 And I think we have critical mass, so we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome to everyone. This is the very first in our pre-conference workshop series associated with the Pass Forward Conference 2021. So welcome to just do it, grassroots advocacy for preservation. These were developed as a series to provide baseline skills and knowledge that we think will be helpful for participants in the Pass Forward Conference. Though these are free and open to anyone, you do not need to be registered for the conference to participate. These will be recorded and available on the forum webinar library as well as emailed to the address that you use to register for this workshop. We have a few logistics before we begin. First of all, we will be using the Q&A function that's at the bottom of your screen to communicate with the panelists. You can submit questions at any time for the panelists during the presentation and they will be answering them towards the end of the session. If you'd like to communicate with others or share information or experiences, you can use the chat function for that. The closed captioning function has also been enabled. You'll find that at the bottom of your control screen. And then we also ask that you follow our code of conduct. A link to that will be posted in the chat function. And now, without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to our host of the program, Brianna Grossicki. She is a consultant with Ethos Preservation and most recently has been a principal at Place Economics. She's also on the board of NAPC, the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions, and is the chairperson at Preservation Action, the National Grassroots Lobby for Preservation. So, take it away, Brianna. Good afternoon. Thank you, Rhonda, for that great intro. I am coming to you today from my home in Savannah, Georgia, representing Preservation Action. I'm very excited for the group of panelists we have gathered for you today that have taken time out of their busy schedules to share some of their stories, their advocacy tips, and just share their journey of advocating for the places that they love and desire to protect. I know Priya is dropping a few things in the chat, and there will also be several handouts in there, so just pay attention as we move through that afternoon. I first want to introduce our panelists, Ian Tafoya. Ian goes by Mr. Denver, and he is active in Denver Public Affairs, Colorado Public Policy, and Federal Environmental Policy. He has worked for all three branches of local government, working at three levels of American government, run for Denver City Council, and has directed many local and state political races. Currently, he serves as the Colorado State Director for Green Latinos. Ian has received recognition for his work from both the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Denver Regional Air Quality Council, and was most recently named a River Hero by the National River Network. He's a trustee of historic preservation and is well-versed in historic preservation, despite the fact that he wears many, many hats. Ian loves to dance, whether it be at a concert or in politics. As Mr. Denver, he uses the media to uplift locals in the community. You can follow Ian at Believe Ian on all social media platforms. Next up, we have Mr. Everett Fly, a San Antonio native and resident. He's practiced for 40 years as a self-licensed landscape architect and architect. He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He's nationally recognized for his Black settlements in America, research, and projects. If you Google Everett, you'll notice a picture of him with President Barack Obama, as President Obama awarded him one of 10 2014 National Humanities Medals for his body of work preserving the integrity of African American places and landmarks. Everett received one of the 2021 Alumni Awards from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design for outstanding leadership by GSD alumni, underscoring what our students, that our students do not stop being amazing after they graduate. So please to have Ian and Everett with us today. And next up, we have Maya Thomas, who attended the University of Pennsylvania for Graduate School. And while there, she began researching the redevelopment of Shardswood neighborhood and how it may, the redevelopment of Shardswood and how it may impact the neighborhood. That led to a five-year engagement with the Shardswood community to seek out new strategies that do not exclude the grassroots community assets, such as North Philly Peace Park and historic resources like the Docs Thrasch House, which is what she'll speak to you about mostly today. In 2021, the education pavilion at the North Philly Peace Park will be constructed and the Docs Thrasch House project has entered into a deal with a local development firm to revitalize the historic home of African American artist Docs Thrasch. Maya is a Los Angeles native and interested in the intersection of the built environment, the future, history, and art. So glad to have Maya with us. And lastly, we have special guest, Renee Coleman. She is the Senior Director of Outreach and Support for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She manages their grants, awards, trainings, journal, conference content, state and local policy efforts, as well as the Diversity Scholars Program and Advisors Program. In her two decades with the organization, Renee has helped engage grassroots advocates and legislators to preserve the federal historic tax credit to adopt, expand, and protect state historic tax credits. And I'll just interject that she is the state tax credit queen. If you ever need any help, please call Renee. And has worked to gain dedicated funding for maintaining historic resources in our national parks. She offers trainings on grassroots advocacy, state and local policy issues and coalition building across the country. Renee earned her BA in history from the College of William & Mary, also my alma mater, and an MS in Historic Preservation from the University of Vermont. So as you can see, we have a stacked group of panelists here with you today. And at this point, I'm going to wave to Priya. We have a brief poll. We kind of want to find out who you all are and where you are on your advocacy journal. So if you can take a moment to answer our poll question here, hopefully everyone saw the poll pop up and are able to answer that first question about your advocacy level. Okay. Thank you, Priya, for those quick results. And thank you, everyone, for voting. Looks like the majority of you ranked yourselves as an intermediate advocate. That's awesome. And many of you are novice. That's amazing. Thanks for joining us today and equipping yourself with more information and confidence to be able to engage your elected officials. We have another poll question. A little more open-ended. So this one we'd love for you all to share about your advocacy efforts. And if you have a website or social media presence around this, please share it with us in the chat. Awesome. Thank you. Many of you are advocating for a site or historic space, and many of you are advocating for new policy. So we'll keep that in mind as we move forward. And yes, please give us comments and share in the chat so we can network and learn about all your great adventures. Thank you. All right. Well, next slide, please, Rhonda. By sharing this photo of Congress, Alexandria of Castillo Cortez, as a representation of someone who I recognize as being a grassroots advocate who was elected to Congress and has been quite successful in getting bits of legislation passed. The last Republican counterpart I kind of saw in Joe Cunningham from South Carolina, who fortunately was not reelected, but he still was able to get the Great American Outdoors Act passed. But I share these examples to show that folks like AOC are changing the face of American politics. People see her and her ability to come elective, gain a following, and move legislation is really inspiring. And I want you all to be inspired today that you don't have to be a lobbyist with capital L. You don't have to be a member of Congress to make change in your community. Next slide, please, Rhonda. So if you were to Google preservation advocacy or grassroots advocacy, some of these might show up. And I'm sure many of us have participated in some of these activities. Top left is heart bombing, folks for picketing to save Penn Station. The top middle photo is also standing and picketing with signs in Detroit. The top right is folks from the Zion Hill Cemetery in, and hold on, I'm having a noise in my background. Sorry, there's something, an alarm going off behind me. And in the bottom left is Brittany Tella giving a presentation. It's very important that you engage with your local community as well. And across the bottom preservation positive Los Angeles is a study sharing the details about what preservation means to Los Angeles. That is very important that you have information to share and educate your elected officials and build your coalition. And lastly, the middle bottom photo there is a flyer or the congressional briefing at Preservation Action hosts every year where it's important that we get together with our members of Congress and their staff and educate them about historic preservation. Because when you join Congress, you're basically drinking from a fire hose and preservation is just one of those issues and it's our responsibility to inform everyone. So with that, I think I'm ready to hand it over to Ian. And Ian, we'd love to hear from you. Yes, hello. Bienvenidos a todos. It's very nice to be here today. My name is Ian Thomas, to FOIA. And I work for Green Latinos, as you heard, I am the state director for Green Latinos. Green Latinos is a national association and network of Latino environmental justice and conservation advocates. We work on issues ranging from public lands and historic heritage to clean energy, clean water, access to clean transportation, and of course, seeking on corporate polluters, which is really one of my favorite things to do. I'm also a trustee of Historic Denver. Historic Denver is our local historic preservation society. It's been around for 51 years, which is really exciting. And you know, in this role, I've had an opportunity to play a part in preserving spaces and creating the very first Chicano Heritage District in the United States, drafting new diversity and equity and inclusion policies for my organization, getting to participate with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Latinos and Heritage Conservation. There are so many advocates in my community that have been working to protect our communities and to bring us to part of the conversation. I think to this day, I'm still the youngest member to ever be on the Historic Denver Board. They might check me on that, but I'm almost certain of it. And it's a really huge honor to be such a young person. But as you heard, I've been working in public policy for many, many years now. You know, before I was in government, I just want to tell a quick story about some policy advocacy that I was a part of, you know, my birthday's Earth Day. So I really hate trash. And I was involved on campus on bringing composting to a barrier campus, which is a tri-institution. So three universities on one campus is really big. It's right there in downtown Denver and we create a lot of waste. And so, you know, that took advocacy on my campus. And I had a class assignment for Parks and Recreation, actually. A course I took, and they sent me to either check out a rec center, which I had worked out when I was younger, I worked at rec center, so I didn't want to do that or go to a public meeting. And I went to a parks board meeting in the city and county of Denver, and I walked in and there was like two people in the audience and a bunch of people sitting around a table and a mic. And they said, you know what, you