The Virginia Preservation Toolkit

Community Advocacy

If you care about your community and want to become an effective advocate for historic preservation, don't go it alone. Be prepared to inform, energize, and enlist others to the cause.

Communities, like people, have their own identities and personalities. Chances are, your community arose as either a courthouse town, a railroad town, a fishing village, a port city, a farming community, a college town, a commercial center, a street car suburb, a mining or manufacturing town, a rural crossroads hamlet-or took shape through some other character-defining impetus rooted in history.

Historic preservation means recognizing your community's legacy and maintaining the important physical evidence that helps define your community's historic character. Only through well informed, persevering, concerted efforts are historic buildings, landscapes, neighborhoods, and downtowns maintained and renewed. It takes a community to save a community!

Preservation happens when local communities, neighborhoods, and individual property owners want it to happen. Preservation advocacy begins with promoting citizen awareness of a community's history; it grows by stimulating private initiative, and it succeeds by encouraging community action and by using existing preservation tools and incentives at every level.

Virginia communities that are committed to putting their historic resources to work for sustainable development are healthier and richer for it. Good stewardship produces substantial environmental, economic, educational and civic benefits for present and future generations.