 Well, hello. Welcome to everybody. And thank you, Merida, for that wonderful introduction. And thank you all for joining us here this week. It's great to have everyone here. We have some of the most creative and visionary and hardworking people in preservation here in Savannah. And that's all of you and all of our colleagues who are tuning in today online. And I thought we'd just take a minute to start by getting to know one another a little bit and let everybody take a quick stretch. So I'd like to ask this year's diversity scholars to stand up. We have 29 diversity scholars this year. Will you please rise? Leaders, if you're under the age of 35, please stand up. This is your first National Preservation Conference. Please stand up. At the Preservation Conference, the last time it was in Savannah in 1998, please stand up. Please, if you're watching us online, please stand up. We'll totally take your word for it. This is the first year that we're live streaming our plenaries at the National Preservation Conference. And we have colleagues, preservation colleagues in Pakistan, in Uganda, in Australia, in the UK, in all 47 states in the District of Columbia joining us today. So please give them a round of applause too. Really excited about the conference this year. And this is such an exciting time for what we all do. Our cities are coming back to life thanks to the growing number of people who are choosing to live and work and play in historic places. Millennials are leading the charge. And research shows that they're more interested in history than any other generation in the United States previously. Slowly, but surely, our legislators, opinion leaders, and everyday people are waking up to the fact that preservation matters. It speaks to the issues we care about. It solves intractable problems. It brings communities back to life. And the challenge now for all of us is how to keep this momentum going. So we're going to take the next few days to do something that we rarely have the time to do as preservation leaders. And that's go deep on some of the most important preservation issues facing the preservation movement today. You've asked for this opportunity and feedback that you've given us about the conference over the years. And the timing, we think, just couldn't be better. We're just a year away from the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, half a century. And as milestone birthdays go, that's a pretty big one. And I should know, because I just turned 50 a few weeks ago myself. And there's nothing like being old enough to qualify for the National Register to make you take stock of your life and where you are and to take stock of our movement. And thankfully, I have a lot to be thankful and grateful for in my life, and the same is true for all of us. So we're looking pretty good for our age. We've discovered the fountain of youth, as you saw a minute ago. That's an amazing number of leaders under the age of 35 who are with us here. But we're going to keep getting younger, and I'll talk a little bit about that later. We've also achieved an admirable level of expertise and influence as a movement. We've moved preservation forward in ways that would have amazed our predecessors. So we stand on a really solid foundation. And thanks to the work that you all do every day. But of course, that doesn't mean we're finished. You know the host of challenges that face us every day. Teardowns, climate change, the misguided belief that old buildings are the problem, not potential solutions. And that's why we need this conference. We have an opportunity over the next few days to begin charting a bold new course for the future. And we've identified four major areas. Real estate, technology, climate change, and shifting demographic patterns. Where we believe focused work now can achieve meaningful results at a scale that really matters across our country. Now no doubt our successors will have other challenges that they'll add to this list. And of course, none of us has a crystal ball. But I'm fairly certain that if we could look 50 years into the future, that the topics that we're going to explore today and this week will be represented on our conference agenda 50 years from now. So we're gonna spend the next few days going deep in each one of these areas using Savannah as our learning laboratory whenever we can. We'll grapple with provocative ideas and explore creative solutions. And I'm gonna spend the rest of my time today telling you a little bit more about each track so you'll have a sense of what's coming. So to get us in the right mood, we thought it would be fun to channel a leader known for really dramatic presentations, the late Steve Jobs. And I've even dressed in all black in commemoration of Steve Jobs. Now we don't have quite the budget of an Apple product launch, but we have tried to borrow a few of their ideas to spice up our presentation today. Although I'm sorry to say, you will not be getting another Free U2 album as part of your admission fee today. But we will be using bold minds and forward thinking technology to enhance our important conversations today. So I'd like to introduce our first theme, Preservation Venture, with the story Daniel Carey, whom you just met a few minutes ago, the president and CEO of the Historic Savannah Foundation. And Daniel likes to tell this story about the early days of the revival here in our host city. The formidable Lee Adler was running the Historic Foundation at the time. And they had rehabbed a few places on Polasky Square, but there was still a lot to