get a chance to testify on any issue you want to. And I was a little, I guess, kind of nervous, a little apprehensive to do it, you know, I was just 22 years old. I just wasn't sure. And they said, no, no, you should definitely do it. So I was like, all right, why don't we have recycling in the parks? And, you know, it was kind of scary to go up to the mic that first time, you know, again, in front of, you know, 20 or so people, you know, nowadays I've spoken in crowds of as large as 20,000. And I still get probably just as nervous as I did that first time when I went in from 20 people. But I asked them for recycling in the parks. And, you know, they were like, well, that's not really a budget priority for us right now. And I was like, what are you talking about? You go to the park all the time. This is what people want. So I didn't do, I didn't do official petition. I just made one on a piece of paper. And we start going around campus. And we collected six hundred signatures. We brought them back the next month and the next month and the next month and the next month. And I think after five or six months, you know, we got recycling into the major parks in Denver. However, it's still 10 years later isn't in every park. And so I think that's a lesson to be learned about if you want to see something finished, it's going to take time and then take advocacy and then take people pushing. Okay, so a little bit of background about mine also when it comes to just zoning, land use, that kind of stuff. I did staff the City Land Use Committee. I did get a watch. A lot of rezonings happen. I did get a watch. A lot of historic buildings be designated for demolition. And I saw a few opportunities where people were coming forward trying to save, you know, save facilities to save businesses, to save community centers, you know, to save these buildings. And I've always thought that, you know, it's really a climate issue as well. Of course, adoptive reuse is something that I really believe in. So when I ended up joining Historic Denver's board, not even before I joined the board, this is actually when I was just getting involved, I was living in a neighborhood in this neighborhood called Launama. And it is a site with many, many years of history. Not only was it really the original site of the summer encampments for the Cheyenne Arapaho and Ute and others that traded here in Colorado pre-colonization. It also happens to be one of the first places for the first territorial governor. We saw immigrant communities moving in and in the 70s and late 60s, it played a huge and pivotal role in the Chicano rights movement in my state. You know, a lot of people don't think about how far ago this is, but when my mom was alive, when my parents were alive, we still had segregated parks here in Denver, Colorado. We had parks that said no Mexicans except on Sundays. The police were definitely making it difficult for us to even enjoy our own communities and it led to a lot of civil unrest and it's a lead to change. And so, you know, we really wanted to celebrate that. So the Denver or Historic Denver decided with their dollars to fund an action fund project to put some money into taking a look at our community and talking with us about how we wanted to advocate, what we wanted to create for ourselves in our own neighborhood. And what became very, very clear to me was the historic preservation map for my city actually had the key over the neighborhood that I grew up in that I was raised in. And I can tell you very clearly if you're not on the map, you're not part of the conversation. And if you're not part of the conversation, they're not going to do any work for you. And I learned this again from my advocacy and working in the city council and working in the mayor's office. And so, first of all, we got started bringing awareness to that and that didn't require going in front of a mic that didn't require going in front of city council. That just required me sending an email and then having a conversation with our landmark preservation board. And you know, ultimately, they did make those changes. And now we can see very clearly that there are gaps that are missing in my community for protection. And now my community is gathering together to protect those spaces. So this first Yukano Heritage District just passed my last month. It feels like it was forever ago, but you know, we used some traditional advocacy tools. We went door to door. We offered walking tours. We wrote op-eds in the paper. And we went on the radio. We called up our city council members and these different departments who showed up to public meetings. You know, I know that sometimes when it comes to advocacy, and I know this is called just do it, it really does require me just to show up for the very first time because I can tell you the processor signing up for that parks board meeting years ago is the same as signing up for a city council meeting. There's places where you can try and practice these things. The same thing that I have to do to pick up the phone to call a city council member to schedule appointment is the same thing that I now do with my job with a congress member or with a senator. These individuals work for you and they're very, very accessible. And I think the really important thing to recognize is if we as preservationists, if we as people and protectors of culture don't approach these individuals, then almost nobody else will. And so we have to speak with the strong voice. We have to speak very confidently. And what I do know is that government officials respond to those who are contacting them most. And secondly, big lobbyists with an L that work against us sometimes, especially in some of my other advocacy around, you know, civil rights, social justice, these kinds of things. You know, they are banking on the fact that you don't understand the system. They're banking on the fact that the city councils and members or a congress member is being inundated with information at all times of the day is new contracts, new bills, new resolutions, and they need somebody to boil it down for them. And so lobbyists who are doing this all day every day, what they do is they, they put these fact sheets together, they bring this information together to try to put it in front of them and to make their arguments. And so I really want to say, though, these tactics are the same kind of things that you can use. And I can tell you that you don't have to have the most pretty graphics, and you don't have to have everything spelled right, right? It's your presence and your voice and your passion that really influence the decisions that individuals are making. You know, I think that in this time that we are in right now with preservation in my city is that my city is on turbo mode for the destruction of old heritage and the creation of new buildings, new gentrification, racing to build more housing that really isn't affordable for our communities. And so, you know, when the, when the racial upheaval began last year, this is a new story. I'm going to tell about a case study of another thing I worked on. You know, the violence was very extreme in my community between the police and identified individuals conducting really terrible things and harming people in the community. And after two days, I just had had enough. And so I went downtown and let a group of individuals to clean it up. We cleaned up the mess and we talked about what this is. This was a valve release for oppression, but more work had to be done. And we started calling out Indigenous statues or statues that actually work against Indigenous values and Indigenous rights, right? We were honoring people like Kate Carson who killed more than 2,000 people by marching them to their death, a monument in front of our Capitol that called battles to where actually genocidal acts of the murdering of women and children in our community. And we knew this. And so we called that attention to the statues. The statues started coming down, both by people pulling them down, but also through advocacy from my community. You know, in this case, you know, we called it out and it was in the media. Then we talked to the elected officials and then we started creating our own memes, really just photos of who these people were, where the statues were, and the government pulled them down themselves. But as the dialogue was worsening, I actually wrote a letter with some other Indigenous leaders in my community to our state society, to the historic history Colorado it's called. And I said, you know, this is really a moment in time where we can really be working to educate individuals to not only know your history, but to write the history for the future of what was happening now, what was in the past, how do people feel about things? And we were actually successful in getting the statue brought into the museum and to being used as an opportunity to talk about manifest destiny, as white supremacy to tell the truth about genocide, but to also honor the fact that, yes, the Colorado territory folks did fight on the side of the Union against slavery. And it's about telling both of those narratives and creating a larger context for a story that existed where it was in place than where it is now. And, you know, we continue to do this work, like I said, with the first Chicano Heritage District, there's already conversations about communities and other parts of town who've now have seen this happen and they want it. And so they're calling us and they're asking us for advocacy. And really, what we're just trying to do is to teach people the rules of the game, because it's applicable once you learn it once, you can do it again. And then I guess just lastly, and I see just a couple more minutes here, as you heard in my bio, I've had a chance to work a lot on ballot initiatives. And what I want to say is that they don't exist in every state. And so I don't want to say blankly that you have access to this. But in my community, people often just talk about the three branches of government, right, which is, you know, the courts and the legislature and the executive, but I believe there's really a fourth one. And that fourth one is you and me, that we have the power to get together with others to change things. And in my situation, you know, we can write ordinances to really create anything. If we want to create a more expansive context, right, for cultural preservation, you could do that to a ballot initiative. If you wanted to, which we just sent to the voters, the vote is going to be coming up here, ballot initiative called Waste No More, where we actually disincentivize the destruction of buildings by requiring the recycling of materials, which should be incentivizing adaptive reuse, that is possible. And so, you know, it took me a long time to get here today, but I want to tell you that I was just once a person who walked into a meeting and the skills that I began to use there and then the networking that I began to do there and the people that I met who cared enough to show up on a Thursday night, were the people that I've gone the distance with for creating new policies, new laws in my city. And I believe you can do it too. And you can pick up that phone right now and you could do the same thing. You could go online, you could sign up for an email list so that you start to know when there's opportunities to engage with their leaders. You could just send an email saying, I care about this issue. I want to start a dialogue with you. And I bet you they write you back. And I know it just seems like it's a really big barrier, but it's not. And I think you're going to hear a lot of stories coming up now about advocacy. And I'm looking forward to the questions. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. I was very inspiring. I loved your quote, be on the map. And golly, you've got 600 signatures on your your first advocacy initiative. Impressive. