All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the last affinity session of the day. Women's history isn't just for women sharing the real path with everyone. My name is Priya Chhaya. I'm the associate director of content here at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And I'm sort of going to just be around in the background monitoring the chat, sharing links and all sorts of stuff. But to get started, I thought I would share a few housekeeping tips, but you will get used to hearing many times during the next couple of days. But I wanted to share them again. The first is obviously this session is being recorded. And please, if you haven't taken a chance to look at it, look at our conference code of conduct. All participants will be muted, though for this particular session, there will be moments where you'll be able to unmute yourself and answer some prompts. The chat function is another way where you can share questions if you don't want to unmute yourself and I'll be checking it and sharing them with Chris during the panel. And finally, if you need help with anything, you can find help to all your other questions through the attendee customer service room that is in your app or through on www.savingplaces.org-conference. There's an FAQ page. And finally, for accessibility purposes, there is an option to have closed captioning on your Zoom. You just have to visit your settings to do so. And with that, I'm going to pass things over to Chris Morris. Just one more thing when we do the, I'll reiterate the, how you want to meet yourself and everything when we get closer to that. And also drop that information in the chat. Chris. Thank you so much, Priya. And thank you to everyone who is joining us today at the end of a long day of really I think fascinating and inspiring affinity sessions I want to. I hope everyone has had a chance to enjoy those. I certainly found them very interesting and informative and I was just sharing with our panelists today have even changed up a little bit of what we're going to do today in response to those because I found some of the things some of the information so compelling. I want to welcome you all to women's history isn't just for women. It's a conversation about women as preservationists and the importance of women's history in shaping our national narrative. I want to thank all of you who don't know me. I am with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the senior field director of the Los Angeles field office. And I of course want to acknowledge Los Angeles is the ancestral home of the Gabrielino and Tongva people here, as well as the home of many many other hundreds of other cultures and ethnicities and languages here in Los Angeles. I'm also leading this conversation today I'm fortunate enough to be the moderator today because I'm leading the new national where women made history campaign of the National Trust. A multi year and organization wide commitment, not just to identifying but to elevating and honoring the struggles and achievement of women of all races. And these are achievements that we all know are far too often hidden or underappreciated or deliberately ignored and I think that's a theme that we've heard throughout the affinity sessions today. This may be the first time for many of you that you're hearing about the where women made history campaign. So before I introduce my esteemed colleagues and panelists and kick off our conversation today. I just wanted to start with just a very, very brief introduction of some of the work of the where women made history campaign that we the National Trust and our partners have launched into this year. So I'll share my screen. To ensure that women are part of our national narrative we must bring them to the forefront in our interpretation and programming at our historic sites. I want to hear more from that about that from our panelists later, but the National Trust also owns and operates 27 historic sites and we are leading by example. Our historic sites are crucibles for experimentation and programming that repositions women as artists collaborators activists and entrepreneurs. This year alone six of our sites have already expanded their women's history programming, virtually because this was covered and they had to close operations to the public for most of the summer. So a lot of this programming is now available online and I encourage you to check it out there's a really amazing range of programs. Some of them have even turned their programming into outdoor Wilson house for those of you in the DC area is actually doing an outdoor exhibition. So some of it you can experience in person and we'll put some of that in the chat for you for those of you who are interested in finding out more about these places and their programs. There's even greater potential for the same type of creative inspiring and educational reinterpretation across our collection of 44 historic artists homes and studios, and we are right now in the process of adding four new sites to the house network that are associated with female artists, and we'll continue to grow this network in the coming months and years with a focus on artists who were women and specifically women of color. I know the National Trust is all about saving places and you can rest assured that a critical component of the where women made history campaign is to save the places that matter to people the most and to tell those stories. And our recent 11 most endangered places listing included a majority of places that are associated with diverse