 those of you in cities and states without your elections. And if you haven't already, I hope that all of you will exercise your hard fought and hard won right to vote and support the issues that matter most to you in your community. My name is Chris Morris, and I am the manager of the National Trust's campaign for where women made history. I'm coming to you today from Los Angeles, California, which is the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino and Tongva people. I am so honored to be joined today by a group of talented women whose individual expertise, commitment, and passion is helping to lead the change in the preservation movement. I have been so fortunate to get to know them and their work over the last year. Today we're going to have a really, I hope, very exciting, interesting conversation about their work. And I encourage all of you, there won't be formal presentations. There will be a few slides to kind of illustrate their work and the impact that they're having. So I invite all of you to submit questions or comments in the chat throughout, and then there will be hopefully some time at the end for us to answer at least a few of those questions in our 50 minutes that we've allotted today. So please put those questions in the chat and we'll do our best to answer them at the end. So to get things started, I would like to introduce you all to our panelists today, and I'm going to invite each one of them to introduce themselves to you. We're going to start with Allison Garcia Keller. Allison. Hi everyone, I'm Allison Garcia Keller. I'm thrilled to be here today. My interest in historic preservation came from visiting the 16th and 17th century city of Antigua Guatemala over summers to visit my dad's family. The entire city of Antigua is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and that was really in stark contrast with where I grew up, which was in South Florida in the 1990s, tropical suburbia, essentially where everything was brand new. And at the time, it seemed that almost everyone or their families were from somewhere else, whether it was another country or another state within the United States. So in that community, in particular, I felt like cultural identity was really a source of pride rather than a source of shame. For undergrad, I studied design at UC Davis, and then I studied historic preservation for my masters at the University of Pennsylvania. And I've worked in historic preservation in California since I'm currently an architectural historian with Environmental Science Associates, and I work on a wide variety of documentation and preservation projects. All of that is to say that cultural heritage is always at the forefront of my mind, given the realization that the rest of the country is really not quite as diverse as where I'm from. That sort of thing really stays with you. I'm a member of the Latinos in Heritage Conservation Education Committee, and I look forward to sharing with you all a little bit about our new project. Thank you, Allison. Next up, Anna Orlando. Introduce yourself. Thank you, Chris. And hi, everyone. It's nice to meet you. I'm Anna. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, but I've spent the past few years in New York and Connecticut. So I've been fortunate to have exposure to many communities who appreciate history. Currently, I'm an associate at the architecture firm Ramsa in New York City, and I've been at the firm since 2017, and I graduated Cornell with an undergraduate degree in architecture. And then last year, I returned to Cornell for my masters in historic preservation planning, which I'll graduate from in May. And then outside of architecture and my preservation coursework, I serve as the Women's Leadership Initiative Chair for my office. And this initiative provides mentorship, education, and peer support to promote the growth of women in their careers, regardless of age, experience level, or background. Thank you. Well, thank you, Anna. Glad to have you with us today. Next up, Nellie Scott, coming to us from Hollywood. Hello. Hi. Thank you all. And thank you, Chris, for having me and so excited to be here with so many amazing individuals. So my name is Nellie Scott, and I'm the Director of the Carita Art Center here in Hollywood. We represent and oversee the estate of Carita Kent. If you're not familiar with Carita, she was an artist, educator, and social justice advocate that I have the good fortune to be the champion of. My own background, I am an art historian who focused on Indigenous contemporary art and social practice. I've spent quite a few years, more than I care, to admit, in working specifically looking at artists' estate and living legacies through the lens of arts education. So making art as accessible and as widely available as possible. Thank you, Nellie. And just a reminder for those of you who have not yet had a chance to see it, a video that Nellie did on Sister Carita Kent and the work that they have done to preserve her legacy and her studio is on the schedule yesterday. So that's a video that you can watch at your leisure. And I encourage everyone to do so. It's a really lovely piece of work and a way to highlight incredibly influential woman and female artists. So thank you, Nellie, for sharing that with the conference. And then last but by no means least, Greta Miller. Oh, we can't hear you, Greta, for some reason. Is this working? There you go. Oh, goodness. Okay. Well, well, everything's working. Very excited to be here with everyone today. And thank you, Chris, for organizing this wonderful call. My background actually started in film and media production of the New School University on NYC. Long story short, media