Growing the National Trust Movement
(The following is the text of a presentation I made on September 7, 2015 at the 16th International Conference of National Trusts in Cambridge, U.K. The session – Looking Ahead: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities – was chaired by Emily Drani, Executive Director of the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda. My fellow panelists were Shivranjani Rajye, Trustee, Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur, India; and Professor Ruan Yisan, Director, National Research Center for Historic Cities, Tongji University, China.) Thank you to INTO and to the National Trust for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland for the opportunity to focus on our efforts in the United States to build a growing and more inclusive historic preservation movement. Our goal is a movement that recognizes all the facets of our diverse history, enables all our citizens to see themselves in our collective story, and – as a result – become engaged in this work. I hope you will find elements that ring true with your work in your countries. Our preservation movement (and I will use the terms historic preservation and heritage …