women. The architect Natalie de Blas, who was an integral part of the Skidmore Owings and Merrill team and designing some of their most prominent projects, including terrorist Plaza in Cincinnati to African American opera singer and teacher Madame Mary Cardwell Dawson, who was the founder of the National Negro Opera Company out of her Pittsburgh home to the Yates Memorial Hospital in Ketchikan, Alaska where dedicated women worked tirelessly as nurses to care for the sick and injured on the American frontier during a period of loss of growth. With over 500 media stories and counting and over 1.3 billion media impressions so far, we have brought enormous and long overdue attention and support to these threatened sites of women's history and we are continue to work, continuing to work with almost all of them to help them with advocacy legal assistance and grant funding to help remove the threat. We're also tackling new national treasures projects like the Mitchell family law office in the Upton neighborhood of West Baltimore, Maryland, which was a hub for local and national civil rights advocacy for nearly half a century. Thanks to the pioneering mother daughter team of Lily Carol Jackson and her daughter would need a Jackson Mitchell. They grew Baltimore's NAACP branch to be the largest in the nation, and they pioneered non violence resistant tactics and grassroots campaigns to fight segregation, which are still incredibly powerful and relevant tools to us all today. And last but not least, and this again is just sort of a sampling so this is not the this is not the last of it but the last I'm going to share with you today. Thanks to our partners at Benjamin more paints four to five sites of women's history across the country will get a new look over the next year with the donation of hundreds of gallons of paint products and promotional videos that will not only document their transformation, but highlight all of the women who are involved with each project. I encourage you all to follow the progress of our first two sites which are seeing here the stunning and groundbreaking women's building in the mission district of San Francisco, and the odd fellows hall at a story Oregon on the celebrating women's heritage website that was launched by Benjamin more will have more projects next year and they all will be focused on sites that tell the stories of indigenous women and women of color. And if you have any more questions or interest in the campaign I encourage you all to check out our webpage on saving places.org for the where women made history campaign and Priya will drop that into the chat for everybody. So, now that I have given you an overview of the campaign. I want to turn to our conversation today and I really do want this to be a conversation I have found these, these discussions during the affinity sessions just really so so informative so useful to me and thinking about our work. And we've heard from many of our talented colleagues, and I thought someone someone said this earlier that in one of the LGBTQ sessions that American history is incredibly powerful. It's a force for change is a force for social justice, and it can even be a force that helps affirm people's life decisions, and their life choices. But it requires us to approach the work of preservation with openness with the goal of telling a more full and a more truthful American story, and with a willingness to respect the lived experience of others and I don't think I could have three better stories to help us have this conversation today, particularly as it relates to women's history and women's stories and the role of women and shaping our national narrative. So I am going to allow each one of them to introduce themselves and I'll show some images to help give you a little context about who they are, and their work. So first up, Heather hike. I'm Heather hike public historian who's worked for the National Park Service, the House of Representatives, including on historic preservation legislation, and has taught women's history. My book doing women's history in public was just published in the middle of the pandemic. And I have over the years visited. I had to count for the book, nearly 500 parks museums and historic sites. As a child, my family visited many historic places, and I was especially fascinated by the wooden pillows at effort to cloister and Pennsylvania. If you look in the corner of that cell, right there, there is a block of wood. And I thought, who would do this, and it really gave me insights into their lives, and was important in trying to come to grips with how we deal with tangible resources and our lives. Years later, I was sent to Gettysburg battlefield in the upper right with a question. What is a living history farm with pigs and chickens and costumed interpreters doing in the middle of a battlefield. I returned with a different question. What is a battle doing in the middle of a family farm. The slider family saw incredibly strong fighting around their family farm and never had the same situation afterwards. Yet we are repeatedly told there are no women in our carefully preserved battlefields, even as women witness battles, hidden basements while fighting raged around them, became refugees and had their homes, fences and gardens destroyed. Most of all, the American Civil War was fought over the bodies, lives and futures of 2 million enslaved African American women. There were certainly women in that war, and on those battlefields. We distort our past, when we only see the battlefields and not the farms. We need to see