Board service with the Natchitoches Historic Foundation became an early laboratory for connecting communications, design, technology, and community preservation. The work ranged from newsletters, gala materials, and event displays to the organization’s website—an early WordPress experiment that occasionally provided its own lessons in digital humility. Together, the artifacts show communications functioning as preservation infrastructure: helping a grassroots organization explain its value, build participation, raise support, and connect local people with the places they were trying to protect.
Tag Archives: Historic Preservation
Posts about historic preservation practice, advocacy, policy, reuse, stewardship, and the care of historic buildings and places.
Carla Bruni provides levity, and rich preservation content for broad audiences
Carla is a historic preservationist who is author of two blogs. She's also a good friend and supporter of Voices of the Past. We're going to talk about her latest blog, BuildingRevival.com, which explores ways to make historic preservation more accessible to the public. I know of few people who articulate the challenges and opportunities in that arena more effectively.
Can you help this heritage project? Cahokia Mounds and the This Place Matters Community Challenge
This appeal highlights Cahokia Mounds as both a World Heritage Site and a landscape still vulnerable beyond its protected boundaries. By connecting the National Trust’s This Place Matters campaign with the need to acquire threatened archaeological land, the post demonstrates an early form of digital preservation advocacy: using online networks not simply to raise awareness, but to mobilize people around a specific action that could materially affect a heritage resource.
Can you help this heritage project? Using GlobalGiving to restore a kullë house in Gjirokastra, Albania
Adventures in Preservation used the GlobalGiving platform to raise money and public attention for restoration training at a traditional kullë house in Gjirokastra, Albania. The campaign connected crowdfunding, social media, preservation education, and hands-on conservation in a World Heritage city. More than a fundraising story, it shows heritage organizations experimenting with digital platforms to build a distributed community of supporters around work that had previously depended heavily on institutional grants and participants.
Can you help this heritage project? Preserving Nicholson’s Past by Renovating and Restoring 1849 Railroad Station into a Community Center
In Nicholson, Pennsylvania, residents sought to rescue an 1849 railroad station and give it a new life as a community center. Josh Stull connects the threatened building with broader patterns of rural population loss, changing economies, and attachment to hometown identity. The project shows adaptive reuse at its most community-centered: preserving a historic structure not as a frozen artifact, but as potential civic infrastructure capable of serving the town again.
Who will advocate for the next generation of heritage professionals? A cautionary tale for university preservation programs
Losing a historic structure is a sad thing. Losing generations of folks to expertly protect cultural heritage is much, much worse. This past week, Louisiana's Board of Supervisors for higher education rubber-stamped a proposal from Northwestern State University of Louisiana to eliminate the university's bachelor's and master's degrees in heritage resources just as these groundbreaking interdisciplinary programs were hitting their strides. The Master of Arts in Heritage Resources (MAHR) was on track triple its number of graduates in the next year.
Video Netcast: Kaitlin O’Shea blogs the preservation world in pink
Kaitlin O’Shea used Preservation in Pink, an unmistakable pink-flamingo identity, and an online network of preservation colleagues to bring historic preservation into a more conversational public space. This video introduces the personality and community behind the project and shows how a distinctive voice, informal collaboration, and emerging social platforms could make a professional field feel more accessible without abandoning its seriousness.
Hometown Heritage Media Network: Empowering Community Heritage Preservation
Hometown Heritage proposed a community-centered media network for helping people preserve local history through oral history, DIY preservation, community museums, and shared digital resources. The idea grew from work in Natchitoches and from a conviction that heritage should not belong only to institutions, experts, or wealthy property owners. The project sought to give ordinary communities practical tools, connections, and confidence to document and sustain the places and memories that matter to them.
Finding your online voice to advocate for heritage resources
This reflection argues that social media could broaden who gets to participate in conversations about cultural heritage. Specialized disciplines bring essential expertise, but public understanding also depends on listening to the experiences and interpretations people bring with them. Drawing on Jeff Guin’s own gradual move from commenting online to blogging, podcasting, video, and teaching, the piece connects digital participation with personal agency: finding a voice can be the first step toward becoming an advocate.
Meet the Blogger: Carla Bruni of “The Green Preservationist”
Carla Bruni created The Green Preservationist to work across a divide she repeatedly encountered between historic-preservation advocates and the green-building movement. Drawing on experience in both worlds, she used blogging, workshops, and practical projects to challenge assumptions on each side. The conversation is ultimately about productive synthesis: how preservation and sustainability can become stronger when practitioners stop treating change and continuity as opposing values.