 Hello, so pleased to be with you today. My colleagues and I are big small town advocates, cheerleaders and doers, and we assume that you like us feel that vibrant small towns are critical to our social and economic wellbeing. We know from studies and we know from our own experiences that successful strategies use those distinctive places, those local assets combined with creativity and tenacity to get great work done. Today we're gonna focus on sort of one element of those small town community development and historic preservation successes. My colleagues and I wanna share our reflections from a recent four state nonprofit rural historic preservation partnership to tease out more about kind of the house and why's of that work. Look at issues of short and long-term impact and what those results have us thinking about the future long-term future of rural preservation efforts. What's next in terms of investments in these small towns? In this brief session today, we hope that we can provide some practical information and inspiration whether you're somebody working on the ground getting these projects done or you're somebody setting policy or executing policy to help in historic preservation, rural development sort of settings. We're gonna start with some quick introductions by our panelists so you know who's with you today. Then we're gonna talk about some of our favorite projects that were part of this partnership and then get into the discussion about some of these themes. I'm gonna go first or else I'm gonna forget to introduce myself, I'm Jennifer Goodman. I'm the executive director of the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance. I've had the wonderful ability to work on all kinds of preservation projects in big cities and small towns throughout my career and I've really loved the work to help these kind of community landmark preservation projects and also fill the toolbox go to speak of incentives and dollars to get the work done. So we're gonna go from our four partnership, four state partnership runs from Maine, West to New York State and we're gonna start with Maine. Brad, can you introduce yourself please? Hi everyone, I'm Brad Miller. I'm the preservation manager for Maine Preservation. I'm just wrapping up my first year with the organization. So in my role, I advocate for preservation as a tool for cultural and economic development across the state of Maine. I coordinate the organization's great making efforts to local nonprofits, manage our preservation easement portfolio and assist with their educational programming. And then prior to joining Maine Preservation, I worked as a regional director at Indiana Landmarks for five years where assisting rural communities, nonprofits, local governments and property owners across the four county region and preserving significant places in both urban and rural settings and I've had a real pleasure of working at the regional level and being able to look at these small communities and also urban settings and really start to pick a part that perceived urban and rural divide. A lot of these communities face very similar long-term systemic issues and those things impact how we practice preservation. So I have a lot of experience with that and look forward to the conversation today. Great Brad. Coming west, Andrew. My name is Andrew Cudwick with Jennifer of the Preservation Alliance and I head up the field service portion of our organization. So I work with small towns, big towns that have questions about fundraising, maybe technical questions about how to and also inevitably kind of community planning initiatives. Hi, I'm Jennifer, I'm a field service rep with the Preservation Trust of Vermont. I am primarily a technical assistance provider, much like Andrew, helping everything from fairgrounds to community owned general stores with a lot of other nonprofit related work in between. I have done work down in Georgia with neighborhood revitalization efforts and tax credit projects. I worked for several years over in New Hampshire for the preservation funder, supporting everything from historic preservation, planning up to large implementation grants and have been with PTV for about five years and have really enjoyed working on both this NBRC grant and that previous one as well. Happy to be here. Great. Thanks, Jenna. New York. Hi, I'm Katie Cobo. I am Vice President for Policy and Preservation at the Preservation League of New York State. New York is probably not a state that comes to mind when you think about rural states, probably would be maybe number 50 on your list of rural states. But of course, New York is much bigger than New York City as I'm sure you all know. And so we have a wide range of small to mid-sized cities, small towns, villages, agricultural areas and also in the northern part of our state, Edondack Park, which is the largest state park in the country and also home to 132,000 year-round residents. So as the statewide organization, we work in all of those areas as well as of course the New York City area too. So I've been at the Preservation League for about a year and before that I worked at the regional level at the Landmark Society of Western New York based in Rochester, as well as at an architecture firm also based in Rochester working throughout the kind of central and western New York region. So a lot of rural and smaller town experience in those areas as well. Yeah, great, great. So we're representatives again of this four state partnership, our four statewide nonprofit organizations worked together and secured a $1 million grant from a federal authority called the Northern Border Regional Commission. And we use that money to re-grant to 15 community projects and communities suffering socially and economically from the decline of the forest products industry, which is what the mission of that Northern Border Regional Commission is all about. Our investments were in historic buildings with strong community and economic development plans. That's what we wanted to invest in. Just wanted to note that most of the project leaders of those 15 projects were associated with nonprofit organizations. And I would characterize them as sort of novice development. Many of them were novice developers. No staff or small staff working as volunteers. Many of them had, as I'm saying, limited experience doing these kind of capital projects that we'll be describing today. And small, small towns, six of the 15 were under 1,000 in population and almost all of them were under 5,000 in population. So to give you a sense of the kinds of projects we're talking about, we're gonna warm up with some of our favorites. Of course, it's hard to choose, but we're gonna do that same geography and go from Maine, West to New York State, starting with Brad, and see a couple of pictures of these wonderful places that we invested in and hear a couple, a snapshot each from the different states. So with our PowerPoint image, Brad, you're first. All right, we're kicking off with a project from Central Maine. Dover-Foxcroft Central Hall served residents as a purpose-built auditorium and community center since 1882, but its future was uncertain after town offices vacated the building in 2008. Thankfully, a local friends group formed and by 2011, a plan