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. And with that energy, we're moving on to Everett Fly. And Everett, I don't know that I see your video yet. There you are. All right, Sarah, take it away. Thank you, Brianna and all of you who are attending. I have two examples that I want to use as a reference. One is a whole community and the other one is a particular component of a settlement, just as an example, you know, for your discussion. Go ahead to the next slide, please. The first example that I want to use is it's a whole community. It's Hobson City. It's Calhoun County, Alabama. It's about 62 miles east of Birmingham, Alabama. It was settled in 1868 as a black enclave right outside of Aniston. In 1889, one of the first churches, the Rising Star Methodist Church, relocated to the site, which would become Hobson City. And in 1895, the Aniston Courthouse fire destroyed the records. Aniston is the county seat of Calhoun County. And then in 1899, the town of Hobson City incorporated, make a note of that 1895 Courthouse fire because it not only affected Hobson City, but all of the other property owners and landowners, because the documentation was destroyed. Next slide, please. And so Mayor Alberta McCrory called me and asked if I would help her find records so that they can verify that Hobson City existed because they were not able to get federal grants. They weren't able to get county support and services because folks in the county said, well, you don't even exist. You should be part of Aniston and we'll tell you what to do. But lo and behold, we started researching and this is where the the unique tools come in. On the right is an 1895 Fire Insurance, Sanborn Fire Insurance map. And we had to go to the National Archives, the Library of Congress in Washington to find this map. But the area there in yellow, sure enough, it shows Hobson City. And from there, we were able to use other records like census maps, United States Post Office records. And we were even able to go to Tuskegee University and look at some of their collections and find records so that we could prove that Hobson City existed and that it had incorporated, it had incorporated as an autonomous community. Next slide, please. A couple of slides from Hobson City, the school there, the CE Hannah School there on the left, it's a break building when you go there now. But the census records and the school records helped us understand that it started out as a Rosenwald School. And on that site, and it grew to be the Hannah School, industrial school, you know, with the brick facade and kind of the modern appearance. The slide on the right is sure enough, that's the current rising star Baptist Church, United Methodist Church, excuse me. And it's on the site that was originally established. And then just to the right, you get a sense of what the residential quality and character is of Hobson City. And it gave us some names that we could research and piece together kind of like a community genealogy. Next slide, please. On the slide on the right is the Town Cemetery in Hobson City. Many people overlook these cemeteries, African American cemeteries especially, because they're in Hobson City, this one's protected, but in rural communities, as it has appeared in the recent news stories, many of the African American communities have been lost and overlooked, desecrated, built over. But the cemetery in Hobson City gave us lots of clues, names of families, names of residents, even professional people. And then on the left is the City Park, the JR Stripland Town Park, it's 17 acres. A lot of times we don't think about recreation space in minority communities and communities of color, but the Stripland Park was part, one of the original components of the town. And by doing research on the park, we were able to find out that they would hold festivals and events, and that there was actually a song written called the Hobson City Stomp. So we even use music history to document that. Go ahead, please. The other example that's a specific component, the Hockley-Clay Family Cemetery here in San Antonio Bear County, Texas. In 1870, the property was sold to Henry Jackson. On the deed, he is identified as colored. In 1875, Jane Warren, the mother of Alonzo Hockley, filed a cattle brand associated with that property, and we were able to find the brand certificate. I'll show you that in a moment. In 1884, the property title was transferred from Jane, the mother, to Alonzo, the son. And in 1908, Jane Warren dedicated land for, and it says in the deed, a colored cemetery, and conveyed the deed to her children. Next slide. In 2015, the gentleman there on the right is Major Mike Wright. He lives in the neighborhood, and he was walking back and forth. There's a school to his right, your left, and he kept seeing this overgrown lot. And Major Wright couldn't figure out who owned this property and why it was so overgrown. And the image on your left, you can see how overgrown it was. Next slide. Major Wright, these are a couple of documents that he found, and that's his red handwriting there. That's the deed for the cemetery. And then he was able to find, by going down to the, we call it development services, the subdivision office, he was able to find this plat. And sure enough, you can see that the cemetery is clearly labeled on the plat, and you can see the modern subdivision of the lots around the cemetery. Additional map research told us or documented that all those lots around the cemetery were originally part of Jane Warren and Alonzo's farm. It was 60 acres. So all that land was around the cemetery was the Hockley family cemetery. The cemetery is about two, two and a half acres. Go ahead, please. We were able, working with volunteers, working with the city council, I even went, in San Antonio, we're fortunate to have an official office of historic preservation. And within that office of historic preservation, there's a cultural historian, but there's also an archaeologist. Well, now we actually have several archaeologists. So I was able to get the archaeologists involved because I had the deed. And then we were able to work on clearing, that's a drone aerial there on the left, we were able to work on clearing the cemetery so that the archaeologists could look at it more closely. But then we were able to get, I was able to get a friend of mine who is a certified land surveyor to do a boundary survey. And that's his survey there on the right. And I can't tell you how important it is, you know, even if you have the deed, it's very important to come back and do the modern survey work so that you know exactly where the property lines are and where the boundaries are. But the drawing on the right shows the cemetery proper, the kind of gray or tan line is an easement that was part of the original Hockley and Clay family farm. And they intentionally set the cemetery off from the road. It was that we figured out from oral interviews, it was a defensive move to protect the cemetery. In other words, they were afraid if they had put the cemetery right on the road, it would be desecrated or torn up even sooner than it was. But on that drawing on the right, you see an area that shaded yellow and an area that shaded blue. Those two properties were residential properties that had encroached into the cemetery. And the encroachment is shown here in this kind of purple or pink, dark pink. Again, without the survey, we would not have been able to even know that there had been an encroachment. And without the survey, we would not have been able to negotiate to get the land back, the 6,000 square feet. Go ahead, please. Through oral interviews and census work, we were able to find these two gentlemen here on the left. This is Seldar Clay. He's in his 90s. And this is Bell Mill Clay. He's in his late 80s. So these two brothers, Jane Warren, was their great grandmother. And they used to go out to the cemetery when they were young boys and help bury folks because people could not afford to have the funeral home provide these services. This site is about 12 miles north of downtown San Antonio. And so I was able to convince them to meet with me. Once we got the cemetery, the site cleared, I was able to convince them to meet with me. And sure enough, the clearing left the two original gate posts there and there that they remembered. And then they began, from that point, they began to describe what the cemetery looked like, their experiences helping with the burials and so forth. The slide on your right is a copy of the livestock certificate of Jane Warren, 1875. Here in San Antonio, we have what we call the Bear County Spanish Archives. And the archives keeps records like this as the name implies from the days of Spanish settlement and occupation. So there are livestock and cattle brands in that collection that date to the 1700s. This one happens to be 1875, but it does say Jane Warren when you read here and then it gives, interestingly enough, these certificates described where in the county the brand is going to be used. So that gives you a cross-reference. You can match the map or the property description with the cattle brand. Go ahead, please. We were also able to, fortunate to be able to get the UTSA, University of Texas at San Antonio Center for Archaeological Research, to do an archaeological report. And then we were able to get Texas A&M from College Station to bring two classes to do lidar scanning, surface scanning, and ground penetrating radar scanning. But I included these two photographs. The one here is the UTSA, the cover of the report, which is a really great report. Not only were they able to tell us about where they thought the burials were because the markers had been desecrated, but they were also able to give us quite a bit of insight as to the evolution, how the cemetery evolved over time. And so they were able to find this series of aerial photographs from 1929 to 1986. And on one of the photographs, this structure shows up here, and it turns out that that was a school. And so that gave us another clue, and we were able to do research on the school and piece together the story of this land as a settlement. So again, think back to what I was telling you about Hobson City. It had a school, it had a church, it had a cemetery, and in Hobson City's case, it had a public park. In rural areas, and many times you will find a field that the community might have used for public gatherings and get-togethers. We didn't find that here, but we did find the school. Go ahead please. The two sites that were where we had the encroachment, one landowner had built a shed on the part of his land that encroached. And we literally, you can see the workers there, in order to be careful and respectful, we literally hand moved that shed and put it in its proper legal location. The property on the right, the landowner had, that was his backyard, and he had landscaped it and put in grass and an irrigation system. And so I arranged to have those properly, the irrigation system properly cut off and carefully replaced the fence so that his backyard wouldn't be destroyed by this recovery. Go ahead please. There you go. So this slide shows you once the, this was the illegal fence line here and the illegal fence line here. And in the slide on the left, you can see how much land roughly was encroached. And then this is the new fence. And you heard Ian's presentation before, we actually, in addition to working with the City Office of Historic Preservation, I had to work, this took five years to get this recovered. And I worked with the City Council, two succeeding City Council people, the Community Homeowners Association, the neighbors, and it took the five years to negotiate with these two property owners and convince them that this land actually belonged to the cemetery. And we would not have been able to prove that without all those aerial photos, the oral history, the archaeology work, and so forth. Go on, you can go on to the next, to the last, I think, there you