As you may have noticed, we at the National Trust are often asking you to join our cause and donate to the movement. But you might not realize why your gifts are so crucial to the good work of saving places. So, here are five concrete ways your generosity will enable us to keep telling the full story of America now and for years to come.

1. Help us add more sites to our National Treasures list to include more diverse communities.

In 2015, we named the childhood home of civil rights and women's equality pioneer Pauli Murray to our list of National Treasures. Murray refused to move to the back of the bus 15 years before Rosa Parks made her historic stand…and was also the first African-American to earn a J.S.D. law doctorate from Yale...an inspiration to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg...a co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)...and much more. But despite her many accomplishments, she has gone largely unrecognized.

2. Enlarge the context of established historic sites to reflect more people's experiences.

Today, our nation faces a catastrophic loss of our identity as more sites of historical and cultural significance deteriorate and disappear forever. Places like Seattle's Panama Hotel, designed by the city's first Japanese-American architect... The Factory in West Hollywood, where the pioneering gay disco Studio One opened in 1974...Chicago's Pullman Historic District, a key site in the history of the labor movement (pictured above)...and Villa Lewaro, the New York home of African-American entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, America's first self-made female millionaire.

3. Expand our HOPE Crew to engage more young people in saving endangered sites.

Recently, our HOPE Crew helped to restore the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Site, which includes the civil rights leader's boyhood home. They've helped out at many other places that played a significant role in our nation's struggle for racial equality, too—like Hinchliffe Stadium, for example, one of the few surviving stadiums associated with Negro League baseball.

4. Ramp up our This Place Matters campaign to encourage more Americans to help protect places that matter to them.

Every American has places that are important to them. Places they care about. Places that matter. To preserve these treasures, we launched our This Place Matters campaign—an ambitious project to identify, protect, and restore the sites that matter to people like you who drive our growing preservation movement. We encourage you to join this effort by sharing the places that matter to you on social media with the hashtag #ThisPlaceMatters.

Note: This Place Matters is a campaign that the National Trust started in 2009, before Black Lives Matter had come into being as a movement. Out of respect for Black Lives Matter and the important message behind it, we retired the campaign in June 2020. We encourage National Trust supporters to instead celebrate places that are important to them using the hashtags #SavingPlaces or #TellTheFullStory.

5. Strengthen our partnership with the National Park Service to secure protections for more special places like Painted Desert.

Named a National Treasure in 2014, the Painted Desert Community Complex was home to a HOPE Crew project this summer as the team worked to restore the complex to its original paint colors. Working alongside the National Park Service, this Modernist structure, designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, is getting its day in the sun.