brought me into tech, which brought me to product management and kind of championing inclusive design and BEI strategy across media and technical tools. Presently I work in product operations for an organization called Shutterstock in Manhattan. It is a stock licensing image, video and audio content company. And I've contributed to not only the product requirements for the tools and experiences that we create for our users and our internal folks, but also consulting on DE&I strategy and placing a trauma-informed lens on editorial contents that we can start to reclaim narratives through a more authentic and accurate base. Also the co-founder and co-director of the Friends of Martin House and serve as the chair for the American Library Association's Rainbow Roundtables Oral History Committee. So very excited to be here again. And I look forward to getting off this conversation. Thank you so much, Greta. And thank you all to all of my panelists today. I'm so pleased to have you here for this conversation. So in varying degrees of collaboration with the campaign for where women made history, each of you are doing the work of preservation by protecting and I think even just as importantly revealing the diverse history and stories and places of women's achievement across this country. And while each of you comes to this work from a very different place and perhaps for very different reasons, I've noticed that there are some common underlying themes that kind of bridge all of our work. And these relate to the intentional erasure of women's history and the imperative for visibility, the value of place as powerful repositories for history and memory, regardless of the form or the condition of that place, understanding that access is absolutely critical to achieving equity and the importance of intergenerational connections as sources of both knowledge and empowerment. And so I am excited to dig into all of these themes with you today. So everybody ready? Let's go. All right. So I want to begin our conversation today with a reference to the incredible work of a Chechenyo Ohlone activist, Karina Gould, who sadly was not able to join us on the panel today, but I am deeply indebted to her and I am drawing on her wisdom as an inspiration for our conversation. And her fight to save the West Berkeley shell mound, which is the home of her Ohlone ancestors, Karina has said it's important to have this history known. It's been an erased history and it's part of a continuous erasure of our people. What if we were to actually have a place where our people could talk not only about the past, but the resilience of still being here today. And many of you are working on places and projects where the history of people and history of the women involved has been intentionally or passively ignored and where there were active attempts to erase that history through the erasure of its physical manifestations. So I want to explore that first and Allison, let's start with you. So you are working with the Latinos in heritage conservation on the Abuelos project. That comes to mind for me immediately where you are documenting and identifying the enormous influence of Latinx migrant agricultural workers. It's a population that's historically been and continues to be overlooked and undervalued in our society. And where those physical legacy of those landscapes and the built environment can be really hard to identify and even harder to preserve. So can you tell us a little bit about the Abuelos project and what you're hoping to accomplish with it to ensure that these histories and places aren't overlooked and that they're given the respect they deserve for the ways that they have shaped our culture and our economy. Sure. The Education Committee in particular is starting out very much and we're at the beginning stages of this Abuelos project and it aims to be digital preservation project that will collect, curate, and amplify stories about the places that matter to Latinx communities within the U.S. and also within Puerto Rico. This will take shape in the form of a website and phase one in particular will be a pilot project that will focus on Mexican and Mexican American communities of Texas. So the idea is that we'll start small with this pilot project and eventually this would grow to be a nationwide repository for information on Latinx preservation. This would include theme studies, surveys, nominations, all of these efforts that would support the designation of Latinx historic sites and also identify nationwide patterns related to Latinx preservation. So particularly with phase one of this project, I hope that people who will use this Abuelos project, which will be accessible for everyone, will become aware of the enormous impacts that underrepresented communities have had on our agricultural industry and also related social movements. This concept of user access will allow and encourage everyday voices could range from students to laborers, artists, grandmothers, intergenerationally to participate and share their own stories, really with the hope that participants will gain a sense of ownership and pride through sharing meaningful memories about the places that they hold near and dear to them. So traditionally architecture with the capital A, that phrase likely would often ring a bell in many people's minds and may refer to buildings that are considered high-style architecture works designed by famous largely male architects and will be looking beyond that when we start to think about important Latinx spaces and places. Oftentimes, as we know, historically underrepresented communities have lacked the resources and specific knowledge to preserve their physical