go. So this was an exercise in being persistent, being collaborative and team-oriented, being authentic, without the authentic documentation, we never would have been able to get this property returned back to the, to the family. We use different types of resources, sources and resources. Some thought of as, you know, conventional for new construction, things like the survey. But we were also creative in using the lidar and the ground penetrating radar. We were respectful of the neighbors. And I put be brave on here at the bottom, because at times it seemed like this wasn't going to happen. And I tell people a lot of times that this is not for the faint of heart, which I'm sure many of you know. So that concludes the two examples. And I'll look forward to talking with you in the question and answers. Thank you, Brianna. Well, thank you, Everett. I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor here. What a great example. And those photos are just stunning. So thank you for sharing those. And a reoccurring theme I'm hearing from Ian and also from Everett is be on the map. That's so important. Well, next up, we have Maya Thomas. He's coming to us speaking about Philadelphia, but you're in Los Angeles, I believe, right Maya? And if you're ready, I'll hand it to you. Thank you. So I learned about and started researching Docs Bash's life here in Philadelphia as part of the studio project and graduate design school at the University of Pennsylvania. I learned about this neighborhood and his life and became fascinated next slide. And so I kind of briefly want to go into what kind of brought me brought me here five, six, seven years later. So in 1890, Docs Bash was born in Griffiths, GA. He was born in the segregated South. He was one of four children with his mother, a failure working six days a week. The Dash family lived in a former slave cabin. And Docs memories of the South play a major role and later in later in his life and in his art. Docs Bash left after the fourth grade. He left school after the fourth grade and worked as a sharecropper, most likely on a cotton farm to help support his family. And by age 14, Docs was taking art classes and left the South for better opportunities by 1908. From 1910 to 1917, there's a great migration that's happening from the South where African Americans are leaving the South and droves and Docs is one of those people. He hits the road and travels around the country as part of a travel involved bill act. And during the year, during these years, he's continuing his art and studying through mail correspondence. After arriving in Chicago, Dash's work becomes a work as an elevator operator and goes to art classes in the evening at the Art Institute of Chicago. And then by 1917, he is joining up with one in that war effort at that time. During World War One, he's actually wounded and leaves service and comes and returns to the United States to perform again around the South. Next slide. After he also returns to the Art Institute of Chicago and he's studying full time after his injury. He finishes in Chicago, plans to continue to travel and document his daily life. He arrives in Philadelphia and finds a home in Shardswood, which is in North Philadelphia, and he joins the graphic sketch club to learn printmaking and find a community of talented Black artists and musicians leading to the Harlem Renaissance in Philadelphia, based in Shardswood and Columbia Avenue. This is the same time that the Great Depression happens after the stark micro crash in 1921. It's a tough time. Doc Stash finds opportunities at commercial signmaking and small printing. When the federal programs to help out local artists go into effect, he joins the Federal Print Workshop, part of the WPA. Starting in 1931, Doc Stash begins to have his art exhibited and sold at many galleries and museums. He continues to study printmaking techniques and operates his own sign shop on Ridge Avenue. To give you a little more context of the neighborhood, he also starts the Pyramid Club, which is a lucrative and prestigious African-American club for professional African-Americans that come and join and talk about the daily life. At that time, it's formed in 1937 and it soon becomes a premier social club. Stash was one of the first artists invited to join and became very active. You can see one of the printing fires that he actually made, and this is a way for the Pyramid Club to actually make money and revenue through advertisement within its pages. Next slide. Next slide. So, this is Doc Stash working with local artists as well. And the pamphlet I was referring to is also on the right of this page. Next slide. Doc Stash becomes famous and is also an inventor of a carborondum mesotent process of printmaking. He invents this with two other artists during his time at the fine print workshop and it started on 311 Broad Street. It's a carbon-based abrasive to burnish copper. He burnishes copper plates and creating an image that can produce a print in tones ranging from pale gray to deep black. And so, they're black and white images that he's creating. Next slide. To kind of implement and talk about daily life. He does city scapes. He does portraits. Next slide. And this carborondum mesotent print. And becomes quite famous for it. During this time as well, there's a second occupant. After Doc Stash's life and death, he sells the house to a local activist named Shaq Mohammed. He moved to Philly in 1954. He's an active Muslim activist working with Malcolm X. There is a local uprising that happens in the 1960s during the summer months, and Shaq is actually indicted and charged. And since there'll be more, who you see on the right is who defended him during that time. Next slide. And so, the house actually has two lives. One embedded in the life and work of Doc Stash. And then the second in the 1960s and the movement for Black independence and rights. Next slide. And this kind of established, and looking at this history, this kind of established one of our first goals, and looking to save this house. This house was sitting empty and banked for more than 20 years under a tangled title, meaning we couldn't find out who the owner was. There was no whale, and there were several children that were left. And so, one of the goals we needed to establish when working with this project is to re-establish a community-centered hub for arts. Doc Stash left this huge legacy in this community, and we wanted to kind of bring that back into Sharswood, and thinking about this house, and the process that we wanted to think about. Next slide, please. So, we moved to Sharswood in that neighborhood, and what it was like. Next slide. Historically, in 1925, this is what the neighborhood would have looked like for Doc Stash. At the top of this slide, you have local residents, you have a pyramid club, you have his house at the top. The checker club, which is a local kind of juke joint place. The Pearl Theater, which is no longer there, which was a vaudeville act where local artists would come and kind of perform, and obviously, and maybe show up at the checker club after work after performance. The pyramid club was a little bit lower down to the right. You had Athletic Square, which was the home of American baseball, and the founding of it, and you also have a Gerard College, which was a private college founded at the start of the early start of Philadelphia for orphaned white boys to attend. If you go to the next slide, you will see Sharswood today. There's a lot of teeth missing. There's a lot more land that's there, and then some of the resources that are there are the PHA headquarters. The pyramid club is still standing and locally protected now. The Doc Stash House is next to the Cecil B. Moore Library. There is a super black development that used to be a housing project created by PHA, and then Gerard College still being there, and is still a local private elementary school and high school for local students. Next slide. This diagram shows the extent of the vacancy around 2018. Many of these properties are acquired at various times through controversial means by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. While not stopping gentrification by development by any means, these acquisitions had an effect on curbing the rate of development in the area. Because there is a super black, which is number three on this map, PHA is one of the largest land owners in this section of the city. Everything that's in red, it was a vacant lot at that time in 2018, and PHA decided to introduce a new redevelopment plan and destroy the housing block that was there, and that's kind of how we entered into this project. At the time, they took over a lot of lots, kind of implicated and got rid of everyone that was either bought out or took over land in that neighborhood, and it's very, very controversial and also sad at the time, because lots of people are moving out. If you can go to the next slide, please. This was under a lot of development pressure surrounding that neighborhood, so firm out to the bottom, Temple University in that area to the right on your screen, Brewery Town to the left, and then Sharpie mentioned an upper corner. There was significant pressure from adjacent neighborhoods at the same time that we're experiencing rapid growth. Clearly, and obviously, Sharpie was going to be next, and so this put a lot more pressure on us and thinking about that house and how to save it, and what that legacy of that neighborhood was going to be under this pressure. If you can go to the next slide, please. So this is a close-up of some of the significant streets there. Ridge Avenue was a major thoroughfare, and then Cecil B. Moore used to be Columbia Avenue. It was renamed for the lawyer that protected Shah Mohammad and had an illustrious career in civil rights as well, and it was an in-the-bone right. So Docks Bash is situated right here. This is the public library right here. The middle section, so the Docks Bash house is yellow. The public library is this magenta blue. The purple house you see is a Malcolm X residency, when Malcolm X came to Philadelphia, he stayed here and opened up a new mosque. And then the green building is a recreation center and health and wellness center, and then across the street in a kind of yellowish as well is the MLK rec center that are all options and current assets in that neighborhood that were strengthened in neighborhood as far as keeping the residents there and providing services for those residents that were there at that time. Next slide, please. So specifically zooming in on the block where the house is located, it's on 24th and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. It's the elements that currently make up the current block. The first floor of the house is historically operated and independent from the upper floors. It was a commercial residence at the bottom and then Docks Bash lived at the top. In 2018, the house had been vacant for at least 15 years and received the unsafe structure violation from L&I. At this time, the problem of unsafe conditions was compounded by the tangled title. The house had no clear chance for a ownership and this combined with the taxable, the legal team made it difficult to repair or even inspect. Eventually, the house came up for share of sale, giving hope to the opportunity for something to happen. The house was unfortunately by sight unseen by a small New York developer and this happened around 2019. Locally, the local historic designation from the city and the efforts from the preservation community kept the house from being outright demolished in order to sell a property. The owner had the first address the violations from L&I. That gave us a little bit of time to think about and negotiate. Because this developer was from out of town, probably did not want to deal with all the legal stuff to make this safe, I think his option was to, he wanted to flip it and had no idea what condition this house