Place Stewardship Toolbox

The Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (part of the Preservation Research Collaborative at Penn) is working with community partners to design the Place Stewardship Toolbox, a culmination of research, dialogue, teaching, and praxis supported by a Humanities-in-Place grant from the Mellon Foundation. The grant was designed to support a trans-institutional partnership between Tuskegee University and the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on preservation education, outreach and practice centered on Black heritage. The digital humanities component applies the lessons learned and research collected in the field and in the classroom.

The Place Stewardship Toolbox provides resources to small-scale heritage organizations to help them ensure organizational effectiveness, longevity, and sustainability. Historically, capacity-building in the cultural heritage sector has been a challenge; from a scattered funding landscape to a lack of coordination and understanding of the sector, historic preservation organizations—both those established and newly formed—can find themselves struggling to determine scope. The Place Stewardship Toolbox is designed to provide an overview of the key components of the evolving preservation ecosystem, helping small heritage organizations to assess and plan for their immediate and long-term needs.

The Toolbox will function as a free-to-use public website. The project has been developed in partnership with local Black heritage organizations, including Friends of Henry Ossawa Tanner House and the Paul Robeson House & Museum, as well as the national African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, an initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.