In March 2014, in response to the dwindling numbers of preservation trades practitioners, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched the Hands-on Preservation Experience, more commonly known as HOPE Crew. In the ten years since its founding, the impact of this program on National Parks, sacred spaces, cemeteries, and along historic Route 66 is evident as volunteers conserved historic sites while also learning valuable skills in the preservation trades. To highlight this a decade of supporting historic trades, here are five ways that HOPE Crew has made a difference.

Training New Volunteers and Skilled Trades Craftspeople

Since its inception HOPE Crew provided hands-on preservation training for 860 paid participants and over 3600 volunteers. Acting as a trades incubator, the program developed short, experiential opportunities to cultivate a pipeline for longer trades programs and degrees in hands-on work. Furthermore, HOPE Crew prioritized creating a nurturing environment to encourage a more diverse and representative preservation trades community. One example is the all-female lead and majority-female crew project offered in Astoria, Oregon in partnership with the National Trust's Where Women Made History initiative. Participants learned window restoration skills from trades expert Ariana Makau.

Encouraging YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard)

Encouraging YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard)

With the heart of grassroots missions and the reach of national initiatives, HOPE Crew spearheaded over 200 preservation projects in 31 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Partnering with local organizations and creating paid opportunities for local youth, HOPE Crew has created a national footprint, with a passion for local impact. The HOPE Crew project at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument is an example of how engaging local youth in traditional trades can make an impact by teaching traditional earthen building practices

Training Students to Digitally Document Sites at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)

Since 1998 the National Trust has supported the preservation of HBCUs, first by placing these important institutions on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places and more recently through the work of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. The goal has been to strengthen the stewardship capacity of HBCUs, while also raising national awareness of their significance and the ongoing threats of demolition, deferred maintenance, and insufficient funding.

Over the past decade, over 150 HBCU students, many focused-on architecture, participated in preservation work across multiple HOPE Crew training initiatives, providing students the tools to document historic sites at HBCUs. In one such program HOPE Crew offered hands-on training, including ongoing opportunities at Tuskegee University, continuing the tradition founder Booker T. Washington set of “learning by doing.”.

Completing Critical Preservation Repairs at Historic Sites Across the United States

From masonry to plasterwork, timber framing to window restoration–the preservation projects completed by HOPE Crew have tallied over 20 million dollars in preservation work for meaningful and often under resourced historic sites. One such site was the Estate Little Princess in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, where HOPE Crew worked with the Nature Conservancy and CHANT (Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism) to offer traditional masonry training at an 18th Century Dutch Colonial Sugar Plantation turned hospital for enslaved people that is a now coral reef restoration station.

Building a Volunteer Ethic

HOPE Crew utilizes their volunteer project model to support and engage communities in large regeneration initiatives at local historic sites. Coupled with many Introduction to the Preservation Trades experiences with paid participants, HOPE Crew organizes a weekend community workshops that allows neighbors, residents, and passionate locals to come out and support the site and project and also use valuable hands-on preservation skills for their own homes or other buildings they steward.