be done. So Adler decided it was time to think big. He secured a $75,000 challenge grant from a local community foundation and then went out and knocked on doors until he matched it. He got a break when Mills B. Lane, Jr., a legendary banker in Atlanta, came through with a major gift which helped HSF buy options on enough properties to shift the momentum. They had a big open house weekend and they were hoping to get a couple of thousand people here to go through their houses and more than 15,000 people showed up. They sold more than two dozen properties in a matter of weeks. And the rest, as we like to say, is history. Now I tell this story today because Lee Adler's skills, his business acumen, his real estate savvy, his willingness to think big and to take risks are still fundamental to our success today. And his basic goal, preservation on a meaningful scale, is still the holy grail for what we all do every day. We're all real estate entrepreneurs at some level. And as evidence of that, we've developed some really tremendous and powerful tools. We now have 60 revolving funds in this country. We've used the federal historic tax credit to rehab 40,000 historic properties and thousands more have benefited from state tax credits. In fact, in the past year alone, our host state of Georgia invested $85 million in historic rehabs and that's just one state. These are fantastic tools, but we have to keep reaching. As you know, the federal historic tax credit is under siege in Congress. You may not know that the Brookings Institution predicts that we will demolish one third of the nation's building stock in the next 15 years. Just stop to think about that for a second. One out of every three buildings in the next 15 years. That's over 80 billion with a B square feet of space. Which challenges us, I think, to ask, what more can we do? So to help answer this question, we've invited Jim Buldner, an expert in private real estate financing, to be our keynote speaker on this track. And it will be great to hear his ideas. But we've also got a lot to teach one another. Our colleagues in Maine recently secured more than $1 million in public bond money for a revolving fund. And Denver just raised $12 million in one hour for popular rehab projects by selling many bonds online. You'll hear from people like Myra Coward in North Carolina and Kathleen Crowther in Ohio and Clark Shuttle in Rhode Island, who've been pioneering new tools in real estate for years. So to wet your appetite, we'd like to spotlight on one project that got its start here at the Preservation Conference a few years ago in a conversation between Clark and this year's American Express Aspire Award winner, Josh Rogers. Now Josh was the executive director of the Historic Macon Foundation at the time. And he was looking for new tools to help revitalize Bell's Hill, a 32 block national register district which had seen better days. He talked to Clark about an innovative tool that Clark was using, Program-Related Investments, or PRIs, which is one of foundation loans and non-profit money at below market rates. And Clark was having great success with PRIs and Providence. Josh wanted to bring those home to Macon, Georgia. The PRI became part of a powerful suite of programs that now has a real shot at transforming Bell's Hill over the next five to seven years. Clark's doing a session on PRIs later this week, so I hope you'll check that out. But in the meantime, we have a quick graphic to show you how it's all fitting together at Bell's Hill. So in 2007, Historic Macon raised $700,000 from the Knight Foundation, which it used to build and rehab 22 houses. Now that was a major success in and of itself and it was double the number of houses they promised the Knight Foundation. So it was just a fantastic success. But that persuaded Knight to step up in a much bigger way this summer with a $3 million in grants and program related investments. Now the loan will eventually need to be repaid at 1% interest, but it doubled the size of Historic Macon's existing revolving fund so it could rehab an additional 100 houses over the next five to seven years. That's half the time it would have taken if Historic Macon had to pay market rates to borrow the money according to Ethiel Garrington who's the foundation's current executive director. Now guided by their fantastic Knight Foundation program officer, Beverly Blake, they went a step further and combined the loan with community building investments including low interest facade loans which notably have a 0% default rate. They also added a program that makes energy efficiency loans bolstered by rebates from Georgia Power and it helped nearby Mercer University secure a Knight matching grant that provided down payment assistance to faculty and staff buying homes in the neighborhood. And finally the county invested in roads, sidewalk, lighting and landscaping infrastructure improvements. So to give you a quick bottom line with a totaled investment of about $5.8 million they transformed 475 buildings and an entire neighborhood. Ethiel and his wife just bought a house in the neighborhood and have applied for facade and energy efficiency loans and he says it's just incredibly satisfying to see the neighborhood come back to life around them. And as evidence that the rehab's working it's worth noting that the total property tax revenue in that area has increased by nearly a million dollars much of it from rehabbing abandoned houses and building on empty land. Now Historic Macon never displaces landowners and they only acquire occupied houses