Essex Heritage Joins
National Awareness Campaign

In April 2010, Essex Heritage organized a rally at the replica sailing ship, Friendship in Salem to bring attention to the plight that Heritage Areas and other preservation based organizations find themselves in today. We along with others find ourselves in a difficult situation with proposed federal budget cuts on the horizon. That rally proved to be quite successful as a large number of our friends and partners came to the National Park Service Site in Salem to express their concerns about the proposed reductions. On that morning we gathered many residents and students from the region that “dropped what they were doing” and came to our assistance. Several pictures were taken showing concerned citizens holding signs that said “This Place Matters”. Many of those photos found their way into local newspapers and several editorials were written supporting the posture we had adopted and also rallied to support our effort. Since those plans proved to be successful more such efforts are being planned both at the local level by Essex Heritage and nationally by the Alliance of Heritage Areas.

National Efforts to bring Attention to Heritage Area’s

At a recent meeting of the Alliance of National Heritage Areas (ANHA) a plan was developed to support building awareness at both a national and local level of the importance of Heritage Areas. In order to accomplish this task, public awareness of National Heritage Areas has to be brought to the attention of the United States Congress, and to financial supporters and partners at all levels. A positive message has to be developed that would compliment those advocacy efforts and increase awareness of National Heritage Areas across the country. In developing this strategy two questions had to be answered. What is the message that will make the Heritage Area case and how do we and others get that message out? How do we raise the awareness of the vital work that Heritage Areas in general and Essex Heritage specifically bring to our communities and our region and how can this raised awareness make the biggest impact? It was decided that our message had to answer the following question. So what would happen if Heritage Area’s disappeared?

The tag line/slogan for this campaign will be “National Heritage Areas: Smart, Green and Working.” The slogan is clean, simple and marketable, and it speaks to the case that we are trying to make to Congress and to local funding sources. We have built off of the successful concept of the National Trust’s “This Place Matters” campaign that encourages people in the communities to take photos of their “treasure” with a sign identifying that location as one of our participating partners. For the Heritage Area campaign, Essex Heritage will ask all of our partner organizations to take pictures of their treasured site along with as many members of the organization that can be gathered for the photo with our tag line “National Heritage Areas: Smart, Green and Working.”, and mail those photos to us at Essex Heritage. We will then compile these photos and provide them in a portfolio to our local congressional offices to place in their Washington and regional offices. Essex Heritage is planning several other individual events and Public Relations concepts and as those events are planned we will most certainly keep the public informed.

In addition to a much broader use of the web site, Essex Heritage is also communicating using traditional methods like this monthly column and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Linked in as well as using other non traditional methods like the Essex Happenings BLOG that I post information to three times a week that can be accessed at www.essexhappenings.blogspot.com.

Read more about the region from Tom Leonard on his blog.

Thomas M. Leonard is President Emeritus of the Essex National Heritage Commission, Inc., the nonprofit management entity of the Essex National Heritage Area, and can be reached by clicking here.