American Alliance of museums on our equity program for example. Um, is that they were trying to create a new template well that means there isn't one right there and and also I think that that's what you find a lot with equity inclusion climate action that heritage sites there's a lot on climate action but it doesn't necessarily directly apply so I think that I don't want to say be research less but I think that there's a lot of extrapolation that has to go into the research, and for us it went more into the community engagement component. Because it's like what are people really doing what's really working what do you really want and, and I think that with a lot of our involvement, especially in our program and our in the water story and the climate action that we're taking. We ask a lot of people what they wanted to hear, instead of using, you know, research that may not be exactly aligned to our own message. And, you know, one of the things that I just attended another conference and you know we, we forget sometimes is that historic sites inherited sites are often primary sources. So, you know, like let's continue to be primary sources I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I do want to comment on our evaluation on our evaluation we do a combination of internal and external and so once we start our programs, we do actually do formal evaluation at that point and then that provides a research basis for others to participate in. Thank you, Hector. Yeah, regarding the research and how we do more with less. Our approach has been at the beginning it's to ask what is already has been done, you know what what's the research that has been done, how we can start thinking, you know, and developing strategies to put that research out there how we can uplift people that don previous research related to preservation, or he started buildings, you know, or a specific, you know, art and collections, and that has been our approach. We necessarily doesn't have the resources right now to, you know, to, to afford, you know, and promote research but at the, but we are developing right now on an initiative. For example, a community by geography for references. How about the university thesis related to heritage to heritage preservation historic sites. What about any publication on different journals that are already out there, and we're getting all that information and put it in one single document. Anyone that are that is interested in, in, in thinking in a historic site or any topic related to preservation they can access that, you know, from a website. So those are ways that is small projects that can have a big impact at the end because that is part of not only a permission but also of the way that we can move forward of the preservation field so. Thanks so much Hector Lindsay you covered research and community outreach a bunch but do you have anything to add. I think using data to affirm or or disprove assumptions is really important, especially as we're talking about change and one thing that I had my presentation took out as we also conducted a membership survey to see who membership is and we're using the we've seen in that survey relative to the city as a whole to do community outreach further so focus groups with those communities to say right what does preservation mean to you what does preservation Austin mean to you and then to try to adapt accordingly. So, trying to build out me date is nothing but we're so small it's just it's not something we've really looked at before but it's proving to be really helpful. Yeah, that is so important you need to establish that baseline understanding through research in order to be able to benchmark any progress that you're making so I think that's amazing that you prioritize that. All right, we have less than one minute left. I'm just going to have one more quick question which is, what is a good first step for other organizations who want to become more inclusive and climate friendly. Anything, anything pop out at you about what helped you take that first step. For me it was developing the allies internally, you know, board staff and and then once you have the allies being willing to try things, you know, try to try new and different things know and know that you have a community supporting you. I'm the same notice Cara, I think for us has been trying to connect with nature conservancy organizations, you know it's not only within the preservation field but we have to step forward and start making collaboration across field. And for us, that has been a great experience. It's a great goal for you want to be and make sure you stick to it because sometimes, especially in this round people will get cold feet and you have to remind them we have this goal and really use that as your guiding star and never, never veer from it and that's how you'll get to where you want to go. That really sounds like the perfect note to end on thank you all so much for representing your organizations and the leadership cohort so well, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the conference thank you for tuning in.