was devised to revive the space as the commons at Central Hall, a multi-generational community center to serve the 33 communities of the Maine-Highlands region. The nearly $2.5 million project features a rehabilitated multi-purpose space on the second floor for performances, workshops, and exhibits, while the ground floor was restored as a senior center and community kitchen, enhancing access to food and social services for the aging. That's a great one. Okay, next up, New Hampshire. So our study focuses on a formerly downtown building in Lancaster, which was once home to a nationally-renowned farm of a physical company, famous invention of the sugar-coated pill. This received a $3 million rehabilitation, adding six new units of housing on Main Street and creating a new sun and commercial kitchen on the ground floor for a local food store. The nonprofit owner was a regional group focused on improving the economies of the Northern Forest. So it fit well with the mission of this particular federal fund. And they arranged a diverse set of funding and hired over 30 local businesses to project. The completed market rate apartments were filled immediately with no advertising and it added ultimately more vibrancy to our state's Northernmost County seat, a town of about 3,000 people. Great. All right, moving across to Vermont. So this is the Bridgewater Community Center. It was built in 1914 and the former school closed in 2015 as part of the push to consolidate Vermont's rural school districts. And the town in 2016 actually voted to demolish the building, but over a series of meetings and community engagement sessions overcame internal frictions. And in 2018, the Bridgewater Area Community Foundation, which is the local nonprofit that spearheaded the project, struck a deal with the town to lease the building for a dollar a year. And so flash forward from 2018 to 2022 and almost $800,000 construction project later, the building is now home to the Bridgewater Community Child Care Center, which when fully staffed will provide 36 child care slots to this community of 900 people. Great. And another wonderful community landmark kind of project, community development project, Katie. This is Whitcombe's garage, which sits right across the street from the Waylandsburg Grange. That building, the Waylandsburg Grange was rehabilitated in the early 2000s and became a very successful arts and community center run by a volunteer-led nonprofit organization. So when the garage, which is really the other kind of significant size building within this very small hamlet of Waylandsburg became available in 2018, the Grange board was interested in acquiring it so they could expand what they were doing. They gathered community input to determine what the residents wanted to see it become. Then volunteer labor transformed this modest 1940s building into a multi-use space with studios for craftspeople, a small gift and craft store, community space for meetings and a cafe. The building is not national register listed or eligible. And yet it was and is described by residents as an iconic building because it has such a strong presence in this small hamlet within the Adirondack Park. Right. So those were just to kind of warm you up and give you a sense of the kinds of properties and projects we wanted to talk to you about today. I think you heard ingredients in those stories from my poor colleagues, critical ingredients that focus on place, connection to an iconic building, creative plan and fit for the building, something that was going to be sustainable, diverse funding, obstacles overcome. I think all of those ingredients are mixed into these stories and we'll certainly tease them out more during the remainder of our program today. So I was going to open it up a little bit just to reflect on the projects we just saw but others that were part of our million dollar block grant, re-grant and experience that we've had professionally over time. As to my panel, as investors or supporters of these projects, what were you most pleased about? What do you think was really beneficial to the communities in terms of meeting community development goals? Jen, I think I'll start with you to just start us off maybe with kind of an overview about this money and how it was spent. Sure. It was really nice. I was really pleased to see that every community took a different approach to these projects. Community and economic development is so specific to individual communities and this program really reflected that. We, like you said, we supported 15 projects across the four states and primarily supported construction projects but within that the work ranged from commercial blocks and downtown to creative makers spaces in old mill buildings to supporting museums and cultural institutions which are economic drivers in their communities. We stepped outside the box and funded workforce development through a high school trade program up in Canaan, Vermont and we actually collaborated across state borders and supported a school district in Canaan but also worked on a project over in New Hampshire and so it was a really nice way to partner together on that and have to start preservation incorporated into that trade program. We helped purchase equipment for a co-working space which is really critical as we've seen a big shift towards remote work that we hadn't necessarily anticipated when we had applied for this grant back in the middle of 2019 it's obviously a very different landscape now than it was then but I think that even with all the shifts of the pandemic each of these community projects I think they've just been so important. We talked about that garage project and how that was a vacant building in the Hamlet and it's now bubbling with activity and it's so exciting to see that a relatively modest amount of money can just make a huge impact especially when they're able to leverage that with volunteer hours. Very much so, very much so. So the traditional bricks and mortar money following the Secretary of Interior standards is certainly important in our field but Jenna just touched on sort of how everybody used money in different ways and Brad do you wanna just say a little bit about flexible money? Yeah, certainly I think the ability to support kind of non-traditional expenses with the grant program was huge and while certainly we're certain to follow the traditional preservation standards and kind of things that we have come to learn and expect with grant funding particularly from the federal government or state government, this program really took advantage of those funds and looked at how we could make buildings more usable and a lot of the projects actually focused on interior buildouts and improvements to existing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems which are things we usually don't think about. We think about kind of facade improvements only with preservation or structural improvements. So just in Maine alone of the five projects, three of them were highly focused on interior buildouts and it's not very glamorous work that has flashy before and afters but increasing the bathroom capacity of a theater building allows you to have the building occupiable by a theater group or installing heat pumps so the building can