and they counter gentrification in other ways too like recruiting low income homeowners and advocating for property tax freezes. And it's just fabulous I think to see groups like Historic Macon out in front demonstrating that history, sustainability, fairness and economic vitality can all go hand in hand. So to deepen our real estate skills as a community of practitioners Melissa Jest recently joined the National Trust as our new redevelopment specialist thanks to funding from the 1772 Foundation which is also our sponsor for this track of the conference. The foundation also makes scholarships to defray the costs of real estate training such as the preservation leadership training intensive offered this week and trainings all year round. Now of course the trust will keep advocating for federal and historic tax credits and doing our best to disseminate your good ideas and innovations. The good news in all of this of course is that people care about the historic fabric of their communities and as they get more involved they quickly discover how life affirming it is to revitalize a place you love. They're seeing that firsthand in Michigan and I'd like to introduce our next new track preservation story with a video produced by our colleagues at the Michigan Historic Preservation Network. Detroit is full of beautiful buildings and they all matter and they all have character and they all have stories. To look at every vacant building as being blighted and needing to come down is a mistake. Vacant buildings are opportunities. The argument about blight is that if you have one house on your block that's vacant that can have a domino effect. It's difficult to look past boarded up windows or missing windows but it's important to shift the perspective of what a building can mean. We see people from all walks of life and from all experience levels who are rehabbing homes in Detroit or buildings in Detroit. I see people who are just like me who have no experience who say I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna see what I can do. They're putting this what equity in because the place matters. I know what it's like to start from scratch with a building or with a project and as far as what they're doing in here I think it gives hope. I think one of the cool things about rehab is the fact that it really helped bring communities back. It feels like a time machine you're like driving down the road exactly like it was in 1914. I could take you and show you buildings that have been refurbished and they're much nicer than seeing a vacant field. Wood flooring they have, crown molding all the wonderful things and we're tearing it down. I don't see that as progress. Preservation is a very immediate and tangible and hands-on way to play a part in Detroit's history. I think that as people start coming back to the city they're gonna realize that this is a really, really unique and cool place to live. Communities are made up of people and parks and all kinds of pieces that go together. Buildings are a part of that. Every building can matter. Like this happening on the ground and I know we've all felt for our colleagues in Michigan in recent years. I don't know, I'd learned something recently that I just thought was quite astounding that $100 million in federal funding from TARP that was supposed to be for mortgage assistance has been redirected to tear down and demolish buildings. $100 million and half of that is, that's $100 million in the state of Michigan I should say and half of that is going to Detroit. The mayor of Detroit has committed to 400 demolitions a week. And designated historic neighborhoods are off the chopping block for now but not eligible historic districts and currently there's no section 106 review which we're working to try to change. But in this very challenging environment in Michigan our colleagues are doing fantastic work to influence how and where demolition occurs. And they're finding that technology has been perhaps their most powerful tool for securing a seat at the table when decisions are made. Earlier this year Nancy Feingud and her colleagues at the Michigan Historic Preservation Network pulled off a really remarkable feat supported by their partners at Preservation Detroit. They organized more than 50 trained volunteers most of them professional preservationists to survey 18,000 historic properties in two weeks. And of course it had to be in the dead of winter in Detroit. Because they were working towards a hard deadline for a project and initiative of the city called Motor City Mapping which was assessing every parcel in the city to guide decisions for demolition. Now Emily Evans who you just saw in the video a few minutes ago designed and implemented a survey to give them good information about the properties in eligible historic districts and to do it in a way that was immediately accessible. The preservationists teamed up with a company called Local Data which is here with us this week to develop an easy to use tool. It allowed surveyors to record basic information on their smartphones and then synthesize that information real time to provide a historic preservation score. So we thought it would be fun once again to pay homage to Steve Jobs and do a brief product demo of this great tool they use. It works like this. Users selected a parcel then answered questions about architectural integrity, neighborhood character, condition of the block and properties requiring further research. Once they hit enter the parcel changed color to show that the survey was complete and then they moved on