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Put History Back in the Conversation About Our National Heritage

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Put History Back in the Conversation About Our National Heritage

Step One: Register

    • Click here to register. 
    • Enter your e-mail address.
    • Enter your information and create a password you can remember. You'll need it for step two. 
    • Click "sign me up" to finish and then come back here for a direct link to our vote on our idea.

Step Two: Vote

    • Click "vote now" on the IdeaJam widget below. 
    • This will open a new window. Enter your login information from step one in the fields in the right sidebar.
    • Finally, next to our idea on that page, click "promote" in the rounded orange box with the tallies. You should see the big number go up by one – that's you!

On April 16, President Barack Obama established the America's Great Outdoors Initiative to support innovative community-level efforts that reconnect Americans to the outdoors. This is a powerful opportunity to raise awareness about historic preservation with the Department of Interior and the other federal agencies tasked with being good stewards of our nation's environmental and cultural treasures.

The government has launched a new website allowing citizens to post ideas about ways Americans can reconnect with our great outdoors and how we can better conserve our public and private lands. Yet in all the rhetoric about this program being about all of our public lands, programs like Save America's Treasures, Preserve America, and National Heritage Areas (or any other history-based programs) are largely absent from the discussion.

That needs to change.

We have posted a suggestion on the website asking the Obama Adminstration to "put history back into the conversation about our national heritage." The more support we can show for this suggestion, the greater our chances are of having a serious discussion about how preservation programs achieve all the goals of the America's Great Outdoors Initiative – engaging youth, creating jobs, fostering heritage tourism, spurring economic development, and saving America's heritage.

Attending a listening session for America's Great Outdoors? Click here for more information.