was in when he bought it. Next condition. This is what the current condition of the structure is. You will see most of the house and the fabric is gone after sitting for more than 15 to 20 years. The rear has been, was the tree fell on it. So many things has happened to this house. And then the effort, basically the effort to restore this house was going to be a great and it's amountable and trying to find a partner who wanted to take on a house that had so much damage and to restore it. And we looked at this as an opportunity to kind of present to local developers. Next slide please. So these are some of the historical features that we pointed out. This is basically researched in a separate studio two years later by a group of grad students. The Arnait facade was one of the biggest aspects of selling points for us to discuss and kind of think about saving. You can see the pointed out terracotta frieze, the cornice, the wood, the storefront in the front with all this glass, with the leaded glass and then the terracotta with the reliefs looking there. You can see all the different really interesting details that this house still maintained despite the damage that is sustained in the back. Next slide. And with that information and knowing all the history, knowing how historic this neighborhood it was itself for the creative arts, we, and not knowing if we could say this house, knowing that with all the conditions that were there, we kind of took our show on the road and went out and talked to the local neighbors and have done several, we call them shards with dashes, where we sat down with the local community and kind of talked about the history of the neighborhood, talked about their oral histories. We were lucky enough to have a local artist group in the neighborhood that was recording oral history. So we had our meetings there when it was called Community Futures Lab and we were able to talk and go through the history. People were able to really engage with that history. Folks have a lot of history and knowledge of Shakhman Hamid, the second occupant of the house and remembered him because he was a local businessman and owns most of the houses on that corner and up and down Ridge Avenue. He had several businesses. So it was very, very wrenching and it kind of raised the awareness of this building and its status and was helpful to us in engaging and getting more people involved. Next slide. These are the several posters that we had. Next slide. And so some of the next kind of goal that we had was to recover this port in memory and part of Sharswood because it was one of the last remaining structures in this neighborhood that talked to that history of artistic expression and also the civil rights movement. At that time, there's another building that's still standing and that's the Checkers Club. But this was actually just so perfect to kind of talk about because of this artist's life and work. His work is still recovered all over the place and collected all over the place, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So it was really super important to still have the structure standing and be in the neighborhood and have this tangible object there. Next slide. So we started thinking about the preservation of the house and what were the tangible means that we can actually get this done given the history of the conditions and the barriers that we saw with this project, the integrity. And we weren't at the onset, we're really sure if we could save this house at all because of all of those problems and we worked and under the operation of thinking about what are we going to do if this house is not saved? That was our first question and how we're thinking about it and kind of work backwards from there with the best case scenario being where we are today. So this is an example of the things that are no longer there. The Pearl Theater is a historic theater that showed you where it was, but this is a picture of it and then there's also murals that are all around the neighborhood recording that history and for memory. Sorry, next slide. So this is a map of LMI demolition since 2007 and then the properties listed either on the National Historic Preservation and the local register. And you'll notice the concentration of where those dominations and protected properties are and if you look at the map on the right, they're down in the lower part, which we call Center City, which is the kind of most affluent area. And if you look further up on the map a little at the top, this is where we're working with the Dachshund House. So there are a significantly lesser number of people of houses that are historic and saved and there is direct correlation of who the African-American folks that are living there, Latino communities, there's a significant less amount of properties that are saved. So reported by the National Trust of Philadelphia, lack significantly behind its pure cities and number of properties listed on the local and national register, only 2% of the Philadelphia register and 4% of the national register. These properties have had these skewed towards Center City and surrounding areas, parts of the Northeast when compared to demolitions. It's also an inverse relationship, putting the areas that are least protected at the greatest risk of demolition. While efforts are underway to conduct a city-wide survey, it is still important to keep this in mind as preserving efforts are being put forth. And at the same time, a lot of these areas are historically disadvantaged neighborhoods that have been impacted from redlining and other discriminatory practices throughout the 20th century. Next slide. And then we also have a fading legacy with so much development going on. There used to be a Dachshund Mural, but you'll see half of it is covered up because of a new development that came on. And now it's actually completely covered with a new mural. And so that legacy was completely being threatened in this neighborhood if we could not save this house. So we really, we thought about that really deep and hard about what are some other ways we could preserve this house if that fabric is not saved. We looked at other case studies, if you can go to the next slide. Some of the inspiring things that we learned about was, of course, the case in Chicago with the Astor Gates and the Rebuild Foundation and some of the work he was doing there to revitalize the community and not looking specifically at houses, but looking at communities as a whole when we're saving these houses. So this is the listening house and the archive house that he refurbished and kind of brought in, brought back as community assets. Next slide. And then we also looked at the Madame C.J. Walker House of the L'Ouaro, which was purchased by the New Voices Foundation. We looked at this. This is like pristine historic preservation here, luckily. But we looked at this because it's being developed and into a new incubator for new African-American women-owned businesses. So it's stabilizing structure and planning for future uses and thinking about how they can help and support other women of color and entrepreneurs in their work. So we liked that aspect of thinking about it. And then next slide. And then we also looked at the Project Row Houses, which started so long ago by a few artists and then kind of revitalized the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, which they maintained the structures of the row house, brought in single mothers and gave them resources with those houses. And then also started an arts program and arts gallery in that neighborhood. And now the Third Ward is the up-and-coming neighborhood, which they're working to kind of help and revitalize, continuing their mission. Next slide. So we're hoping in the same light as these structures and other presidents that the Dock Slash House can contribute to the long term stability and economic recovery of the African-American community in Shardswood and developing new services and rural material assets and building generational wealth and equity in this neighborhood with explicit support for African-American, African-American women-owned land businesses and startups. And so we were lucky enough to kind of find and resource a local developer that had been in that area for more than 30 years who had been doing this for a very long time. And we, after the share of sale, when we lost the house, the owner was then able to sell because he was not interested in saving his house and going through L&I and doing all this stuff. He was able to sell next slide to our current development partner, which is Beach Interflex, which we have entered a deal to kind of help. We raised $100,000. We're anxiously waiting, planned with the architects that they've hired and bringing this back into a community arts community hub. With that $100,000, we'll be able to pay the rent of a few artists to come and do a residency. And this house month is done for a number of years, for about three years. So we're super excited about this work and where we are now with this process. I'm going to leave that there with any questions. Thank you, Maya. That was awesome. It's very inspiring to see that this was a graduate school project for you that you couldn't quite quit. You know, you kept going as Everett said, you have to be persistent. So it's awesome to see the, to hear that you've secured the developer, local developer and $100,000 that you sourced. That's awesome. So now we had hoped to turn to a panel discussion. And I know there's quite a few questions in the chat. So let me pull some of those up. Everett, I know you answered the first one, several of them. I'll just read quickly, unless everybody, Priya, can you tell me if everybody can see all the answers to the questions? I think the ones that you all answered already, they can't see, but all the speakers should be able to see the actual questions, but I would read them out again. Okay, awesome. Good to know. Okay, so Betsy had asked Everett if it was necessary to file a civil suit against the encroached owners to recover the land of the Hawkeley Clay Cemetery, and Everett answered that they were able to take their certified land survey to the city. And the city ordinance very clearly says they do not allow encroachments. And so the city was the enforcement arm there, and they did not have to file suit. That's great. Vanessa also asked Everett about any visible grave markers, and were they able to determine how many people were buried there? They believe there were at some point more than 50 graves. And through oral history, know that there are more markers, but those have been vandalized over time. And unfortunately, the ground pen trading radar was inconclusive. Let me go back here. Gail asked, what type of preventative measures should be put in place to monitor historic properties during and after really bad weather using IDA as an example? Maya, since the property you were working on is open to the elements, how did you all approach that? Was that part of the 100,000 that you raised and working with the previous owner to secure it? Yes. So the previous owner had to address some of those issues on a basic level. And then with beach interplex, of course, they don't want to lose any more fabric. So they've currently protected the building. It's covered. There's a fence around it. And so those things have been addressed. Expeditions, yeah. Great. That's good. Again, kind of using the city to force the hand there as a theme. Anne had asked Maya, if they were able to apply for grants, do they have to take ownership of the building? Maya replied that their partner has a nonprofit arm and they were able to apply for grants that way. Very smart plan. Ian, this question is for you, I believe. Lynn talks about how they're trying to fight demolition of naturally occurring existing original housing and replacement with it of overpriced, unaffordable, big developments. And they haven't been successful. They've