both the women and the men entangled in that war and everything else. Telling the whole story requires that we have many perspectives and finding ways to encourage everyone to appreciate all of those perspectives. So I talk about telling the whole story. Thank you. Thank you, Heather. Next up is Ryan Spencer from Preston Smithfield. Hang on a second Ryan, let me get your slide up here. There you go. Take it away Ryan. Sure. Hi everybody I'm kind of humble to sit on this panel about women's history as a representative of the, I guess a male of the species. And I just kind of want to give you a little bit of a background as to who I am. I grew up really on stories I think as historians were storytellers we love stories. One of the best things that my mother did for me was sit us down every single night and read stories to us. And I grew up with a natural curiosity about people, different people than myself even as a fifth grader I was really interested in reading Lucy Maude Montgomery's Avan Lee stories. I think my friends made fun of me a little bit for carrying in what they call the girls book. I was interested in sojourner truth and also my sister had all the American girls books and I read all of those with voracious appetite. So I was always very interested in lives other than my own. When I was a child, I grew up in Michigan and my parents used to go on date at a place called the Henry Ford. And it's a place where I really fell in love with history and it's a place where I ended up working for 13 years when I got into the museum field. And I learned a little bit more about my own family history, my own agrarian history, I learned very much what it's like to shovel manure and help birth calves but I also learned what it was like to to manage a very complex historic site. That's very complicated stories, stories about slavery stories about the suffragist movement and stories that impacted the lives of ordinary Americans, and it was there, working at the Henry Ford that I came to the conclusion that museums are a great place for understanding both ourselves and each other. And museums are great tools for building empathy between people and certainly something that we need more of today's empathy. I came to the I came to Smithfield here in Southwest Virginia, a very different place from Michigan, about a year and a half ago with my brand new wife. I'm the serving as the executive director and Smithfield was a site that was really dying and was really in trouble. So I've been working with the community here to tell some very difficult stories about slavery to tell stories about the indigenous peoples who are removed from this land in order to make room for other people. And it's, it's a job that I've certainly really enjoyed. And the top left, there is a picture of the most recent or the very first panel that we've that we put together at Smithfield and this was a panel discussion about race identity and memory. About how we remember slavery impacts our world today. And right here's second to the left is actually a woman in Kara, mostly hops from Baltimore, who is on our board of directors at Smithfield, and who was a descendant of one of the enslaved families at Smithfield. And so I'll save the rest for a little bit later. Thank you so much Ryan. I'm looking forward to digging into that a little bit more and you know we will. And so it is my great pleasure my great honor to be able to introduce to you all Leona Tate. And she has a really just an incredible powerful personal story. And thank you so much for for being able to being here to share it with us today, Leona. And I will give it to you to tell everyone a little bit about your, your history and what you are doing today. Thank you Chris. And I'd like to thank everyone else for for being here in 1960. At the age of six years old, I was one of the four little black girls that were the first to desegregate public schools in New Orleans. A day that will be forever etched in my mind I will never forget it. This is a story by U.S. Marshals, every day. And just, I guess just being naive and being from the audience. It's just, it just was unreal. Let's do that morning. Leona, we may, we may need you to refresh. I want people to be able to hear your story. You're breaking up for us a little bit. We'll see if we can come back to Leona we definitely think. Leona we may. Are you still there. Yes. Yes, you were breaking up a little bit. Can do you mind kind of re going back to the beginning there just a little bit. We weren't able to hear a lot of a lot of your story, which is so important I think for the folks on the phone to hear the first picture, the top left hand corner. It was the first day that New Orleans public schools were desegregated. That was 1960 November 14 would be the, would be the correct date.  