“Community Heritage Preservation Project” Receives the 2007 District of Columbia Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation – Dr. Angel David Nieves, Assistant Professor, Historic Preservation, on Founding Project Committee

Dr. Angel David Nieves, Assistant Professor, Historic Preservation was a founding committee member of the Washington DC “Community Heritage Preservation Project,” along with Joy Ford Austin of the DC Humanities Council, Patsy Fletcher of the DC Office of Planning, and Marya McQuirter, Ph.D., an independent scholar. Dr. Nieves played a critical role in helping to shape the overall vision of the project – advocating, in particular, for a community’s access to its history as a form of social justice.  Nieves states, “The overall project grew out of a collective sense of frustration that communities across DC were being left out of the historic and heritage preservation efforts by city planners, local developers, and the tourism industry who were primarily invested in gentrification.  The DC Humanities Council provided us with a platform to meet and discuss possible new strategies and initiatives to address these issues.”

The project began in the spring of 2005 with a symposium entitled, “Community Heritage Preservation: Identifying and Managing Local Grassroots Resources.”  Since then, the Project has held a series of public programs and workshops throughout Washington, DC offering training and skills development to local grassroots organizers and community-based historians invested in preserving local heritage resources.

Since its inception, the Project has been funded by such organizations as The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); The Project on Civic Reflection; The National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) through the Dorothea de Schweinitz Preservation Fund for Washington, DC; The Program in Historic Preservation, School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park; and the Historic Preservation Office, DC Office of Planning.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty will present the 2007 DC Mayor’s Awards for Excellence in Historic Preservation at the 5th annual awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 9th at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street, NE.