become more energy efficient and also just heated and cooled so you can use the building throughout different seasons particularly up here in Maine. So really thinking about how can we put buildings back to use for communities, not just preserving them but how are they becoming an active part of the community? And I think that's obviously just from a programming standpoint is awesome and allows us to effectively implement these funds in communities but it also helps from just a public perception standpoint where we're always preaching about how preservation is economic development but this is clearly connecting preservation funds with things like heat pumps that we need in buildings so that they can be parts of our communities and I think that was a huge, huge improvement for this grant fund and hopefully something we can see continuing to happen down the line. Yeah, great point about public perception Brad and sort of what is preservation and linking to that community development work? Speaking of sort of definitions and preservation at Katie, do you wanna add anything? You sort of reference the project before in terms of being a little less traditional, I guess. Yeah, I mean, this is not a building that someone who was outside the community would necessarily have picked out as being kind of a star building or anything like that but it's certainly something that the community themselves felt was important and they identified it as being something that was important to them to see it reused. It had been a business in town for a long time and does have a significant physical presence given how small that place is. So the fact that they were able to treat this modest little building as a preservation project even though it's a vernacular building, it's not extremely old, it's from the 40s so it's definitely old enough but for themselves that it was important deciding what they wanted it to be contributing to labor, it really made it into more than just a rehabilitation project but into something that really brought the community together before, during and after the project and continues to do so now that those spaces are up and running, as Jenna said, replacing a vacant building with something that's really become a community center especially given the synergy with the Grange across the street. Yeah, wonderful, wonderful. And before we turn to sort of surprises or challenges Andrew, anything else on sort of this question about the benefits, the best sort of parts of this and in terms of how we made these investments, what it did on the ground? Sure, I mean I think in the case of the Parker noise block in Lancaster, it was just the perfect storm, it was a nice coming together of all the pieces that really the town had been working on laying the foundation since a dollar general proposal came in and demolished two historic homes on Main Street and so the town several years ago had already tried to prevent future dollar generals or that kind of development from happening so they passed form-based zoning, they created what we call 79E, which is rehabilitation, revitalization, tax incentive for downtowns and historic buildings in New Hampshire and so when this building came up which the preservation alliance had been aware of for a long time, trying to negotiate with the owner, trying to get a good outcome. The fact that the owner finally agreed as a nonprofit developer that stepped forward and said, yeah, we'll take the risk and we'll try to create housing on Main Street and those tax incentives and the town being on board is just a nice coming together for a big project and we'll talk later, but I don't know, they would've done it if they had known how expensive the project is gonna be. It definitely, they're happy it happened as well. Right, right, right. The ecosystem was there and they took advantage of it. Yeah, well, I built it, they helped build sort of new layers in that ecosystem and have success within it. So about challenges, I guess Andrew's just referencing some price escalation, do you wanna just kind of carry through on that idea, Andrew, that you were just talking about with the Parker J. Noyes building? Yeah, I mean, I think everybody's familiar with kind of the COVID pandemic, bottleneck problems that a lot of construction projects happened across the United States and this project certainly got caught in that, I think, all of our colleagues in Vermont and New York also. I think the biggest, some of the best challenges financially for this project was they're in a rural area and so kind of the typical contractors who do multi-million dollar projects were not talking of a bid to come and bid on that check. We had provided a building assessment for them which outlined maybe a million dollars of work and that ended up being $3 million worth of work by the time, again, some of the bottlenecks and labor shortages came to play and they had some creative solutions. I don't know if we want to get into that but the developer, the nonprofit was able to really work with the local contractors to kind of train them and to kind of scale them up from what a project they would normally do was actually a timber framing firm that specializes in zero homes and barn restoration and this building is not a timber factory but they were able to, like I said, scale up and they learned a lot and they learned a lot of new building techniques and they learned a lot of management and I think it was kind of a risk that the owners took but it definitely paid off and then that local firm had options to get the electricians and to get the plumbers and to get the structural folks and when they ran into fire from years past and saw the foundation and roofing issues, so. Yeah, yeah. So in the face of all of that COVID related and beyond sort of finding a new labor leader, I guess, was some good wraparound folks that were more experienced in those kind of historic preservation projects probably to make that work. Brad or Katie, let's stay on these kind of labor solutions for a minute longer but it certainly was a big issue and we expect it to be an issue for a while going forward. Brad, did you have anything to add or anybody else? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly the impacts of COVID really exacerbated what was already an existing problem that we recognize in the Northeast and also across the country of a shortage of skilled tradespeople in the preservation trades and something that has been somewhat successful at a small scale and made and also in New Hampshire is, for example, one timber framing company, they actually consult on smaller projects, train local carpenters and timber framers on those projects. As Andrew said, you can kind of scale up, make them feel confident, put together those kind of construction documents and plans where the local group can then go ahead and follow them. And that allows kind of these smaller towns and more remote areas and the capabilities to tackle these preservation projects. And particularly in Maine, where we're at the end of the country, distance has a real impact on labor issues. And so being able to have professionals come in and trade smaller contractors and kind of just boost their confidence to tackle the first project, allows them to then