And I can remember my mother saying, when you get in the car, you sit to the back of the seat and don't put your face out of the window. A lot of, a lot of things we had to do that during that time was out of obedience. We had to talk to them. And when we approached the school and came up to the front. The street was filled with, with people being from New Orleans and knowing that area. And the parade was coming because that's what it is. And, and I asked my mother, I said, Well, why do I have to go to school, and I can't watch the parade and she said, No, that's not the case, you know. So we were escorted in the building up this up the stairs for the, for the first day and we must have sat in the hallway by the principal's office half the day before we were even placed in a, in the classroom. The parents had started pulling their, the white students out. So about three o'clock that day, we were the only three students left in that entire building. Couldn't understand why, you know, the supervision was really, really tight. We were not allowed to eat from the school. We couldn't drink out of the water fountains because they were turned off the windows with papered. We couldn't even go. Security was really, really, really tight. But once being in the building, you know, we felt real safe, not, not even realizing at that time that the marshals that brought us to school every morning were in the building the entire day. It was years later that we found that out. But now that building had been sitting since 2004. It was closed down for low academics before Katrina. And I had just wanted to know why it couldn't be reopened as a school again since they were only going to put one school in a lower night board after Katrina. So they assured me that it wouldn't be a school again, but I felt like it needed to be something educational. I went to studio fish to the following pair of school board and nobody really knew the history of the building. So I had to do a presentation and explain to them what had happened in 1960. So that opened up a way to give us space to try to acquire the building and 10 years later we have acquired it. Hopefully, this is where the racial healing racial or the racial really barriers just started and I'm hoping this will be a place for racial healing. We will be offering, you know, I'm doing workshop on doing racism workshops along with another group called people's Institute will also have different workshops going on in the building. The second and the third floor will be low income housings for the elderly. Thank you so much, Leona. It's just every time I hear that story, I still it just amazes me. So thank you so much for for sharing that with us today and want to make sure that we get into our questions here because there's so much more to say about the next phase of how you have taken that that site that played such an important role in your childhood and turned it into something that is just a tremendous community asset for the ninth ward. We are running a little behind everybody so I am going to dive right into our next section thank you all to my three panelists for for that introduction I think it really helps you all on the phone understand or on the call understand why I've selected these folks to join in this conversation today. I structured this around sort of three big questions, and I wanted to have a robust conversation between the three panelists so what we're going to do is I'll direct a question to each one of them. Give them the chance to answer other panelists to weigh in. What I would love is for the folks who are on the zoom to feel free to weigh in with your own perspective on these questions in the chat. I'm definitely capturing this I want to assure everyone that we are already thinking about how we continue this conversation, turn this into other kinds of tools and webinars about how to interpret and interpret women's history and make women's achievements front and center. So the chat function is going to be very important to us but I'm going to switch now to our questions and conversations so panelists get ready.  I would really love to pick up where you left off because as a, as a lifetime civil rights activist and someone who is actively preserving and adapting a historic site to promote racial justice and racial equity. How do you view women's history and stories as a way to bring more truth diversity and equity to our understanding of our history, particularly when it's your history you and the McDonough three, who played such an integral role in this site. Why do you feel it's important to save this place and to make sure that people understand this history. Well as far as I can remember women played with a backbone or whatever role they played in, they were they were really strong women that I grew up under. And I know I just felt like this building would be that the opportunity opportunity to get people involved in what really happened there. I get to visit a lot of schools, the children are not aware of this story. And it's strange when you can go out of state and they know all about you and right in your own city, they don't know about you. And I just found that that was really, really strange. So my my thing was, you know, people come to me they want to find out about the story, you know, you know, just to write a term paper, you know, and they got to run all over the place to find that information so hopefully we can have it in one place for you. And so that people can really understand and understand at where it happened. The Lord ninth world has been neglected. And, and it really needs this viability to get back off on the ground on the map at least. But I don't know I just feel like that that's the spark this building is the spark. I feel like it looks like we may have lost lost you there. Oh, you're back. I'm still here. Okay, great. Can you talk a little bit more about the the interpretation of your story at the site. For those who don't know this was one of our African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grantees earlier this year, specifically to support the interpretation of Leona story and the McDonough three in in this space that is going to be so different from the other things to the community. Can you talk a little bit about that that how you're interpreting that story