histories. Like Chris said, oftentimes many of these places may no longer exist. And so a project that stands out to me that I worked on that's up on the screen here is McDonald Hall. This is located in San Jose, California. It's also known as our Lady of Guadalupe Mission Chapel. This was the home chapel of community organizer, civil rights leader and labor rights leader Cesar Chavez. And this building had changed a lot over time. It had been moved several times. Many features had been covered up, so they were still intact but buried under later modifications. And in some cases, even original features had been wholly removed. So integrity in the traditional sense was a huge hurdle. But thanks to tremendous community support and advocacy in addition to efforts by scholars and technical experts and new perspectives on historic integrity, this building was placed on the National Register and today is a National Historic Landmark. So all that is to say that with the ABALS project we hope to identify more places like this and to be able to understand and commemorate places that may no longer have physical structures, whether they be a trail or a park, a place of refuge, a place of mourning, place of celebration, or even a cultural landscape. Thank you, Allison. And I have to say I was so thrilled that we were able to provide at least a little bit of support and this is just purely a plug. I'm just going to acknowledge it now for the National Trust Preservation Funds to help support the work that you're doing through the ABALS project. Now specifically what I would love to dig into a little bit more with you is this is sort of this larger question of intersectionality which we're going to get into a little bit later in the conversation. But how are you looking at the ABALS project as a way to honor the essential roles of migrant women in this project and in your work since so many of the farm worker programs were largely or exclusively targeted at men, but we know there was an entire network of women who were absolutely critical from a social familial economic structure that were sort of there surrounding them, behind them, supporting them. So tell us a little bit about that. Well, sure. We have a picture here of Maria Moreno and she was the first female farm worker in the United States hired as a union organizer. She was born in Texas in 1920 and then migrated to California during the Dust Bowl migration. We're musing her picture to illustrate that there is there's a big lack of documentation of my female migrant workers. But I also do want to say that the name ABALS project, ABALS translates to grandmothers in Spanish, has the feminine ending on it, ABALAS, as opposed to ABUELOS, which would be grandfathers, to acknowledge the role that women play in in our community as matriarchs, keepers of knowledge, keepers of history and traditions. Overall the ABALAS project will be looking at experiences of women, men, children and families and historically and presently as Chris said, women make up a large percentage of the migrant labor force in a variety of industries and although the Bracero program in particular, which operated from the 1940s to the early 60s mainly hired men, women have worked as migrant workers in many industries in communities and regions all over the country really. So we plan to highlight these experiences of women migrant workers through oral histories, firsthand accounts and photographs when we can find them. Although it's still really early in the project, we've seen that women migrant workers are underrepresented and we're going to be mindful of this and hope to develop explicit strategies for research documentation in order to help elevate these women's experiences. Great, thank you Alice and I'm so excited to see, I know you're still at the beginning stages of the documentation and creating the database but I am just so excited to see where the ABUELOS project goes and I am just thrilled that you were taking this kind of holistic approach to thinking about how these stories and the places associated with them are kind of passed down generationally but all of the different components that go into being able to make sure that story is fully told. So kudos to all of you at Latino's and Heritage Conservation and can't wait to see more from you. So I wanted to sort of shift gears a little bit but this is still very much related to that whole notion of intergenerational storytelling and sort of the connections across generations and how important they can be. So Greta, you and I were recently working on a piece together for the Curve Foundation which is the predecessor of what is probably the, is it the most popular lesbian themed magazine in the world? Is that how they identify themselves? So we were working with them on a piece and in that piece I was so touched by something you said. You said there's power in knowing your history and being able to touch your story and the strength of your elders teaches you what's possible and that resonated with me so much and I'm guessing it resonates with a lot of folks on this call and with our panelists and so I just kind of wanted to open this up to all of you to talk about why it's important to you to reveal those histories and the struggles and the achievements of our foremothers and how does this bridging across generations whether it's past or forward or both? How does that strengthen ourselves and how does that strengthen our work? So I'm going to open this up to anybody who wants to answer that. The work that we've been doing with the Philips line in Del Martin house has really meant a great deal to me not only as a professional but as a gay woman. I think one of the key components