tackle the next. And another thing that we're kind of also working with in Maine is thinking about where those communities, where there aren't any contractors working, how can we possibly package preservation projects so that we can entice them to come to these smaller towns and communities, obviously our preference is always to keep those funds for preservation products as local as possible, but sometimes we do have to look outside for solutions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jenna, I don't know if you, there's obviously with changing costs, there's, whether you're at the local level or you're at our grant-making level, there's issues about changing costs and changing budgets. What do you do? I don't know if you want to talk about the workforce investment now or we can hold that till later too, but I'll give you the floor, so to speak. Sure. So just carrying on that theme of challenges and solutions to those challenges, I found in helping administer this program across the four states and also in the other grant-making that we've done in Vermont, communications with the funders has been essential. I think people, I think the funders when they have been able to be responsive have been. This is an unprecedented situation that we find ourselves in and we've really tried to be flexible, both with the sub-grantees to allow them to move money around within their budgets when it worked within the parameters of the program. We have gone back and we have reworked budgets when we've needed to and it was a big administrative list, but it's what's going to help get these projects across the finish line and that's our goal. But I think communication has just been a huge part of that and we're seeing it now in programs and I think we're going to see it more and more as we continue to move forward. As additional federal funding starts to become available to these community organizations and is really going to be a huge part of kind of filling those budget gaps that are coming up because of the increase of cost of materials and labor, figuring out a way to fit that money into a pre-existing budget and a project that's already started with the review process that's been completed. The more flexible we can be with our money at this end, it's a huge help to those community organizations so they're not having to go back and either not be able to use the review process again and so I think flexibility and communication, those are the two things that I would say have been really helpful with those unexpected challenges and as you mentioned, trying to solve the workforce development challenge at the front end, investing, we spent between New Hampshire and Vermont, we each invested $50,000, so $100,000 into the trade program through the Canaan School District and that money was used for training and for tools. It did not go into any of the materials of the building because the way that program has worked is they'll purchase a structure, they'll use it as a classroom for the students, for juniors and seniors, they spend about two and a half days a week I think on site and it's a learning lab for them, it's an opportunity to learn basic construction skills but also to be able to understand plaster and window restoration, older mechanical systems, how to refinish wood floors and when you think of the Northeast, I mean, we have some of the oldest building stock in the country and so training people to be able to work on these types of buildings which do have very specific needs and especially when you start talking about historic preservation grant funding, we need a pool of really good contractors and I know that we are all very lucky, we have some people that we lean on quite a bit to help make these projects successful but and those people are very generous with their time in terms of training the next generation but it's important for us to be able to do our part in that as well and I think this funding really helped us try and tackle that problem. It has not been without its challenges because when you're trying to fit a workforce development project into a pool of 15 construction projects, it's not, they don't always go together well but it's gonna, the end result is absolutely going to be worth it. Yeah, yeah. Such an exciting model there and Kanan Vermont working also in Colbrook, New Hampshire and yeah, a different kind of revolving fund that helps meet the really enormous preservation trades issue for sure. So you need labor, we all know that housing and the inter-relationship with supporting workforce, those people need housing to live in, right? All part of that ecosystem and getting the right ingredients together to have vibrant small towns. We certainly touched on that area of housing as part of this initiative that we're wrapping up now. Anybody wanna talk about housing issues relative to these small town investments? Anything more about labor? Any takers? I mean, I can just say, I mean across America we have a huge housing shortage in New Hampshire, the vacancy rate for rental units is pretty much zero and in some pockets of New Hampshire it's consistently under half a percent. So, I'm the Northern Forest Center which again focuses primarily on kind of reinvigorating economies of our four states and towns that are affected by the decline of the forest industry. They realize that a big impediment to finding new talent and kind of reviving those towns is that there's not, there's actually enough kind of affordable housing but there wasn't a lot of quality market rate housing. And so again, these six units they didn't even have to advertise. They were instantly filled up and I followed up and figuring out who is actually living in these places and two of our school administrators, there's a doctor for kind of a hospital that serves pretty much the county. And I think a lawyer or some confessional class. So that was something that their main street hadn't seen in really decades was those kind of levels of income that they think will really help the restaurant scene, the brewery that just opened. So certainly affordable housing is a problem but they found kind of their niche was more market rate housing. Yeah, more people to serve on the planning board, et cetera, et cetera. Jenna, did you have something to share regarding labor related to uses in buildings? Like you're the portrait that you offered at the beginning of this session is a childcare facility. Yeah, and that was an unexpected challenge and not that we hadn't seen until the end of the project that because of the labor shortages, if the childcare center can't be fully staffed then all of the slots that are available aren't going to be open. And so that's been a challenge both in this childcare center and I think across almost every childcare center at least in the Northeast, probably the country. And that's not something that we can tackle through this program, but just one of those kind of ripple effects that we hadn't anticipated and that the pandemic really did exacerbate. And hopefully as we continue to address, affordability around housing and workforce development, some of those challenges will subside. Yeah, you're here. Anything else that we, before we move on we were gonna move to sort of the on the ground