Leona. Yeah, I want to interpret it just as it happened. What we heard went going in the building on once got in the building, you know, the, we will just set on we just had to be seated on the side of the wall. You know, till somebody decided what they were going to do with us. And then Miguel testing I had gotten bored we played hopscotch on the tiles of the floor because we just didn't have anything else to do. But I do remember, you know, getting placed in the classroom and, and, and I want people to realize, you know that once we got in the classroom. That's when the parents started taking their students out, you know what I mean, it was like a whirlwind they didn't, you know, and, and all of that will be interpreted on the second floor. You'll come down to the first floor where we want to really start in the beginning of those leaders that that helped us get to that point, you know, we have to find find a way of how we got there and get to start with a little bit of read just a little bit of reconstruction and, and show those those active active. active. Those. Parents. Yes. And then we'll have a classroom that that was our original classroom that'll be set up that was, you know, at least show that it was the only three of us in the classroom. And we'll have other areas that'll highlight different things that happened in the civil rights movement during that time. We'll, we'll have classrooms for the workshops for the undoing racism. People's Institute will come in and do the. But they're calling a community university. Keep on through high school. And. It's a remarkable project, Leona, and thank you so much. I cannot wait. I cannot wait to see it in March when it is all done and, and just the, what you have done in terms of involving the community and thinking about how this serves. Not just the lower ninth Ward, but New Orleans sort of taking something that has such a difficult, difficult history and turning it into such a positive, a positive place for the, for New Orleans is just such a laudable and remarkable project so thank you so much for being with us today and sharing that. Ryan, I am going to turn to you next. If you're ready, you manage at Smithfield you recognized earlier a historic property that has a difficult and quite frankly very painful history. And you, you also shared with me earlier that historically places, both the people and the people associated with the site have shied away from recognizing both the history of the women that were there as well as the enslaved peoples were there. So, talk a little bit about how you have drawn on women's history, and how you have elevated women's roles to help build understanding and empathy I am really curious to hear how you have used this as a way to bring people together and to begin to reckon with their past. Thank you very much, Chris. It's, it's interesting, I think for me to, to be here and to have a discussion in front of everybody is if I have some sort of knowledge that I need to impart because one of the most important things that I've really learned in doing this role and actually any role in public history is to to listen to that. And that's one of the most important things that I've been taught and one of the things that has helped me the most when I've been engaged in conversations about difficult history, especially relating to Smithfield is to be quiet and to listen. So the history at Smithfield, I think follows the trajectory of a lot of historic house museums in the United States. They're closing and closing and closing, because the narrative is becoming less and less relevant to people. They have, by and large, been museums and shrines about a specific powerful white guy who did something that was perceived to be important or not. And it's sort of held up as a shrine where the past is glorified where it's certainly told in a way that makes people feel warm and happy, and want people to sort of go away feeling that their their idea of the American model of democracy is somehow validated. When, when I came to Smithfield, there were maybe 10,000 visitors a year, if we're very, very lucky, and that's not a sustainable model. I told the panel that interviewed me that I would only be interested in taking the job if we could make Smithfield relevant, and that if Smithfield didn't become relevant then it didn't deserve to exist and they should close their doors. One of the ways we've made it relevant is by talking about people besides just Colonel William Preston, who built this house. This house really is an important architectural example of white classical colonial architecture was, and it's the oldest and the best example of that in the west of Blue Ridge Mountains, but it doesn't really matter unless we sort of tell the whole story. Colonel William Preston certainly was responsible for influencing the Declaration of Independence he knew George Washington he fought with him in the French and Indian War. He was involved in keeping the western side of Virginia, sort of pacified so that most of the states or colonies militia could be sent over to the east, but he died in 1783. And his wife survived them for 40 years, and his wife was unable to really take ownership legally of Smithfield but it is her story that looms very largely over the entire place, but her story wasn't really told. So we've tried very hard to elevate her story throughout the house we've tried to put up panels about her next to everybody else, the governors who were born in the house so that her story isn't put below those other stories but alongside us. And