of the project has been the ability to restore the ownership of narratives that are oftentimes overlooked or not given the full spectrum of attention that we would like to see them have and getting to that level of accurate and authentic representation in telling Phyllis and Del's story and looking at all of their historic contributions over time not just to the LGBTQ rights movement they were coalition based but seeing how their work really permeated throughout the social justice communities. Another piece for me was about self-awareness being a young gay woman growing up in central Pennsylvania and a brother in Mennonite family there really wasn't a lot of visibility and equitable access to queer information and I didn't see representation of myself or those that I cared about so that idea of when you get to that place where you can really touch your history it gives you that starting point and what I mean by that for me and I know some of my friends maybe others these were blueprints not only for life but for changemaking for activism able to identify parallel lessons in the work of folks such as Phyllis and Del and how it would apply today for that continued changemaking effort and also the most important piece of this too was validating the self and validating one's lived experience. History when you can finally grasp it it becomes this tool where you can push back against stigma and stereotypes and you know that because of your elders things have been done before so that you don't have to struggle as hard today you know what has been completed what battles have been won and the efforts and strategies that were taken to get you to this point and how you can continue with that effort so being able to look back on incredible changemakers from the past who have helped pave the way it gives you that assurance you're not alone you have a place you have a space you know my and Martin house and you realize that it's you who gets to reclaim your narrative with pride and that's power that's so beautiful Greta I remember when you said because they did it I know that I can I just I almost started crying I was like that's so true like this that to me is the real power of these stories and these places as a real as an inspiration I love the use of the word the blueprint so we we know that it's been done we've got the model in front of us we just need to to pick that up and run with it so anybody else Anna and Ellie Allison how are you interacting I know you've already kind of touched on this Allison these kind of intergenerational stories but also the intergenerational connections I'd love to jump in here because this question really excites me in the work that we do so the Crete Art Center is a project of the Immaculate Heart community and that history in and of itself is steeped in feminist theology and ground baking women that have come before us and there's actually a documentary that just came out about them called Rebel Hearts you're curious of what their history is and they became essentially an ecumenical community and when Corita passed she left her estate to them and they could have done many things with it but they chose to pass this on to future generations and they work every day and thinking about the ethos that that they share with her in passing that forward and so this question really excites me because it's something that we sit with every day and learning from those at the shoulders that we stand on now people like Anita Casper and Helen Kelly and Corita who made her work possible this collective of women that's not only stood behind Corita at that time but continue to do so and again passing that torch to the next generation so I'm really grateful that you allowed us to bring kind of those elders into our space to learn from and to name them uh yes and I hope you will put the link to the Rebel Hearts video documentary in the chat because I I thanks to you I saw it I so much history that is kind almost literally in my own backyard that I did not understand and talk about a group of fearless women speaking truth to power I mean it doesn't get more fraught than dealing with the Catholic church and the archdiocese and the Vatican and they were I'm just what they did was really remarkable and so I love that you're sort of you have it embrace that ethos and you are embodying it in the work that you are doing at the Corita Center and you're carrying it forward and sharing that ethos as a part of your plans for the the Corita Studio so thank you for that all right Anna you are actively at the center of this kind of like intergenerational bridging the past and the present and the future and I am so delighted thank you so much to have somebody on our panel who's a student and who's just starting your career and as you mentioned you've just taken over the leadership of the women's leadership initiative at Ramza and and so from your perspective I really want to hear like what are the most pressing challenges you see from young women today or people who identify as female who are just getting started in this field or who are contemplating a career in preservation or an affiliated field what are the issues that you're exploring and how can we better support strong young diverse women and people who identify as female so that we've got that representation and those diverse perspectives in our work and to help shape our thinking thanks Chris yeah that's a it's a very big question but I think from my perspective working and being in school one of the challenges I've been facing is just feeling overwhelmed by the amount that there is to learn and the experience that is yet to be gained and I think that's especially true in fields like