perspective, ready, ready go? Okay. We just wanted to share some takeaways from those projects. I think you heard in the portraits and you've heard in this subsequent discussion there were certainly challenges along the way. So kind of let's sort of tease out some of the advice that you would give or do give to project leaders that are just starting out in these kinds of community projects. Again, often folks that haven't done this kind of work before. I wanna talk maybe just kind of go through the steps a little bit, talk about planning, team, fundraising, communication, things like that. Anybody wanna start off? You know, always at the beginning of the project is the group, it's the group that starts it. And it's really challenging. Some communities seem to have the talent to be able to move projects forward and access the resources. And some communities struggle to pull those groups together. And so I think it's really important as technical assistance providers to help with that process. You know, I heard the great analogy recently of are we watering a garden of sunflowers or are we giving one or two sunflowers the room to really grow and flourish? And like figuring out what structure and who the drivers are going to be behind these projects. That's a huge part of the pre-pre-development that people don't think about. You know, they identify a project and they think about funding sources, but who's gonna make it happen? And like you said, the vast majority of these projects are done by either organizations with very small staff or they're entirely volunteer based. And how do you pull that group together? I mean, that's kind of step one right there. Yeah. How do you find those people, Andrew? I'm thinking about some of your projects. Think about, you look around at where other success has been and you check people's hearts to see what they're interested in. What do you think? Yeah, it starts with those who have legs and lungs and then you kind of narrow the field a little bit based on their interests. And sometimes, it might not be a preservationist you're looking for, right? You might just be looking for a community activist or a mom who's got some time because she has a newborn or something. Maybe if you're doing a preservation project, you don't have to just have preservationists on your team. And I think all of our colleagues, I see nods there. So, and honestly, you probably don't want all preservationists on your team anyway. It just doesn't make for a very fun project. I mean, you want some diversity, you want some outside thinking, you want some creativity. And I think that the most successful projects have that diverse perspective. Yeah, yeah. Somebody wanna talk a little bit about kind of right size planning. I mean, Andrew referenced a building assessment that was helpful in terms of phase, but it certainly didn't have the big number because the biggest number it was one million instead of three million because not everything had yet been anticipated or different things were happening in the economy a couple years later. Do you feel like you have some favorite elements about planning and picking uses that anybody wants to share? I think that was certainly an element of our 15 successful projects that we were choosing to invest in those because that work had already been done, right? Folks knew what their budget looked like. People had picked a use that had a strong community development and sustainability sort of element to it. I mean, yeah, I think just to agree with everything you just said, Jennifer, and just to preach to the preservation choir, I'm sure that proper planning allows for successful projects. And so just always encouraging communities to think about how we can plan on the front end and eliminate a lot of those unexpected challenges that we might face down the road. And that, you know, the projects in Maine that was spun into this project were all just pieces of much larger projects that are still ongoing. One of them was just one of four building complex. So they're able to take off an appropriate size blight of this much larger challenge instead of trying to think about how can they tackle all four buildings at once and how can I take advantage of this grant fund to do that? So I think again, it's just if you have the, you know, invigorated community group working on this, just having them kind of figure out what they can figure or can kind of accomplish in this first chunk. And we saw that in Maine with the five projects. You're here. And I think, and it's not one of the NBRC projects, but kind of a similar project, letting the pre-development kind of evolve as the projects move forward. I mean, we funded, there's a covered bridge project that's going on in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. And it started with a $500 seed grant to kind of get a very basic understanding of what this bridge was going to need in order to be able to be returned to community use both to be part of kind of a recreational trail system, but also a place making effort and really a community gathering place in the outdoors. And that $500 seed grant allowed them to secure money to do some kind of stabilization and then secure another, I think maybe $50,000 in pre-development for a much larger pre-development study because when you think of covered bridges, it's structural transportation, it's all of the environmental stuff related to it. And so that little bit of planning up front allows you to kind of grow over time and properly scale your planning to kind of the direction that your project is moving in. But there's a big difference between planning for $100,000 and a million dollar project and understanding that early on is good. Sometimes it's okay if the budget speaks up a little over time, I know we do a lot of groups, but if they really knew what they were getting into at the beginning, they may have been a little more hesitant, but they had enough information to make an informed decision and then those community members, their capacity increases over time and their ability to tackle those challenges increases. And so all of that early planning is a key part of that. Yeah, yeah. And I'll segue by talking about other kinds of little investment making a big difference in terms of specific expertise or wraparound services, anybody have any good examples of using a little money for fundraising that really helped out or I know we're talking about a federal grant program with federal dollars with this program we're talking about today. And that obviously has its own set of responsibilities. Anybody wanna talk about the use of an expert kind of for short money having a big impact? Katie, I'd be interested to see. So your project was really volunteer heavy, right? So how did they leverage that and balance the fundraising with all the volunteer labor? Jenna might actually remember more of this than I did because this project actually happened before I came on staff. I was lucky enough to come in in the very tail end. I know there were some challenges I think from the granting perspective that because so much of the labor was volunteer, it meant that a lot of what we were reimbursing were the expenses for materials and things like that. That's a little bit of the headache