it's really interesting to that the people when I started reaching out who are interested in having these conversations were either very interested in keeping the narrative as it was because they had a vested interest in the story. There are a lot of Preston family members still around in some of them are really, really nervous about telling a different story. A former board member told me that he was worried that I was going to try to tell a story that Susanna Smith Preston was a lesbian, and I said well, is there evidence that she was because if she was that'd be cool to talk about but if we don't have evidence then we won't talk about it. We want to make sure that we tell a full and complete story and remind people that we're not trying to diminish any one narrative but have a fuller narrative. And I really reached out the people who are interested in telling a full narrative were by and large women. I mentioned care Dr Karen mostly hops, who was on her board of directors and who is a descendant of enslaved family here at Smithfield. She has been invaluable and trying to tell stories that will help build a fuller narrative and help people understand hopefully build reconciliation between some of her descendants and the people who enslaved them. Preston family who are interested in telling this fuller narrative are by and large women, often millennial women, often women of generation X generation Z. And they are so impassioned about having this more equitable discussion about what life was like, and what the stories are about Smithfield and what they can tell us about today. Our full mission really is that we want to make sure that we can gain perspective from the past and insight for today and hopefully inspiration for tomorrow. And we're trying as much as possible to use our stories of the past to give our to give ourselves a better perspective for today so that we can hopefully build a better tomorrow where there's hopefully better understanding and certainly the women I've spoken to have been so passionate about that. Thank you, Ryan. That is such a great example of how people, you know, and Heather, you and I have talked about this and I'm going to put in a plug for Heather's book. Once more, doing women's history in public sites that you know you've talked to people who basically say, Oh, there were no women here. There is no women's history here there are no stories to tell of women or other underrepresented communities and we all know that's not true, because women were everywhere, and every place has a woman's story to tell so so Ryan thank you for for that for all of your all the work that you're doing all the innovative work that you're doing and involving women in those stories and in that sort of reconciliation process. And you've set me up perfectly for my question with Heather, whether you intended to or not so thank you. Heather, you're sort of the women's history expert in terms of how, how we can do a better job of recognizing women, bringing their stories to our historic sites and places, and yet so few of our sites and monuments and parks and fields as you mentioned earlier and our cultural landscapes. Unlike Preston Smithfield they they don't actually acknowledge women's presence or give their struggles and achievements adequate let alone equal attention in their interpretation so tell us from your, the hundreds of places that you visited. What does it look like to include to fully include women and women's history at our historic places. And how does that change and audiences interaction with understanding of that that place in that history. Heather. Thank you very much. So it seems to me that what happens is that we have more stories, more people, and more honesty. And so when we tell women's history when we tell the whole story, and that's how I've spent my career, trying to tell the whole story. So let it begin by identifying everybody who was there. And I mean everybody. We think about, we talk about minority women, but there was a time when in colonial Virginia, white women were definitely the minority. We talk because it was Native American indigenous people. When we think about the Southwest, the one of the Southwest, in terms of the cotton plantations, and much of the south. Black women were the majority. And so we want to think about everyone who was there, not just the white family living in the plantation house. So you start by trying to identify everyone and use all the sources that you have and be creative. And so there's always this balance between being creative and being very thoughtful and intense about good scholarship. So it means working to get the best scholarship to build the significance, the knowledge base, and to link those with the tangible resources that we have, we have the gift of tangible resources. So we want the history to match the people who were there. I once had a biologist say to me, What do you mean you only study one gender. When we study birds we study both. Humanity should be the same. So I think that's one part of it. I think another part is that a lot of women's history are long term trends. We now know in the scholarship that American women, and this in cases more Anglo American women started having smaller families in the 1780s. That's a long term trend. And so it doesn't show up with a specific public date. It's not a political or military date. It's a long trend, and we need to find it in different ways. We often find in doing women's history that using generations helps us to make more sense of things. And so we try to look at long term