architecture and preservation because the more time you put in the more you learn and the better experience you have so it can be pretty daunting as a young woman to be approaching these fields and I think there's a lot of self-doubt that comes with that growth but I think one thing I've learned in my experience at Ramza is that mentorship is really key to that growth both finding a good mentor and then also becoming a good mentor which is something that's been new to me in the past couple years so in our these are some photos actually from events that we've had with the women's leadership initiative and really what we try to do is just create moments and spaces for exposure to women across the office in all different departments and then even women outside of our office that are working in the field and that can share history with us and share their experience and their perspectives so really I think sometimes it's just as simple as having a nice honest conversation with a woman that has had the same experience or is having the same experience that you're having because that can really help you feel secure in your path forward because mentors don't always I have found that mentors don't always have to be this very formal long-term relationship it can be someone that you're meeting in an event like this or someone that you haven't even met that you follow remotely but I think definitely one thing that people can do and what that I hope people do in their own offices and their own professions is to find opportunities for young women to step up and have these greater responsibilities because even if you know even for me taking on the leadership of this women's group I was very intimidated and I thought I'm too young for this why my why are they picking me but in the end I think it was a really transformative experience to have the support of women above me to give me that confidence and to tell me that I can do it and people will benefit from it and I'll benefit from it so I think yeah definitely find a good mentor be a good mentor and find as many opportunities as you can to meet women and from all different fields and backgrounds. Oh thank you Anna that is so true I mean I think we all can relate a bit to the whole imposter syndrome it just sort of seems to be endemic and that notion of finding those mentors finding people around you that can serve as a source of information inspiration guidance and creating that those opportunities I think you're right those are so critical give people a chance to explore who they are and what they can do so so thank you for sage advice thanks so much. So Nellie I want to I know we talked a little bit about Sister Corita but I want to I want to talk a little bit more about the work that you've done there so shining a light on a woman who was a very public figure in her in recent time I was stunned I mean she was on the cover of Time is that right like so public at the time but absolutely has not received the recognition that she deserves and and I was really struck during the public landmark hearing about how many people acknowledged her humble little cinderblock studio as a kind of a sacred space because of not what it looked like but the passion and the vitality and the significance of Sister Mary Corita now there were also a lot of people who were trying to devalue her and her life and her work because they were only talking about her in comparison to male artists at the time so it's like oh well she's not Andy Warhol so she's not important and I think a lot of us are really familiar with that kind of false zero some game argument so how did you respond to critics who only wanted to talk about her in comparison rather than in terms of her own merits and accomplishments. Yeah good question and I think you know we I can say for myself and our team is we really kind of came at this a little bit we're not necessarily part of the preservation community we are historians and but I recognize that there's a parallel also in our journey of thinking through her place and her seat at the table also within the art world these conversations that we're having of whose history and whose work is being valued and so when we found out about the pending demolition and we're right across the street it felt really important to raise our hand and very early on I know that we were on a local call and they wouldn't say her name and as someone who gets to be her champion and is steeped in these rich archives where she was on the cover of Newsweek she was on these like LA Times Women of the Year and all of these accolades that that are in our archives that championed her place at the table in in California design history I mean you name it it's a seven degrees of Corita influence and running into that and I I know that we have a really great privilege to name here as well as an archive of you know around 30,000 objects artworks ephemera and a great privilege that we have a full-time staff and people like Catherine Mullen who's historic preservationist who heard that call and came to our aid to to help us on this journey what was interesting to me from again kind of a little bit of an outside perspective of the conversations we were having about not only this very humble building yeah there she is a very posed photo of working in the studio and this is the humble building we speak of that many women artists in particular often remembered in in conversation with the work of their their partner and what was really unique here is a not only a powerful incredible woman artist and educator who was being champion and still is championed by a collective of other women who are saying you're not going to forget her her students who