administratively perhaps, but definitely worth it for the results in the end. Jenna, was there anything else from this particular project that you recall for this question? Not specifically related to the planning but I think so much of this, so much of what made that project successful is that same idea of having really strong understanding at the beginning of what the goal of the project was, how they needed to carry out a specific volunteer day and then being able to convey that information to the volunteers so they could do the work. And so again, leaning on leadership and knowledge of people at the beginning of the process and then having volunteers kind of execute the vision. And again, I think because that building wasn't architecturally significant from the standpoint of the NAFSA register and I think was maybe the garage. And so it was relatively unfinished. There's a much higher level of flexibility with the work that could be done than with some of the buildings that may have had much higher architectural, thinking of the Oneida Mansion project in New York, Katie. Like the level of planning involves the building of that historical significance is gonna look a little different. But again, it scales depending on what the project is, what the scope is, what the building is, what the community group is. Here, your original question, Jennifer. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board has a Rural Economic Development Initiative which supports rural communities and accessing federal funding or other funding sources. It essentially funds grant writing assistance. And so it opens up the opportunity to access those funds for communities that may not have that capacity to do it by themselves. And I think small programs like that where you're making really like a $5,000 investment, if that $5,000 investment can then unlock a $500 Vermont Community Development which is the block grant program, implementation grant for accessibility. I mean, that's a huge leap from $5,000 to $500,000. And I think a lot of our organizations have kind of small planning programs like that that can provide a lot of information upfront for a little bit of money that then lead to much, much bigger things down the road. Yeah. I think that's a really nice... Sorry, I'm just... Sorry, Jennifer. I mean, our towns, the smallest rural towns, the towns that maybe need the investment the most have the fewest resources to get that money and to manage the project. Like there's no full-time town staff probably or there's definitely no staffed non-profit developer. And I think we also run into a lot of fear of federal money, right? These small towns like no way, there's so many strings attached. So for us to be able to offer the block grant that kind of be the liaison made that money more accessible and less scary to these projects. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I would just offer the example too of sort of short fundraising money, linking volunteers to experienced fundraisers that would do things like direct them from having the pale at the county fair to raise money to looking at the list at the inside the door of the library, their same library in town and look at all the donors names and coaching them on how to do major donor asks. And I think a lot of these projects do have money from private individuals as part of it. And I've seen great examples of little investments of getting a little bit of professional help just making a huge difference in terms of dollars raised. So kind of a sister idea to what Jenna was talking about in terms of going after public money. I'm gonna shift to, if we're ready, ready to talk a little bit about the partnership. There have been many conference sessions on partnerships in the past, the good and the bad and the ugly. My question is about sort of the replicable strengths of the partnership. And I'll start with Jenna actually in terms of fundraising, staying on fundraising for a little bit, just talk a little bit about how the partnership you think made us effective to get the million dollars in the first place. Sure, so the grant we got was obviously through the Northern Border Regional Commission, but it was a regional forest economy partnership grant. And so that specific program was looking at how you can kind of maximize benefits across borders. And so we looked at it and said, okay, we have strong ties between all of our statewide nonprofits across the region. Can we group together and really put a strong application together? And it was successful, obviously, which was very exciting, but I think it's the group aspect that really made it competitive. A single sub-grant, if you look at any one of our projects may not have been competitive to a funder like Northern Border Regional Commission. But when you look at the collective grant making across the four states, then it becomes a very competitive project because of those 15 sub-grants, you're talking about a million dollar investment creating pretty impressive metrics and federal funders are looking at metrics. And so you look at the communities that are gonna be served. If each one of those projects is impacting three or four communities, you're impacting 45 to 60 communities across the region. You're looking at probably 10 to 15 businesses created, probably 15 to 20 jobs that are created. You know, 36 childcare slots and just one of our projects, like Brad mentioned, energy savings in a lot of these buildings. That, when compiled altogether, makes for a really competitive project. And in addition to that, the capacity building that happens with each one of those projects, like being the liaison between the small nonprofit and the federal funding source, we were able to kind of help smaller groups navigate that process. It was challenging because you're trying to sub-grant 15 grants on the same timeline. And we all know that construction skills look very different. But it was the collective effort that I think made this really competitive and I think can be recreated in different areas through different partners. Yeah. I would say that there was great collegiality between the statewide nonprofits leading up to this, but it was the first time we had done something formal like that together. And you sort of touched on this, Jenna, but just the learning between us and sort of we're all in this together and sort of thought of it as a pilot and learning about the topic of this session really, sort of how do we make our best investment in these sort of places? It was great to have the collegiality across the four states as we were going to answer questions and learn from it. And then as you said, the setting up the networks and being so supportive of the sub-grantees as well, I think we're essential elements of all that. Anything else about this partnership or working with underrepresented, underserved groups, these volunteer groups? All set? Let's go ahead. I'll say, go ahead, Brad. Yeah, go ahead, Brad. Yeah, just to kind of further that, thinking about, maybe not about the partnership, but just being able to, as all of us work for statewide nonprofits, we already kind of operate at a high level and be able to see communities that are kind of facing very similar challenges, but they kind of have this