trends rather than events, and we look at the tangible resources the landscapes, the architecture, the objects, which would include both those underwater under land and on on out on the dresser. And so we plug for archaeology there, and, and try to see how these all connect and use all the sources that we can, and then we end up with an amazing story that helps us know who we are, and where we've come from, and opens us to much more interesting stories. And the real secret is, I think it's more fun. Amen to that. Well, I have been scrolling through. I'm not seeing any other big questions that folks have thrown out there yet. So I'm going to throw in a bonus question, and this is open to any of you. So I'll let you guys decide who wants to answer this. And this may seem this is not intended to be trite, but it really is quite a serious question because we've had the four of us have had this conversation. And it's kind of remarkable that we even have to ask this question. But why is it important, why should women's history be important to men, or people of another gender who don't identify as female. So how does women's history, women's stories, and you were just touching on this Heather and Ryan you did to make these places, much more relevant and more interesting and more rich and full for a larger audience so I'll, I'll leave that to whoever wants to take that one. It seems to me, and I've been very fortunate because I've been in the past 50 years, which is shocking, but the 50 years of the development of women's history is a field, and with research building on research. And so as we've moved along we've come to realize a whole lot of stories that we never suspected and women we never imagined. And so if we don't share our history with, as my husband likes to say, the males of the species, the MOTS, then we're going to keep having the same problems where we are not appreciated and we don't appreciate. And so there's a very practical reason for sharing the women's history with everyone whether it's a date night, or fathers bringing their daughters or however we do it there are lots of ways to do it. But we also and we also need to say to men hey it's your history too. Without women's history, we distort American history. Absolutely. Thank you. Well, we are coming dangerously close to the end of our time and so I am going to move on to our next kind of our lightning round. I am so cognizant of I listened to these affinity sessions I come to these sessions every year I've been doing this for 16 years, and I hear all of these great conversations about, you know, all of the work that people are doing it is so inspiring. I really want us to leave everyone on this call the 405 participants on this call, thank you all, by the way, is, is to go home knowing that yes this work is difficult, yes this work is important, but I want you all to feel challenged and I want you all to feel empowered to go home and do it yourselves.  Thank you. I would encourage you to continue to invite women to the table to have discussions, but when we're having those discussions about women's history make sure that you invite men to were a little bit more hesitant to sort of engaged in the conversation but I think it's important to tell men who are interested that it's okay to have a conversation about it. We're often worried about mansplaining. And I think we just sort of have to be reminded that hey, we need to have this conversation together, just not dominate the conversation. Thank you. Great suggestion. Leona, are you are you still there. Yes, I'm here. Excellent. What's how what's your challenge for all of these folks on the phone. I want everybody to be get the recognition that you deserve, you know, and, and no we can't do it without men, no we can't do it without me because without my partners I don't know what I would be doing. It has really been a God sent to us and I think your development partner for those for those folks. Yeah. And, and I really need people don't understand that you can't do everything. Yeah. We lost you there at the end Leona. Can you. Yeah, just, just if you need the help ask for the help, you know, is it will be no way we could have done this project without without men. There's no way to cut it and done. So, yes, we all we, we all need each other to do this work that that is that is absolutely true. And I would be remiss if I did not mention that the National Trust is a partner there for everybody and thinking about how to do this work, whether it's our advocacy or grants or other programs so I encourage everybody to think about us as a partner in a resources they as they explore the ways that they can tell this story. Definitely. And last but not least Heather what's what's your challenge item you had a whole list of them so so you're going to have to pick one. Well and I think the list will be made available as well as a bibliography for all of you. So please enjoy those. I would like to joke that john Adams was a kept man, because without Abigail Adams he couldn't have been in Philadelphia. So I want to make that plug but I also want so humor counts, and also be sure to be creative. The House uses Halloween to feature women writers and also to see how much they can terrify their visitors with scary stories. So, humor and creativity, make a difference, as well as taking this very seriously. And knowing that we have a lot to do and we need to keep doing it. So thank you all. Yes, no thing that great suggestions we need creativity and we need, we need some levity in our lives to especially now so that