been labeled as elitists. Any suggestions on new advocacy approaches? Well, that's a really good question. I think that this is something we encounter, of course, in my city, in particular, the yes and my backyard groups that have really organized, making the arguments that all housing leads to market readjustments that are going to be providing more affordability and attainability for communities. That just simply hasn't been true. They've built, built, built, built impacted communities. And yeah, affordability has not been found there. So I think debunking that myth that just building leads to affordability is a huge component. You know, here in my city or in my state, we are literally on the verge of implementing our first inclusionary zoning to require apartment buildings to include affordability. And so then I think in some ways that may strengthen their arguments, right? That you're removing these homes to create more density and it is going to have affordability. That's going to be hard. But it's also a good thing to actually have a tunable housing, of course. But I think that part of this is you have to be doing advocacy kind of all around, not just responsive. And I think it's when people show up only when there's a demolition permit that often those conversations come into play. And so just as an example, you know, historic Denver was trying to defend a restaurant that had, oh, I'm going to forget the type of it. But the Googie, I think is what it's called, the kind of style that's related to car transportation from the 1950s. And it was on a car door with housing where housing would have made a lot of sense for buses and that kind of stuff. And so, you know, of course, the arguments were easier to be made against us in that situation. But now here we are creating the first Chicano heritage district, right? And so I think that creates space for these conversations. And then, you know, I think it's really, really, really important to be having a conversation about diversity and inclusion principles within your own organization and representation within whomever is trying to save a space. Because, you know, you go into a community with leaders that look and come from their community, the arguments about being called the leaders, I think, are kind of broken down, right? And so I guess my answers are, you know, advocacy in more places and more diversity, I think can really lead to that. And then, like I say, debunking these myths that just because you build it doesn't make it attainable. Great advice, Anne. Gail, you asked a question about paperwork for commissions. I am going to put my NAPC board member hat on here and suggest that if you're not a member of the National Alliance Preservation Commissions that you should join, they have a great listserv and a lot of resources, some for free on their website. And yes, all commission paperwork should be public domain, but you might have to submit a FOIA request for them. So just keep that in mind. Cheryl asked Everett, did you find having the deed was key to receiving assistance from the city? Everett, do you care to answer this live? If I could find the right buttons. There we go. Thank you. Can you see me? Yes. Go ahead. So the key to getting the city involved was having the historic deed and the certified land survey. Because the surveyor was able to, now with the modern GPS equipment, they were able to pinpoint the corners of the property within a quarter of an inch. And so once we had that certified land survey from a professional surveyor and we could show that it matched the original historic deed, then yeah, that's when the development services office said you have a case and we'll support you because the city ordinance, the subdivision ordinance does not allow neighbors to encroach on one another's property. So was that those two pieces, the deed and the modern survey? Thank you, Everett. More questions rolling in here. There's two related to Philadelphia here. Carl asked about fillets, anti-demolition laws, but not of money to survey properties that are under development pressures. That's still the case. And Maya, the second one was asking about the properties adjacent to DOC's thrash. Oh, yes. Having the money to actually survey their properties is a problem. There has been a recent initiative to actually start going out and surveying historic properties in different neighborhoods on a city-wide level to kind of make sure that their databases are correct and they have stuff they have, and they also have things that they've missed. So there is a current effort to do that, noting that in hindsight they've missed a lot of things. The plans for the two adjacent properties, the dream is to also acquire those two properties because they are significant to the second owner in a second period of significance for the civil rights movement. There are finding the owner and who those people are is just the matter of time if we can can also acquire those properties. Thank you. Well, I want to be careful about our time here. So I think at this point keep adding questions to the chat and we'll see if we are to the Q and A and we'll see if we can get to them at the end. But I do want to shift over to our special guest in Renee Coleman. And while we're waiting for the slides to come up here, I just want to point out that the stories that our panelists have showed and the passion that they show and their advocacy tips of working together and using the traditional preservation tools like documentation, listing on a register and bringing those forward are so important because those are the stories that are so useful when lobbying for historic preservation and advocating for your cause. So that is the big link here with Renee and moving to a larger scale of preservation advocacy here. But do not think that you saving and documenting the history of one house isn't important. It absolutely matters. And those are important stories to share with with our elected officials at any level. So I just wanted to make that connection and pass it over to Renee. Thank you Brie. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with everyone here today. I'm going to talk a little bit about an opportunity that we have as part of a conference which is going to be meeting virtually with members of Congress and their staff. So we have actively recruited somebody from each state who will help organize those meetings. This is an example of what what Brie is talking about in terms of taking the advocacy experience that you have and moving it to to inform your elected officials at the congressional level. So this is an example from the National Main Street Conference and for those of you who might not have ever been to one, I liken it to a cross between a political convention and a Baptist revival meeting. It is quite an enthusiastic crowd as you can see and you really feel the sense of excitement when when you're with all of these folks who truly believe in the cause of Main Street. And this was an opportunity for folks here who had been advocating at the local level on their Main Streets to thank members of Congress for continuing the Federal Historic Tax Credit. So we did a video with all the folks in the crowd yelling out, you know, thank you to Congress. So I wanted to show that the power of everyone coming together and taking that expertise that you've developed at the local level is very powerful. So next slide please. So we invite you to join us at Past Forward doing this same kind of advocacy. And I've put the link up there where you can register and the best rates as we found out are before October 5th. That's the early bird rate ends October 4th. And as I mentioned, we have somebody who for each state has agreed to help folks who register for the conference have these meetings with their congressional offices. And there will be lots of help along the way. There'll be talking points provided. And so it'll take kind of all of the stress out of it for you as a participant if you want to do that. So if you're interested, please sign up to attend the conference and check that box. Next slide. So I just wanted to share with you some of the top advocacy tips that I have learned the hard way. And sometimes it's always best to have somebody else experience the pain. And then, you know, you can gather the lessons learned. As Priya has just put up in the chat box, we have an advocacy toolkit that we've pulled together. But interestingly, we also have several webinars that were done with a segment of each toolkit. So it's not me telling you the, you know, lessons learned, but these are practitioners from all over the country who are sharing their advocacy tips. So that might be of interest to you. Next slide, please. One thing that I've learned over time is that I believe it was Ian who said it's all around advocacy. It's advocacy in many different forms. It's building the relationship over time so that you're not just coming when there's a demolition, but that you're a familiar face and that your information is familiar to them. So these are the stages that I've seen happen with folks. You know, there's that initial phone call or that initial meeting, like Ian talked about going to, and then there's the sharing of information. And you can see this picture here. It's me with a gentleman who are helping inform the Speaker of the House, you know, information about the Federal Historic Tax Credit. But what's important about that photo is that it's many different perspectives being shown to him and the support coming from many different quarters of the folks who are interested in saving the Federal Historic Tax Credit. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a site visit must be worth ten thousand. So the picture there on the bottom is showing a building in progress. And I encourage all of you to ask your elected officials to come by and see your rehabilitation in progress so that they get a sense of all the labor and all the love and all the hard work that goes into creating the rehabilitation. And I think people enjoy hard hat tours, and I think that's very memorable to them, as well as seeing actual residents and businesses and artists in those spaces. So I encourage you whenever possible to continue that advocacy on site. And then lastly, it's sort of being seen as a resource, right? So now they know you, they trust you, and now the official is coming to you, and you're the expert on all things we have and all things preservation. And I think that's sort of the stage of advocacy. Next slide, please. So my lessons learned the hard way is that you don't need to have an all 50 state campaigns. So we at the National Trust, thinking about advocacy at the national level, recognize that there are key committees, key members of Congress, key elected officials, key agencies that manage those programs that we're interested in. And so it's very important to be very targeted in your outreach. And then the picture that's next to that is also about focusing on a specific message. So again, these are all folks who came together around the Great American Outdoors Act. And you have folks from Main Street, you have tourism officials, you have convention and visitors bureaus, you have people who for all parts want to have the historic resources in our national parks protected and well maintained. And so there was a very focused message, but a lot of different voices saying the same thing. The next one is sort of hitting on that same theme about finding folks who can deliver the message in a way that it's heard. And so me saying something about your community is met with some interest, maybe slight, but you talking about your community and your preservation issues is much more music to your elected officials ears. So the right messenger is in key. And then the last I want to show is Senator Scott from South Carolina. We had a meeting scheduled with his staff. And I was with a bunch of folks who wanted to to meet with his