to the next property. The team could watch the surveys adding up in real time through a dashboard view and it aggregated all the information about each individual property and used it to create a comprehensive view of the block or the neighborhood. The data was then converted into a GIS data layer which provided a historic preservation score for all the buildings which motor city mapping could integrate into the information it was providing decision makers. The surveys opened up new partnerships and conversations and it's been a really powerful tool encountering the old stereotypes of preservation as slow or inflexible or out of touch. It's also demonstrated that we can move at the speed of decision makers and be influential without obstructing the process. It also gave Detroit preservationists a chance to show that they understand the realities facing their city and they aren't going to demand that everything be saved. In fact, I thought it was really interesting that as a result of all that survey work they found eight properties that require further investigation. So digital surveys like this one and others such as the app created by the Getty for Survey LA are terrific examples of how much easier and more affordable it is to use technology than it used to be. We're very fortunate this week to have Esri, the industry leader in GIS as a sponsor of this conference track this week and we're delighted that their nonprofit program manager David Gadsden is here to share a case study in the use of GIS at the James River, one of our national treasures. The days coming sometime in the not too distant future when GIS, 3D modeling and laser scanning will be the standard I believe for building and landscape documentation and powerful tools for bringing cultural resources to new audiences. We thought we'd close this section with a glimpse of the future in the form of dramatic laser mapped 3D images of Mesa Verde which were created by a nonprofit called CyArk which was formed after the destruction of the Bami and Buddhas over a decade ago. They're building a free 3D online archive of the world's great cultural resources before and they want to document these places before they're lost to manmade or natural disasters and the ravages of time. To me it's just tremendously exciting to think about the capacity tools like these can bring to our work, especially as we begin to tackle the next issue we'll be talking about this week, the crisis posed by climate change. And I'm guessing this is the topic that we're all dreading with a little bit of dread. It's hard to think about the potential impacts of climate change, let alone to talk about them or to try to plan for them. But this is definitely one of those things where the consequences of not talking about it is definitely worse than the conversation itself. Now I know that there are some people who still question whether climate change is happening but I've believed for quite some time that it is happening and I'm hearing from preservation colleagues around the country that they're seeing its effects as well. So as a community we're already starting to experience and grapple with climate change in very concrete ways. In coastal Louisiana, we lose a football field worth of land every hour. Just stop and think about that for a minute. The historic waterfront in Annapolis, which is one of our national treasures has seen nuisance flooding vastly increase over the past 50 years and climate models predict that by 2030 they will suffer flooding 180 days out of the year, every other day. So it's tempting to throw up our hands in the face of threats like that but as we're seeing in Annapolis and in other places it's not all bad news. Climate change is also spurring new partnerships and some very thoughtful resilience planning. So we'll explore both the realities and the opportunities more fully in the Trust Live session on Friday that's dedicated to climate change and we owe a special thanks to our friends at the National Park Service for sponsoring our conference track this week. They're showing great leadership that will help us respond effectively and Director Jarvis especially deserves tremendous credit for consistently sounding the alarm and empowering his senior leaders like Stephanie Toothman, Associate Director for Cultural Resources, Partnerships and Science to take action within the service. All told, the National Park Service has more than 400 park units and so they're a fantastic learning laboratory. Now roughly one quarter of these units have already documented climate-related impacts and that number will almost certainly continue to rise. To give you a sense of how their work is taking shape we'd like to spotlight the challenges at six very different sites starting with Cape Crescent Stern on the coast of Alaska. The shoreline here is eroding so quickly that the Park Service now uses GIS models to direct its survey efforts so that it can find cultural resources before they're lost to the sea. Changes on this scale are devastating for native cultures and their traditional practices. At Toom Kikori, a Spanish mission in Arizona and throughout the Southwest, Adobe is deteriorating quickly because of rainfall changes. The Park Service is studying how much stress the Adobe can endure and what sorts of maintenance work improve its resilience. Hurricane Sandy, just a few years ago at the same week of this conference, devastated Ellis Island's buildings and collections, many of which had to be moved offsite for repair. The question facing the Park Service now is where to put