were in this space with her who who who taught and and learned and were part of these conversations of you know what does hope mean and that you know it's not just optimism and you have to show up and so this kind of individual response to the collective whole of like your own responsibility and I think when we responded to those critics of well you have her artwork isn't that enough this value placed on a woman's workplace of no it's not a marble building she wouldn't have had access to a building like that and when you mentioned the CHC hearing which we are again so grateful to so many people and individuals who who called in and and the commissioners and it was very heartfelt a moment was there is a natural intersection of faith art and social justice and that this is a living legacy and it wasn't lost on me during during that hearing that you bring up that so many people called in with the idea of how do we put this building back in service how is this building a representation for all of those shared ethos and that we will need spaces like this when we come out of this pandemic that are rooted in love and hope and what it means to be a good neighbor and so that's really how we responded she is Carita she stands in her own merit let me tell you more about her and further we work really hard on the digitization of those accolades because that came really apparent to us of if her work was not digitized and readily available online then we know about it in the archive and our wonderful researchers do but we need to make that more accessible and I think that's a larger conversation around women's history and making sure that that gets digitized as a tool absolutely and I don't think you could have set it up better is a segue for my next question for Greta which is all about these questions of not just digitization but the larger question of access and visibility and how critical that is to identifying these places to bringing attention but also respect to these women and the work that they've done so you and I have been working on the lion martin house over the last I guess it's six to nine months now and I have to say you have truly opened my eyes to these integral connections between visibility representation and inclusion and just how important it is to document our histories especially those like at the lion martin house where they were intentionally hidden at the time because they were associated with shame or stigma or just falsehoods so talk about how the virtual documentation of a place like the lion martin house can be a source of empowerment in a way for women and lgbtq and other marginalized communities to capture and to reclaim their histories that was awesome thanks chris that was great setup uh yes I'm obviously very passionate about virtual and digital documentation and experiences and I I see a theme in the things we continue to talk about which is this idea of access and driving visibility behind the the stories that are just not seen so in working with sly ark when we did the digital documentation of uh phyllis nine and del martin home it provided a window of opportunity one to center the voices of the community localized in san francisco but also within the queer community itself and this allowed us to do two things one we could you know reach a far more greater global audience in the story of phyllis and del which to me is a great tool for hope there's nothing like hope you can't live without hope and it's baked into the digital product that sly ark is working with the friends of lion martin house to produce for the general public it also allows us as chris was mentioning to begin the work to remove shame from stories that have been excluded for so long and to also reframe that narrative so that we're not just talking about historically excluded communities from the idea of victimhood but from the idea of being a survivor which is incredibly important the other piece is removing the stigma and the shame from requesting access to that information the platform that in this case that we'll be using is a very user friendly platform you don't have to be intimidated to go there you don't have to feel like you're going to be outed if you're accessing this information you can do it within the safety of your own home tour the site listen to lgbtq history experts talk and speak to the work and lives of phyllis and del so there is a lot of power there to unearth these historic moments that some folks may not know even existed or were just denied access to because of geo or other limitations that were just putting up barriers of privilege in their way where they couldn't touch their stories so this is really exciting work and i'm very happy to see it continue and thinking of the future too sometimes they're released questions of well why do this for this little humble home why do it for sites like this and the lift and effort versus some of the long-term preservation work that i'm even still learning about uh if it's quite a feat to get some things done and i have tremendous respect for everyone that is on this call for the incredible work that you're all doing um the digital documentation is a little bit more as i see it as an intervention what could we do now for this space how could we prove that the work that phyllis and del did within this home really mattered to a spectrum of people in the fight for justice so thinking long term what data could we capture for future change makers filmmakers documentarians researchers 50 100 200 years in the future if we had the tools at our disposal why not do all we could now so that was also part of the decision to go this route which was to preserve the data to make sure that we