kind of isolated scarcity mindset where they think we can't tackle this project, but we have the ability to look with a wider lens and look across our borders to our partners and say, what if we tackle this together and bring these kind of resources to these smaller communities? I think just from a, almost like a psychological standpoint, you feel like you're more empowered to tackle that old building in your downtown if you know that others are doing the same thing and you also have the money to do it, which is helpful. And the technical assistance from our organization. So I think that's where, again, we're in New England, so our states are smaller and closer together, but there's still the ability to replicate this elsewhere in rural communities where you're kind of looking across borders or looking at even just across municipal borders to work collectively to bring resources to preservation projects. Okay. So in this last section, again, we just wanna touch on some issues about measuring the impact and also good practices, best practices about communication as a way to extend this good work. Let's start with communication and actually gonna go backwards a little bit and talk about communication as a central ingredient, good communication to a project's success. And I think I'll stick in New Hampshire for a minute. Andrew, do you wanna just wanna talk a little bit about that? Just about kind of communication. Yeah, yeah. Maybe use a Lancaster example or anything else that you wanna share. What are some of the practices that you've seen in these small town projects that are- Yeah, for a little bit. My experience and- Yeah, my experience personally and professionally again is that sometimes there's a lot of suspicion in small towns when a big project is happening, right? Or maybe there's a new owner that wants to redevelop a property. So I think really good communication with the town is huge and I know that is what the Northern Forest Center did with this Parker Noise Block. They made sure that they were not perceived as solving all of Lancaster's problems through this redevelopment. They really wanted to say, we're gonna use the tools that you've already created to just improve your town and help you meet your own mission too. So that really helped. They're also just really good about constant communication, constant updates about project updates. I can't tell you how many times I've been involved with a project and you go to their website to see if they've posted updated photos and their website hasn't been updated in three years. And then you go to their Facebook and their Facebook hasn't been updated. And then you just like, if you're a donor or you're just interested in the project, you wanna make sure that you're being communicated with and that they're updated photos because that's exciting. You wanna see progress and momentum. And I think the Lancaster project was very good about constant communication, constant thank yous, open houses and tours. They had great stickers that they passed out. So everything about their communication made it seem like the project was fun. You wanted to be a part of it. You wanted to contribute, even if it was only, you know, five, 10, 15 bucks, they have these nice kind of gifts like stickers for the lower donors. And I think that gave an avenue for some of the people in town to feel engaged even if they were not the $10,000 checkwriters that you really also need for your project. Busy people forgetting to communicate and how effective and impactful it is when you're a good communicator. Yeah, or that you run out of energy and you'd forget that good communication is gonna be critical to the next thing you do, I guess. I think my colleagues and I often struggle with the right kind of stats to be collecting and having the energy and resources to do a good job with that. I think we also all know that stories plus stats are probably the best combination, the most impactful for our donors, our elected officials, the general public. Jenna, I know at Preservation Trust, you've done great work with videos telling stories. I know you've been playing this critical role with us with this project on the responsibilities and kind of the math as well as the art of this in terms of thinking about those stats we're gonna measure. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about one or both of those things, the stats and the stories? Sure, so we track specific stats for this grants related to community service, businesses, improved or created, and then jobs improved or created. And then beyond that, we are trying to capture increased community engagement. And again, that probably looks very different from what we intended it to be when we wrote the grant and received the funding versus what we're seeing now. But those aren't things that are numbers and those are the community engagement side of it. I think is the thing that's much more effective when told as a story. They're the community engagement side of it that we see highlighted in our annual reports that is the focus of the annual preservation videos. And in some ways by creating that content that we can then share with the community organizations, it gives them a very easy tool that then communicate their successes with other people. And it also lets them shoot their own horn a little bit, but not only have they done a great job, but they've been highlighted by these larger organizations for their hard work. And I think that, especially in small towns, people are sometimes reluctant to do that. And so it's nice when we give them that opportunity. But I think having those kind of two sets of metrics, municipal governments probably really excited in the jobs created and the businesses created as well as the community engagement and then the people level and maybe more interested in the story. And so to have both of that wrapped into the same project is really useful and also really nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Katie, you had a story about communication through award giving. Do you just wanna talk a little bit about that? Sure, yeah. Our organization gives out about eight to 10 excellence awards every year. And as you can imagine from New York State, we do get nominations of a really wide variety of very excellent projects. And so Waylandsburg Garage was nominated last year. And I think for the selection committee, it took some, you know, a little bit outside the box thinking about what makes a project excellent to be able to consider this project in the same realm as some of the other types of projects that came in, but they did. And this did get an award last year. And of course, the award ceremony was over Zoom. And so we had videos produced for each one. We're gonna show the video from Waylandsburg at the end of this presentation. They had a viewing party to watch it, which was really fun to see their pictures from their viewing party. And so that video from that has, of course, had a lot of life beyond just the award ceremony to be able to show like this is the way we see preservation going to be more community focused and letting people decide for themselves what's important and what they wanna do in their own communities. Yeah, great, great, great. I guess as we get