staff and make their case. And he happened to walk by. And he was going in the back door of his office. And one of the advocates detached went over to him, shook his hand, introduced himself and said, I'm here, Senator, to talk to your staff today about this particular bill. This is why it's important to me. Thank you so much for your support. And he did that all I swear to you in like 10 seconds. And the rest of us were just sitting around in shock. And he probably accomplished more in that 10 seconds in a sec than our our half an hour meeting. But advocacy really is endless pressure endlessly applied. So even if you're in a hallway, take that opportunity. Next slide. So what we'd like to do now is mapping exercise with you. And I'm going to give this to you as an example of just to get your mind thinking about all the different folks that might be able to help you with your message. And this is the kind of thought process that I have when I'm organizing grassroots for a particular campaign is to go through all the folks that I think might have an interest in that particular issue. And you can see up here that I've listed everybody from mayors to planning commissions to housing advocates, donors, tourists, tourism agencies, contractors, anybody that you can think of that would have a potential link to the issue that you're fighting for a particular site that you're that you're fighting for. I have been talking before groups and I would say, okay, so this is the person we're trying to reach. And I've had people say, oh, well, I didn't go to school with them, but my wife did or I used to work for that person or so I think it's a matter of figuring out who knows who and again trying to get a lot of different voices to say the same thing or have the same request. Next slide. So the exercise I know this is going to seem old fashioned, but I want you to either take out a piece of paper or clear off your desk and get a get a clean word document up and just sort of think to yourself about what it is that you are are trying to save and and sort of have that in the back of your mind. We have had a very exciting week in Capitol Hill. There is the historic tax credit improvement bills and the Senate and then the House and in the House, it is included in the House Ways and Means markup, which means that the improvements that we've suggested are are being considered. And so what I was thought would make sense is if we could think about your own senators and if you were going to reach out to them, what you might do. Next slide. So again, you can either use your own specific advocacy fight that you're in and I know that a lot of them were listed or you can use your own two senators and and have those key targets in mind as we go through this mapping exercise. And the first question is always start with yourself. It's the same lesson that they teach in genealogy classes. It's, you know, who do you know? Do you yourself personally have a relationship with this office, with staff, with a legislator? So evaluate whether or not you yourself have a relationship and then think about who you know that might have a relationship. So think about all those different groups that we listed in terms of who do you know? What organizations are you involved with that have a relationship with that U.S. Senator? I myself do not have any connections with my two senators from from Virginia, but I do know that they frequently come to an area nearby because it's a underserved community and they're very anxious to try and be as helpful as possible. So in my mind that's immediately what leaps to mind is that I should find somebody there who frequently hosts the senators to see if they might be able to help me. Then what you want to do is evaluate your best options and go through and think who do you think that the senators would be most receptive to in terms of hearing this particular request? Would it be somebody that they're familiar with in this particular community? Would it be someone who they've known for a really long time? Is it someone that you know they an organization that they have a particular affiliation for? So I think sort of thinking through who might have the best access and have the best relationship. And then of course will they actually make the request and so you yourself have to use the materials that have been presented all those facts that you've developed and all those things that you know about your particular site. And then again repeat as necessary because you want to continue that outreach as Ian will say. So I hope this kind of thought process about trying to figure out who you know and how others can help you with your advocacy is helpful to you. Next slide. So here is an example of what I would suggest if you were interested in advocating for the historic tax credit. First how do you reach these folks, right? So here is a website on how to actually look up how to reach your senators. And again these are the questions that you would ask yourself about engagement. There you could call them, you could pick up the phone and just ask to be connected to a senate office. You could call their in-district office that's nearest to you. In my case it would be one about an hour away and see if they would be interested in meeting with me. And most of their websites have a place where you can leave a message for the staff and the senator. And then we also have an email ourselves where you could take action through forum. So those are the different ways that you have to outreach. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of social media ways to reach them as well. Next slide. So as I mentioned this historic tax credit improvement act has been introduced in both the senate and in the house. And it would permanently add value to the historic tax credit and really make it easier for small tax credit projects. So depending upon whether your senator is a democrat what you want to ask them for their support is that you know this is currently being considered by the house ways and means it hasn't actually passed out. But we're hopeful and that we would ask for your support. And then for republican senators you would want to ask you know please support this bipartisan improvement legislation. Next slide. So thank you very much for your attention and I'll hand it back to you. Thank you. Thank you Renee for all that and I think it's also as Ian said at the beginning very applicable you know even though right now we're thinking about federal advocacy and federal new senators all these skills and the mapping exercise it can be all used at any different level whether you know I'm in Savannah Georgia so you know I need to talk to my district two rep about a deconstruction ordinance and Georgia state tax credit expires at the end of 2022. So I'm working with folks to you know how do we approach the state legislature in Georgia about a tax credit. And while I know a lot of you on the on the call today are very passionate preservationists and like lead the charge I also want to make a note and one of our national trust colleagues Reina Reagan wrote a good article the other week about preservation burnout. And if you do your mapping exercise and let's say you figure out what your skill set is maybe you're the organizer and you have somebody else who's putting together the handout and is digging up all these facts and the stories and the stunning photos that Everett shared and you know is working out in the community like Maya was and is the great communicator that Ian is you know you sharing your story and building a coalition is giving away the power but it's also freeing to you so that you can work on the one slice that you want to do and that you are good at but don't feel like you have to take on everything. As Renee said focus your message and it's also focus your work so you guys don't get get burned out there's a lot of buildings out there to save a lot of cultures that we want to save and I know it gets overwhelming sometimes with that said I want to jump back to the chat and the questions real quick. Kria has shared a lot in the chat on how to get in touch with your reps and I know there was one other question we didn't answer from Charlene. Doing a master plan and many residents want to preserve the character of their neighborhood but haven't committed to being a historic district is there something that could be considered in the master plan to protect a neighborhood's character while the neighborhood works together? I might pass this to all of the panelists to take a shot at answering. Ian would you like to go first? Sure I'm going to jump in here you know I sat on our 20-year vision master planning for the city we had a whole bunch of tools that we put in there you know conservation overlays are a way that you can still get some of the characters of the homes without necessarily having to fully create a district around them that's one that I think a lot of communities have pursued. What I will say though is it's pretty awesome that your group was thinking about the student master planning process so I was really emphasizing like we should be encouraging at the next lower level the neighborhood planning initiatives where we're bringing people together to talk about the future of their community where they won't roads, bike lanes, whatever to be thinking about historic preservation then because then you're building in early the support that you're going to need instead of again being a responsive and elitist like many of us accuse of being you can early on start talking to people and I think this is in particularly true for communities that are just now reaching the age in which they can be protected in my community or you know they're going to be in the next 10 years because we won't be doing a ten you know in the next 10 years we won't be doing this master planning process and so I think it makes a lot of sense and the other thing I'd say is through that process you can talk to people out if they want a district but maybe they don't want a district maybe they want land marking of a few places in general and then you can build out from there but I do think that encouraging it to be concurrent with other planning processes the most wise choice that we can make if we want to have the full buy-in of our communities excellent advice Ian Everett can you see me yes okay I think that Ian gave a great answer I wear a couple of hats being an architect and a landscape architect and so what I would encourage you know kind of in that conservation overlay idea is to think about things like historic streetscape you know what does it look like going down the street in one direction or another you know the views into the neighborhood and you can you can add that to the architectural elements you can add that component so think about you know the outside like I say streetscape you know overall neighborhood or landscape you know like Ian said but you know before you get to that kind of last-ditch effort think ahead great idea Maya um I have to agree if there's things that they can commit to that are artistic or less permanent um I would say think about um if they want to commit to a historic district and what that means I think they should explore that and I think working on that together as a community can help them kind of inspire them to move forward and and decide which direction they want to go um in their community themselves I think master plan and design and architecture are really scary things sometimes for people to kind of unpack and explore and I think if you kind of come with them as um at where they're at um it talks to them about their community or flowers or gardens or art or bringing those elements back out as a group um it can lead to um larger steps and movements in that community absolutely absolutely and I wanted to share that last year we were speaking with um South Carolina rep Jim Clyburn um he was supporting a very supportive of historic preservation