had all the visual assets recorded and stored um and open access so that in the future those who need those materials and assets will have them to work with going forward yeah no it is such an exciting project and i'm so grateful to have the opportunity to work with you and shame and the friends of leon martin house and the glbt historical society i mean the the just beginning to understand the impact of these two women's lifetime of work and the i don't think it's an exaggeration to say the millions of lives that were affected who may have no understanding of recognition of the role that these women played in helping them achieve the rights that that they enjoy that we all enjoy today and so to me working with syar to make sure this story exists in an easily findable accessible and like you said sort of shame free format so that everyone can globally can understand this story is just so critical and and in my mind should be integral to the work that we do is you know we need to save the physical place but we also need to to save it in other ways and make it accessible in other ways so thank you so much for for helping to to kind of bring all of those issues to light for me gretta right um this is i know we're coming this has been a great conversation by the way so thank you all um and i have one more question that is i shouldn't have saved it for last because it is absolutely enormous and i don't expect anyone on this call to have an answer to it but i feel like i would be remiss if i don't at least ask it and and it's as i've gotten deeper into this work i i am just i am so struck by and in some ways kind of overwhelmed by the enormous complexity and challenge in addressing a subject as broad as women's history because it encompasses the full range of women's identities and and those who identify as female whether that's religious whether it's racial whether it's economic whether it's their sexuality identity it's it's everything and so what i'm really concerned about is making sure that we avoid the mistakes of the past and that we value all of these perspectives all of these identities in a way that doesn't privilege one over the other that women or their identity their gender identity or their sexuality identity isn't any more important than than any other identity that they embrace and promote themselves so do you have some suggestions for how we can promote more solidarity and inclusion across groups and across identities that but so many of that we're we have heard from and are hearing from today in these affinity sessions don't i'll jump in at once i i think from from a very like sort of big picture perspective i feel like as preservation practitioners and as academics we tend to get very caught up in the language very like difficult you know scholarly language and i feel like sharing stories in plain understandable terms is really important so there can be an even playing field for everyone to kind of come in and and learn from wherever they are and i feel like particularly for complex topics and histories it's important to simplify these ideas which can be overlooked and maybe even feel a little bit exclusionary excellent point anyone else gretta yeah i think too looking at how we define requirements gathering putting inclusion equity and justice before diversity meaning we're not just checking off boxes for how many projects we think we're getting done but how are we really being inclusive when we're going through the process of our early planning stages how does that get baked into the overall procedural process that we're taking when we're about to take next steps to whether it's preserve a landmark or in you know my world revamping the way we do content ingestion and representation for folks across the spectrum visual projects and products so one of the things that i think needs to happen is for these to be codified into the actual requirements gathering we actively need to say you know who isn't here that needs to be here what are we not seeing that we should be seeing or should be looking for how are we really giving the just attention for intersectionality and identity of story how do we build a space or a digital experience that we can walk through and address whether it's the planning or the design from the viewpoint of marginalized communities and that means hearing their voices do they have a driving seat at their own table they're not being used for idea harvesting and then moving on you know how are we representing their communities are we representing them with dignity are they being served and who are we really doing this for at the end of the day and i love Allison's point of sometimes depending on what world you're in you really have the blinders on for your world and it's not intentional but things get missed so how do we start to treat exclusion as part of risk management and how do we start baking these requirements in from the top down and even if it takes time do we reassess the way we do our advisory groups do we start to bring in more activists community leaders documentary filmmakers inclusive product managers or dei strategists not to take away from the expertise that is already in the room but to look at those edge cases and add to the conversation to help ensure that no one's being left behind or missed i love that thank you grata uh so i mean i knew i was the smartest thing i i did was to get to know you so thank you so much for all of the wisdom that you are bringing to this conversation and i just want to shout out to michelle magalong um who who her chat is incredibly important comment too it's important to support and empower those that have been excluded and marginalized support them on their