that never hurts. Well I'm going to throw out one a little bit more serious a little bit more wonky and bureaucratic but but I want to make sure to mention it because there has been so much conversation today across the affinity sessions about the challenges of officially documenting and designating history underrepresented peoples and communities and cultural spaces and landscapes that has been a theme that has come up over and over and over again and how much more difficult that is than trying to use our sort of standard processes in talking national register districts for places that are architecturally significant or in some way noted for their design. And I just wanted to mention, while this may not be easy it may not be quick. There are several steps that you can take to make sure that women's history that women are a part of these a part of these designations in these stories it can be taking an existing national register nomination and amending it as we heard on the UIA call, you can amend that nomination without having to take it back for approval so you just insert those women's stories those people of color stories in there and make sure that the full story is told and recognized as a part of that designation. The next challenge that I'll throw out there is any new nomination that you do any new program that you put together any new exhibition that you do to follow up on Ryan's comments. Where are the women in that story, if they're not there, then you aren't looking hard enough. So challenge yourself to look for them as you do your work going forward. We are almost at our time and for those of you who are interested in that there is another session on Thursday, going to put in plug for my colleague Christine grubs on diversity and inclusion in the national register so so make sure to join that on Thursday if you're interested in diving into those strategies more, but I want to close just by sharing my gratitude with all of you, all of you who joined us for this conversation today for all of your comments in the chat and thank you to my three colleagues who joined me for this conversation to share their experience, their insights, their lived experience, and help us all feel inspired to go make sure that we are elevating women and women's history in the work that we do so my thanks to to Heather to Ryan and to Leona, and I hope everyone has a fantastic conference. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Take care bye bye.


It was indeed, I think, one of the most wonderful people I've come to know in my capacity as Director General. She was loved and admired by people from all over the world. Everyone she met, she brightened their lives. There's no question about that. She was always a very cheerful person. She approached life with optimism and happiness. It was contagious. And she remembered for spreading joy wherever she went. There was a wonderful tradition in Japan that people come by the house of the family who was lost a member. And they pay their respects to the family and they leave a very small gift of money. There's an expression of their admiration for the person. Well, so many people came to the Otsuka's home to express their sharing of loss and sympathy with the family. And left so many, very small gifts that it quickly added up to a large amount of money. And Kay and the children, as I understand it, talked to so many as a family and felt that it was Kerry's money, not their money. And asked themselves what they should do with it. And they asked themselves what would Kerry want the most. And they immediately thought of a garden. It was truly a great pleasure for four of us, myself, my daughter, myself, my son, Hiroki, and my second son, Yuki. To come here to celebrate the inauguration of a memorial garden, a wonderful garden for my wife. On this non-rainy day with such wonderful people. We're very impressed with this garden. It's a really perfect match between tropical plants with a Japanese idea of the garden. And we really love it. And we really wish that this is not a dream, this real. First of all, I'd like to thank Mrs. Christian Ziegler for strongly and continuously supporting the idea of constructing this beautiful garden. Thank you very much. I would also like to thank two of the best friends of Kerry, Mrs. Julie Burish, and Mrs. Patty Hion, who really contributed enormously to the idea of construction, designing, redesigning, and removing, and adding, and finally constructing this beautiful garden. Without the support of everybody, this beautiful garden would not have been completed. Needless to say, Kerry was a special person for us as a wife and as mother. But I believe that she was a special person for many of her friends. She was extremely kind, gracious, and extremely warm-hearted. She felt very happy when her friends were very happy. So she was very much fond of giving gifts to the friends. When her friends smiled with a gift, she smiled a lot more. She was that kind of person, and she loved the Erie, and she loved people in Erie, and she was always proud of being a member of the Erie family. And unfortunately, however, she can no longer give gifts to her friends. So on behalf of Kerry, we have decided to donate Kerry's money. We are here to construct this beautiful garden. She'll be extremely pleased if many of you come here and enjoy this garden for many years to come. Lastly, I'd like to say on behalf of my family, including Kerry, I'd like to say thank you so much. Thank you. I'm sure that many of you know this poem, but I read it in Japanese first.