funding in congress and um particularly HBCU funding and he made a statement about how important it is to you know save the buildings because it's and you know this is tying in with what Maya and Everett were just saying about some you know the landscape features or or whatever the community identifies as important um because it's so much harder to share the stories when those things are lost um so don't think that you're the only person thinking about that even you know members of congress get that and they get that because we've shared that with them and they've seen it firsthand the impact that you know keeping these buildings around and um where they're where the funding is that they're they're voting on um as Renee said having the site visits and sharing informational sheets is very impactful so great questions guys I want to to give a shout out if there's any questions specifically for to Renee about the um advocacy opportunity coming up at the conference drop them in the chat um Renee I did want to ask are there some if we do sign up for that are there some deadlines that we should be aware of what what are we committing to that's a great question um so your time would be um attending an October 21st webinar to learn more about the priorities and talking points to share and to get your handouts um and then it would be a half an hour to uh up to three hours depending upon how many meetings you wanted to attend so um it would be a little bit of homework in terms of reading and it would be uh bringing your own information your own story to share so it might be um a little bit of creating your own handout or anything about your own particular work that you wanted to share and then there there will likely be a pre-meeting with the advocacy and you know the volunteer in the state who's agreed to sort of coordinate the meetings to figure out who's going to say what and in what order so that folks aren't spending all their time on the zoom call introducing each other they'll actually have an order and and get down to the business so I think that that would be about the limit and then the way to sign up is when you register for the conference is to take off the box that this is something that you want to participate in um and then the state advocacy person would get in touch with you um and uh we're hoping that folks will sign up by the last week in October uh so that all the meetings can be can be made and held um during past forward which is the first week of November okay awesome so you guys have another month to think about signing up there's a couple of more thank you Renee there's a couple of more questions that came in um Kristen asked I think they should probably go to Ian does anybody use digital advocacy tools like voter voice I haven't I haven't heard of this tool before voter voice but certainly digital tools are a platform that you know we have to use um in addition to you know general analog show up in person knock doors but um without digital especially in this year of COVID I think almost nothing was possible and in some ways um it's proven to be a really amazing tool for increasing uh public participation right so we've seen huge gains in public participation in public meetings for example around advocacy because people can get online and it can be improved you know uh one thing that I say a lot when I'm testifying around um environmental issues is if the DMV during the pandemic could figure out how to text you when it was your turn so can any other platform in the government that's a great point I have also heard Ian and I don't know if you've seen this um but there was a call that I was part of and I don't remember the software that they used but they um had everybody on at six o'clock in the after in the evening um to join a call that was held by an advocacy organization uh to let their individual members know the current status of a bill um and so then after it the phone call came you knew it was coming in at 6 p.m you heard your you know advocacy marching orders from that nonprofit and then you hung up and then you you know could go to your computer and do it so I thought that was kind of interesting I'd never seen that done before Vanessa asked uh question directed to Ian but I think others would have great answers too on how to protest city legislature that is not interested or unwilling to agree on implementing mass preservation initiatives like conservation or local historic districts so I think in general how do we build preservation ethic in our communities well I mean I think there's a you know when you're talking and working in the government again as I was saying a squeaky wheel gets the grease the people who continue to come back I think that's the consistency and the longevity it's going to take time to do this work and I can give you an example um recently in a work that I've been doing around advocacy for the unhouse we had a new individual who moved here from another state and he came in he came in hot and he was showing up like every day to the mayor's office and he's like I'm going to change this you're going to change this I'm going to be back here every day but honestly what we know in the government is that if you can bear that weight for 30 days 45 days a lot of these people disappear right they find and move on to something else they move and get a job they find a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a partner and all of a sudden they just care less about whatever that issues you can name this issue over and over again we you know pit bulls was another one where we had pit bulls are illegal and people would write letters every single day and then they would drop off and so I think you know consistency and approach I think is very important you know if people aren't interested then you got to go and you got to teach classes in the community you got to start doing those petitioning processes like I was telling you about or sign on letters really to show people that they are interested um and really finding a champion and finding a champion can also be part of a of an election cycle right like um there's nothing and I've actually been thinking about this for a while about how with my city growing like it is we almost need a c4 we need a pack we need people who are influencing and pushing for preservation and cultural preservation um so that you know you can be in the air of people who are running for office because that's generally how we transform things and you have to change the legislature if they won't do it and then you know just lastly you know if they're unwilling um but they know that interest is there that's when I would say organize and run actual ballot initiatives right that's when I would say organize and bring um and ask you know a zoning committee or historic preservation committee to adopt the rules that you're working on it it really just depends on how your community is structured but you know I would be happy to help anybody figure out in the structure that you have what is the right tool to use but you know if you're out there and you're collecting the signatures and the media is covering you and you're doing the work um any legislator who has any idea of how to keep their job is probably going to start opening their door to you more than they were to begin with. This is Renee I couldn't agree more with what Ian was saying and I saw that happen on a particular state historic tax credit campaign and these campaigns can be multi-year over a decade in terms of building the support for this idea across the entire legislature and finding that champion but um in this instance they had been at it for more than you know 10 years and they were able to in their candidates you know they were talking to all the candidates for governor and in each one planted this seed of you know have a state historic tax credit and it really took root um in one particular candidate who ended up being governor so that election cycle is really important. Vanessa I'll just add that um I think it's featured on preservation actions website um but Cincinnati the other year hosted a um candidates forum on historic preservation for everybody who is um running for office in Cincinnati so it's a lot to put together but all your candidates would very quickly get themselves educated uh about historic preservation if they were going to show up to a you know a public forum on it but that's one way of um you know putting it more in in their court you know if they're going to be running for office you can say hey I'm a preservation voter and there's hundreds and thousands of us out here and here's what we care about um so don't don't think stuff like that would be off limits as well check in the chat here and one one more idea for Vanessa would be perhaps to see if um the city would allow a study to be done in some way even if they didn't fund it if you could find an additional funder and additional partner to start with some type of um educational piece uh that just sort of opens the door to get them more familiar with preservation and and what might be possible um and another idea is the power of competition and um taking them to another place uh that that has done great things whether it's a neighboring community and um I know that there's a great example from Main Street where they put all of their elected officials in a tour of us and go to the neighboring three or four communities to see the best of the best um and take home ideas so showcasing somewhere else that might help mm-hmm mm-hmm very good lessons very good lessons all righty well thank you all for sticking with us I don't see any other questions in the chat um there was a lot put out here as resources for you and these were great uh inspiring stories um so I hope you came away with this being as inspired as I was um you know I got to get on my Georgia tax credit stuff here pretty soon so I'm glad to have been a part of this um please all keep in touch and thank you all for everybody who put your um the causes you're fighting for in the chat I can't wait to go through all those and I think now um turning it back over to Rhonda yeah I just wanted to mention a few um upcoming opportunities for additional workshops that are pre-conference workshops for past forward 2021 uh these will be the next two afternoons um the next two Tuesday afternoons uh upcoming so if this time worked for you this week hopefully it works for you again next week when we'll be hosting understanding climate change uh this workshop is developed in partnership with the national park service and we'll cover um understanding some of the terminologies methodologies strategies uh for climate change and how it impacts heritage resources and then on the 28th the law department of the national trust will be doing an introduction to preservation law and easements so again they'll be providing a brief overview of legal aspects of historic preservation and you'll also have some opportunities to ask some specific questions so we hope you will join us for both of those upcoming events and then uh finally I wanted to remind everyone to register for the conference the early bird registration rates and on October register before then um we'll be having a series of post conference workshops and webinars too so be on the lookout for announcements about that but we want to make sure that everyone is registered for the conference that's taking place November 2nd through the 5th and then finally I wanted to thank all of our panelists Brie, Everett, Maya, Ian, and Renee for joining us and sharing your knowledge and expertise hopefully this has been really helpful to everyone um be on the lookout for that email that you will get with the email that you've registered for this session that will include the link to the recorded session and some of the additional materials that were mentioned uh during the session so thank you to everyone and hopefully we will see you next week thank you thanks all