own terms as allies know when to step back and when to step up thank you michelle so wise all right well in our last five minutes um i just wanted to give everyone an opportunity this is a little thing that i like to do um because for me these are great conversations i hope i'm seeing in the chat people are really inspired they're they're excited to take things back and apply them to their to their own organizations in their own work but i want to make sure that nobody walks away from this conversation without having a good idea to take home and put into practice so i'm ask every single person on the panel to share one challenge for the audience it can be something big it can be something small it's just to get you all thinking about things that you can take home and put into practice as a way of centering women and doing all of the things that we've just been discussing doing it in a respectful way that respects other identities other priorities but hopefully get you thinking about ways to elevate women and bring their stories to the fore so i'm going to just randomly allison go first what's your challenge i would say ask questions come from a place of genuine curiosity i feel like like what anna was saying preservation can feel like a field that's very much handed down from one generation to the next and it can certainly be intimidating and feel closed off so i would encourage a variety of fresh perspectives you never know if a question that you ask might inspire something or or even potentially a movement thank you so much um anna what's your challenge so i would i'll add on to that i think it's really important to attend your local meetings whichever one seemed interesting to you whether that's preservation economic development or just you know a local meeting for women that is hosted by an organization or something like this but i think attending local meetings is providing you know giving yourself a space to have a voice in your community but it's also putting you an environment where you're hearing other voices and so i think across generations across genders across all backgrounds i think local meetings are really important for preservation thank you um Greta words of words of wisdom to challenge the folks on the call well the last question was great and that was part of my challenge so i'll say it again is to figure out what it means to you and your processes or for your team to put inclusion equity and justice before diversity don't treat projects like checkoffs you know the checkoff boxes starting with inclusion gives your team or your organization a chance to create inherently diverse projects and whether it be science or digital products the overall process um it's will work even better when there's a cultivated sense of belonging and i challenge you to bring those community leaders into your room bring those activists into your room and listen to them and hear them create space and let them drive and then the next piece of that is support their narrative don't know our narrative right and thank you and and i'm just looking here in the chat divya thank you so much for also reminding us of the need to acknowledge and respect people with physical disabilities and other challenges that we need to to be mindful of those two and make sure that we are creating an inclusive environment for for everyone so thank you and all right nely give us your challenge oh i feel like everyone covered most of my challenges um but i think that that shares the common thread of um why this work matters and creating accessibility you know kind of just pulling on the thread of allicens um the simplification of like um of language that we're using um you know engage visual artists as well to tell your story sometimes it's just that simple but also engaging your community stakeholders on those local meetings and um engage a lot of larger audience i guess that's my challenge is to engage a larger audience by saying you need help i mean that's uh that's what we did and i feel like if it had not been uh for covid if you access to civic engagement and creating pathways to civic engagement on a local level um really empower people who were not um preservationists to speak up about this shared history and shared goals so just to add on everything else a challenge perfect thank you and i have a challenge as well i'm just going to be perfectly honest this is a bit of vlog rolling but i think it's important that everyone on this call um know that we have a new unique funding opportunity at the national trust are telling the full history grant program and the application the guidelines the FAQs were just released yesterday they are public now it's in the chat everybody go take a look and my challenge to all of you is to go look at this information because this is a one-time only program 25 to $50,000 grants for projects dedicating to telling a more full history of underrepresented and marginalized communities and that includes women so i want all of you to go take a look at that and think about a research a planning a designation a training project that you can do to bring more understanding appreciation and respect to the places that represent the history of women women of color indigenous women lgbtq communities and submit an application by december 15th everybody we want to see a lot of those applications coming in and with that we are at our time i want to thank all of you for for joining us today i see that we had almost 400 participants thank you all i hope you are as inspired by these amazing women as i am and thank you all for all of the great comments and suggestions and questions that you put in the chat enjoy the rest of the conference everyone