A Year End Message From The National Trust For Historic Preservation
One of the causes that’s most dear to me – and I hope to you, as well – is the National Trust For Historic Preservation. Please read and respond, if you can, to their year end request for donations:
Protect Places That Matter
Ever since Ann Pamela Cunningham led the first effort to save Mount Vernon, the historic preservation movement has had as its guiding principle bringing people together to save the places that matter to all of us.
Over the years, our movement has evolved to encompass not just presidents’ homes, but historic schools, parks, cemeteries, courthouses, rural landscapes, downtowns and a host of other places that help define us as a nation.
I am writing today to ask you to help sustain our work to preserve America’s story and her places that matter with a generous year-end gift to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Your support for our work is more important today than ever before.
Through our many successes, we’ve shown that preservation is good for the soul as saving places from the past preserves uplifting architecture, provides a solid foundation for building strong communities and maintains the stories that connect us as a people. But in these times, it is not enough to show that preservation is good for the soul, we must prove that it is good for the pocketbook as well.
Bluntly put, too many people think historic preservation is a “nice to support” activity, but one that is expendable when serious issues like education, economic development, and global climate change need to be addressed.
You and I know that historic preservation is not expendable, but is rather an important component of efforts to educate our youth, create local jobs and make our existing homes, neighborhoods and cities more energy efficient and sustainable.
We are at a critical time as a movement – a time when we must make sure that local, state and national preservation groups get a “seat at the table” where economic development, job-creation and climate-change programs and policies are being developed – because preservation has an essential role to play in all of them.
Please make an immediate and generous year-end gift to help ensure that the preservation of America’s heritage has an ever-more meaningful place in the landscape of American values.
Thank you for your support,
Dolores McDonagh
Vice President Membership