the collections, where to put them back and potentially move them out of or bring them back onto the island and potentially put them back in harm's way or should they move them to a safer location? At this ancient rock quarry in Minnesota floods regularly disrupt Native American rituals. The Park Service is pumping out the quarry, but the situation really calls us all into this very theoretical challenging question about whether pumping is a viable solution over the long term. Similarly difficult scenario, planning is underway at Fort Jefferson, built in shallow waters at the end of the Florida Keys and it's tremendously vulnerable to sea level rise. The same's true at national parks and many cultural resources across the country and many more are gonna be underwater. Dr. Tuthman has talked at length with Native Hawaiians, for example, about how they would feel about their ancestral places that are likely to be submerged. And she asked the question, would they still matter in the same way? And the answer of course is yes. The people associated with those places still matter and so the places themselves still matter. Native communities in particular stand to face significant losses because so much of their history and culture is tied to the landscape. We can't prevent all of these losses and none of us wants to think about the kind of triage we're likely to face in the coming years. But I think it's incumbent upon us to reckon with it bravely because no one is better suited than we are. To help people memorialize the places they love and to save the places they can. Now going forward, we may choose to consider new approaches like moving buildings, raising them up or implementing creative waterproofing and reinforcements to help them withstand flooding. Of course, reducing carbon emissions is essential to the equation as well. And it's so it's important that we keep reminding people that the greenest building is most likely the one that's already been built. And I'll put in a quick plug here for the great data our preservation green lab has compiled to make this case, all of which is available on our website. And finally, I think it's worth noting that we can also make a difference through the way we interpret our historic sites. We can draw attention to the physical impacts and when it makes sense, bring climate change into the discussion that we have with our guests. The Park Service is already doing this at a number of their historic sites and they're working with park rangers to figure out how to manage the really challenging conversations that follow. But no one is better suited than we are to put climate change in a historical context. And I think that's one of the most powerful ways we can bring it out into the open and help us grapple with it together as a nation. Now, I think it's time to lighten the mood a little bit. And I wanted to get back to that fountain of youth that I promised you. I'm talking, of course, about the 15 million local preservationists that you've heard me speak about at three other national preservation conferences. All these younger, culturally diverse, kindred spirits of ours out there who share our values and represent our future but don't yet think of themselves as preservationists. Now, we know from our marketing research that the best way to reach them is to connect with them on social media and then engage IRL or in real life, as they like to say. So with that in mind, we've been experimenting over the past couple of years with a series of engagement efforts. We lined, for example, a 26-foot box truck with AstroTurf and drove it around Houston before an important Astrodome vote. Yes, you now need a trucker's license to work at the National Trust. We opened up a campaign, a pop-up campaign office in Cincinnati just a month ago and had great success with a hard-hat tour in New York State Pavilion. Yay, Cincinnati. A really positive note on election night and past a bond referendum, it was terrific. So these campaigns have been a lot of fun and they've taught us a lot about how to engage with this new audience. Chief among them is the need to think outside the box and we've been trying to do that. For an organization like ours with more than 65 years of sending direct mail and communicating with people in one way, that's been about as much fun for us sometimes as dumping a bucket of ice water on our heads. But as we saw from last summer's ALS ice bucket challenge that sometimes that's exactly what it takes. So earlier this year we did something really extraordinary at the National Trust. We worked with our partners, the Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, to host nine graffiti artists from around the world and they painted murals on the stadium which is a national register eligible building and one of our national treasures. We had the full support of the stadium's architect, Hilario Candela, who's working closely with us as well as Gloria Estefan who performed at the stadium in the 80s and has been a very prominent voice in our campaign to bring the stadium back. The murals were applied under the very watchful eye of a professional conservator and then photographed and the prints are being sold to raise money to help with the rehab and reopening of the stadium. Now don't worry, we won't be turning Banksy loose on Montpelier anytime soon. But what we're trying to do at the Miami Marine Stadium is to celebrate all the stories associated with this place including the story of the street artists who really embraced this place over the past 20 years and breathed