Barbara Campagna, Graham Gund Architect of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has announced that the next internal conference for Buildings & Grounds/Preservation Staff of the National Trust Historic Sites will be held this summer in California. NTHP sponsors the event and typically pays for the expenses for one person per Site to attend. Additional attendees from each Site are encouraged but the Site would be required to pay for any additional attendees. These conferences are held annually and rotate among the various disciplines at the Sites (last year it was educators and interpreters, next year probably collections managers and curators).
This year’s conference will be presented jointly with California State Parks, our co-stewardship partner for the Cooper- Molera Adobe in Monterey, California. It will be held in Monterey in August and will probably be 2-1/2 days in length. More information regarding the agenda, hotel and venues will be forthcoming as they are finalized. Tentatively we will be discussing two major topics: Disaster Management Planning and Integrating Sustainable Practices into Site Management. Several years ago the Buildings & Grounds conference focused on Disaster Planning but in the past year we have encountered several true actual or near disasters at our sites which have led us to re-examine many of our practices. With all of the wildfires this past year in California, California State Parks has been re-examining their practices as well.
As most of you know now, the National Trust has embarked on a comprehensive Sustainability Initiative (see www.nationaltrust.org/green) . This month’s issue of Preservation magazine is the Green Issue and is entirely online at http://www.nationaltrust.org/Magazine/current/index.htm (the “Your Trust” article on page 10 details this Initiative) but if you would like actual copies, Barbara has thousands and would be happy to send you more. We also have a “Beyond Green Building” blog that describes the latest news at http://blogs.nationaltrust.org/preservationnation/?cat=19. If you have some time and interest, you might want to read through some of the archived postings on our blog (Barbara’s so passionate about the subject that she has written most of them). In addition, we encourage you to read Richard Moe’s speech on sustainability which he gave upon receiving the Vincent Scully award from the National Building Museum in December. You can even download his speech as a podcast!
Barbara is in the process of updating our Best Practices Manual to incorporate a Sustainable Practices division, and we may actually all work on this together as part of the conference. She hopes to have the dates figured out very soon and will send more information as soon as it becomes available, but if you have questions or ideas in the meantime, let her know.