to the end of our session, we just wanted to make sure to give a shout out to the Northern Border Regional Commission, you know, the work in these 15 communities has been just really rewarding and very helpful, you know, hearing from the community perspective, very helpful for these catalytic projects on the ground, making a real difference. And on another level for us, it's been a way to think about what kind of investments we need now and in the future, what are the benefits of partnerships and what would we change going forward? This money was available thanks to our congressional delegation from all of our four states from Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. So very excited again about its ability to make a difference on the ground as well as the ability for us to get new ideas about what we wanna do going forward. So I'm gonna close with that a little round robin from the different states. And I think this might be the last time you get to talk during this session as we near the close. Let's go from Maine to New York again, stay in the same order. And the question is, if you had another million, if you had 15 million, how would you spend it next in small towns to try to get some, some of this kind of community development, historic preservation benefit? Any answer is the right answer, I think, Brad. Oh man, that's a lot of pressure to go first here with this question. Certainly, I think the success of this program, funded through NBRC, doing it again would be great. Doing very similar projects. I came last year, so kind of at the tail end of the end of our five projects in Maine, but I went through and saw all the projects. We had a long list of organizations and communities that did apply. Obviously, it's like any program we had to select the final candidates. So there's obviously still a need out there. I think it goes back to my earlier comment about being flexible with grant programs or grant programs that are flexible with what types of spending and just improving systems and making buildings usable. And I think another part of that is also making sure that we are adapting our buildings to the future. And kind of we're answering the call of preservation and climate change and the need to make our buildings energy efficient and also more resilient in the face of the impacts of a changing climate. So I think kind of targeting those things in these smaller communities would be very useful. And all of those improvements also lead to economic growth and also energy cost savings. And I think those are all things that definitely here in Maine, I'm looking to tackle as a state and as a community. Great. It's tough to go first, but it's also tough to go second, third, and fourth in this situation. So you're allowed to be additive, emphasize, or share something totally different. Andrew. Yeah, I think I will piggyback on Brad, especially when I said earlier, if we could have a million dollars for septic systems, wells, storm windows, roofs, like the non-sexy things that people don't think about in preservation projects, but definitely make a project viable and useful for the future. And maybe like beer and pizza parties for the volunteers. I think that would go over well. Yeah. That's a great idea too, yeah. Jenna. Yeah, I mean, I think Brad has done on a lot of it. I think the beauty of having more money is you continue to have a bigger and broader impact and you get to tell more stories. And I think the more stories we tell, the more we can emphasize that preservation is a tool and not a barrier. And so it's a tool in the community and economic development toolbox. It's not something you have to be worried about from a regulatory and a review standpoint. And so the more we can celebrate these preservation projects and really help people understand that they are sound and sustainable community and economic development. The easier it will be for all of us moving forward and the better it will be for all of those communities. Here, here. Katie. We actually are sort of running a test case of this kind of situation right now. We have a very small pilot capital grant program, not a million dollars, much smaller than that, but geared towards arts organizations. And it's something we're doing one time because we had a source of funding for it, but are hoping that might be opening the door to future capital projects. And so we're seeing what the demand is out there. And it's, of course, huge. And I think it is exactly the kinds of projects that everyone else has been talking about, the ones that are hard to get funding anywhere else for accessibility improvements and upgrading air conditioning. That's a huge request for these arts organizations that are finding it harder and harder to run programs in the summer. And yet, we would like to see them make energy improvements that are helpful and not harmful to their carbon footprint. So definitely thinking a lot about resiliency, adaptation, and the kinds of projects that are hard to fund anyplace else, but are very important to let these organizations keep going in these smaller communities. Here, here. That's great. Well, everybody, whether you're working on a policy level or working on the ground, hope you took away a few new good ideas, maybe about new strategies or new perspectives on really focusing on these wonderful community assets, these special places, harnessing great, harnessing good money, harnessing human expertise in those doses of creativity and tenacity and energy you need to pull these projects off. Hope it helps with what you're working on now or what you're working on in the future. We'd love to hear from you. This final slide is gonna have our contact information on it. Please feel free to contact any or all of us with questions or your suggestions. Look forward to hearing from you. We're gonna close with a video that Katie mentioned before, the one the Preservation League of New York State utilized when it was giving that award she mentioned to that great project, The Walling Parage. We love the themes of community enterprise and commitment that come across so central to these kind of projects and the work that we do. So thank you very much to the panel for sharing your ideas and good luck to everybody listening and watching. Here's the video. This is a very iconic building at the center of this small hamlet of Weylandsburg. Everyone who lives in the area drives by frequently. They know the building. The building is owned by the Weylandsburg Grange Association, which is actually just across the street. We're sort of thinking about it as a center of craft activity but also as a community center and center of activities are broader than that as well. It's just really magical because it's the product of collective volunteer work and so there's a tremendous sense of pride and accomplishment in the whole building and to have people to walk from one end to the other to have folks that work from the blacksmith to the woodworking shop. It's just, it's really fantastic transformation. Winning this award from the preservation league and the prestige that that brings with it will help get the word out, will help inspire others with this vision of what's possible and the tremendous, tremendous benefits that come with it.