In early 2025, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative (DFS). Supported by a $5.2 million investment from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program, DFS empowers descendant community and family-led organizations to be leaders in the physical preservation, interpretative programming, management, and governance of historic African American places. In July 2025, DFS announced its first cohort of seven grantees as part of the Action Fund's National Grant Program.

Ashley Bouknight, PhD and Niya Bates joined the Action Fund to co-lead the program and sat down to share about their own journeys as preservationists and what makes DFS unique.

Can you tell us about yourselves and how you came to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund?

Ashley Bouknight: I am Dr. Ashley Bouknight and I am a senior manager of preservation practice. Prior to working for the Action Fund, I was the senior manager for professional development at the American Association for State and Local History. Prior to that, I was one of the curators at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee. My background is in historic preservation, African American interpretation at cultural heritage sites, and museum education. So, I love to bring together folks who love storytelling, who understand the importance of descendant work, and most of the work that I've done over the last 20 years has been working with descendants.

Niya Bates: My name is Niya Bates, and I am a PhD candidate in History and African American Studies at Princeton University and a senior manager of preservation practice. I came to the Action Fund with a background in historic preservation. I worked for Montpelier previously as a preservationist and for six years directed the Getting Word African American Oral History Project and African American Interpretation at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

What is the Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative?

Bouknight: The Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative is a project that allows descendants of, and families related to, historically relevant sites to, for example, co-create a stewardship plan with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. It is an opportunity for these descendants to be at the planning table, and not just in a consulting capacity, but one that allows them to provide their expertise in their local and their family history. Then the Action Fund and National Trust bring this melting pot of consultants skills to help take their work to the next level. This is a really cool project because these are sites that have already been doing the work, we are just here to give them a helping hand.

Bates: To add to that, I would say that the Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative is also an effort to foreground the work of descendants of enslaved people in stewarding the stories at their ancestors’ sites. Historically, the narratives at those sites have been controlled by other groups, perhaps even descendants of the original enslavers, without much attention given to descendants of those folks who were enslaved. So, we're able to approach a more empowered stance for descendants of enslaved communities and how they're able to push different narratives and different ideas to the foreground.

How does the program define “descendant” versus “family,” and how does that impact preservation or stewardship work?

Bates: In 2018, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund partnered with James Madison's Montpelier to create a document that advised museums and cultural sites on how to engage with descendant communities. In that guideline, they define descendant communities primarily through the lens of sites of enslavement—as direct lineal descendants of people who were enslaved at these historic places.

What we have an opportunity to do with the Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative is to expand upon that definition to think about descendants who are stewarding sites like burial grounds, historic communities, or who are tied together through significant events that are important to American history. So, along with our descendant communities, we can begin to think of a definition of descendant that more broadly brings communities together throughout African American history in the United States.

Bouknight: We really worked on this definition of "family-led" versus "descendant-led." For family-led, we're looking at family units who have lived at or were connected to a particular site over a long period of time. They may not have been the original owners, but over time their family has created a connection to that specific place and they have created their own level of historical significance attached to the site.

For descendants, as a comparison definition, those individuals had early, foundational historic connections to the site. They can connect their family to a site's establishment over multiple generations or multiple time periods.

What excites you the most about the future of the Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative and this first grantee cohort?

Bouknight: I am very excited to see all the different sites in various places across the country, but also just the joy that you receive from helping someone else do the work they were already doing. Helping them build the confidence to put together their own stories, their own narratives, and to watch them take ownership of those narratives. I'm really excited about that part because as practitioners we’re also stewards. And this is a reminder that the work that we're doing is meaningful; it is someone’s legacy, it's someone's family history, and teaching them how to save those legacies themselves is such a powerful act as a historian. I'm really excited to share that expertise and those lessons with others.