life into it when everyone else had left it locked up and just crumbling. They've turned it into a massive canvas, as you can see. They've covered every square inch, sometimes multiple times. Some of this graffiti is actually incredibly beautiful and it has an inherent appeal for 20 and 30 somethings. So we did something else kind of interesting. We hosted an Instagram tour and we did an online lottery and in one hour, 450 people signed up for 45 slots which was the size of the permit that we were given by the city to bring people in. 450 people in one hour. And this, we just thought was an affirmation that these engagement campaigns work and that social media tools like Instagram are worth all of us exploring and adopting because it encourages people to focus in, literally, on the details that make their communities and historic places around them so special. It also enables us to engage grassroots leaders like Ines Hagediz Garcia here in Miami. She's an architect and a realtor who loves the stadium and she's promoted our events on her blog, Instagram and Twitter. She's helped us turn out some very important local influencers. Grassroots supporters like Ines are really true heroines for us in these campaigns. They give us credibility with their peers and they bring new ideas and a fantastic positive energy to our work. You'll see that firsthand this week but I'd like to wrap up my presentation this afternoon by introducing you to two young preservationists from Buffalo, Bernice Radle and Jason Wilson. We'll be awarding Bernice the Peter Brink Award for individual achievement tomorrow for the passion, creativity and ingenuity she brings to the challenge of revitalizing Buffalo's historic housing stock. She was an important partner to us a few years ago when we brought the conference to Buffalo and kicked off our local preservationist outreach at that meeting. And as it happened, that event was pretty important in the life of Bernice as well because she met her now husband at the preservation conference in Buffalo. Since that time, the two have purchased five homes in Buffalo through their company which they call Buffalo of Realty, I'm sorry Buffalo of Development and they're constantly on the lookout for new properties. Their latest collaboration is a new show for DIY and HGTV that will feature historic home rehabs in Buffalo and debuts this spring. Here's a sneak preview. This is Jason Wilson and this is my fiance, Bernice Radle and we are obsessed with renovating houses in the city of Buffalo and contributing to the renaissance of the city. Buffalo is a very older city. We have just a ton of vacant houses that were dedicated to it because we see how much it benefits the community. We dedicate a lot of our time to restoring houses in Buffalo because Buffalo needs us. We really have no off switch. And people see it every day. Hey Jason, how are you? Pretty good, looking good. People see our progress and they want to be involved and they want to pay attention to what we're doing and they see it and they're excited. We just bought a house for a dollar which was unbelievable. We took that off the city demolition list so we got it for a buck. It is going to be a huge challenge but it has so much historic content and character. It's very rare to find I think the leaded glass which is really awesome. Yeah, it's usually the first piece to go. This house is really gonna be completely transformed specifically this room. One of the big things is coming into the kitchen, the doorways just way too small and there's another real opportunity with the mantle even though this is brand new, I'm sure we can find something used or salvaged that has that historic character that will really be a centerpiece of this room. I know it's gonna be our best project yet. I think it has the largest potential for impact in the community because of the area that it's in and all of the other momentum that's kind of hinging on that street. Buffalo is on the line for us really. The city's gonna live and die by every renovation big and small. We feel the pressure every day to keep on working harder, faster, stronger and really make our properties resemble our own passion for Buffalo. Go Buffalo! We have an off switch. That's what it takes to do preservation, right? And if that doesn't prompt viewers to rethink their assumptions about who we are as preservationists and what we do, then I don't think anything will. We have so much to gain by creating a movement that looks more like America but we need to broaden the way we think about our work to get there. And with that in mind, we've invited some provocative thinkers from a variety of fields to join us this week starting with urban strategist Majora Carter who will take the stage in just a few minutes to launch our preservation tomorrow track. We've done our best to set the stage for productive week but we need you to bring it to life. It's natural to want to continue with business as usual but I challenge you to find, to share your best ideas and to find at least one new idea this week that you can take home and put into practice. We have a wonderful opportunity to redefine preservation for the next 50 years. Let's seize it. Let's bury the stereotype of preservation as the movement of no. Resist the temptation to let others limit us or to limit ourselves and create the movement we know we can be leading, problem solving, proactive and community focused. I challenge us to step forward boldly to bring the past forward and to leave this world a better place than we found it. Carpe diem, thank you.