Community Conservation Initiative
The Community Conservation Initiative’s mission is to make conservation guidance, techniques and information freely accessible to all individuals, families, neighborhoods, organizations and other communities. Working together, we collaboratively preserve the cultural heritage they value and celebrate. In so doing, we are bringing conservation into the business of nurturing communities and preventing the erasure of cultural memory.
This initiative is led by Anisha Gupta and Joelle Wickens. They’re creating resources, running programs, and raising money to create an infrastructure to embed community conservators in public service institutions across the US. Explore the information below to learn more, and email them at info@community-conservation.org to get involved.
Anisha Gupta, Rick Fengler, Kathy Zdrojewski, and Joelle Wickens at a community clinic at the Route 9 Library and Innovation Center (Image credit: Evan Krape).
Stories
Project Video
The Community Conservation Initiative is working to make conservation skills, guidance, and information freely available to all. In this video you will learn about the project and discover where you can learn more and get involved. Closed captioning & video transcript are accessible at the right of the video tool bar.
Estelle’s Story
Estelle Reddick brought her great grandfather’s 1909 mixology book. The book features not only cocktail recipes, but also home remedies and cleaning solutions! She came to the workshop hoping to find a way to safely house the book. Previously, Estelle kept the book in a safe deposit box or on a shelf in her home office. The Community Conservation Initiative assisted her in creating a protective book sleeve. Since pulling out the book for the workshop, Estelle and her family have enjoyed flipping through and sharing discoveries.
Featured on Instagram!
The Community Conservation Initiative was featured on the University of Delaware Instagram.
Resources
This is the very beginning of a comprehensive set of resources for people doing conservation at home, and people facilitating community conservation events. Click on each to download the PDF.
Conservation How-To Guides
- Archival Storage and Conservation Materials Suppliers: A Partial Listing
- Delaware Valley Framing Opportunities
- A Guide to Box Making: Business Card Holder
- Care Tips for a Variety of Materials and Objects
- Materials List for Housing Paper, Photographs, and Books
- Caring for Your Books at Home
- Caring for Your Paper at Home
- Caring for Your Photos at Home
- Creating Art To Last: Resources
- Caring for Your Personal Collection
- Mounting Small, Light, Flat Textiles
- Velcro Hanging Support System for Flat Textiles
Community Conservation Guides for Facilitators
- Community Clinic: A How to Guide
William Donnelly and Sara Tidman discussing how to improve storage for an object from the Rockwood Museum (Image credit: Evan Krape).
Projects
Our projects are geared towards preserving objects that participants treasure. It might be something that would not seem significant to someone else but for the participant, because of the person it is connected to, the event it reminds them of, the personal, family, or community history it tells, the object means something to them and they’d be sad if it got lost or destroyed. It might have some monetary value as well, but the most important thing is that through the object they are able to connect to a piece of their history.
Community Clinic Program
In this 2 hour program, participants bring in a meaningful personal object, share its story, and collectively brainstorm how to care for it. Conservators facilitate the conversation in a community-building atmosphere, and participants take home storage materials and informational resources on hands-on preservation tips and techniques to use at home. The goal is to provide resources and help participants create a plan for their objects that are financially feasible with readily available materials (i.e. from the hardware store, not a conservation supplier).
The kinds of objects represented in the programs are ones that participants treasure. It might be something that would not really seem significant to someone else, but for the participant, because of the person it is connected to, the event it reminds them of, the personal, family, or community history it tells, the object means something to them and they’d be sad if it got lost or destroyed. It might have some monetary value as well, but the most important thing is that through the object they are able to connect to a piece of their history.
Care & Repair Workshops
These hands-on workshops cover a variety of simple methods to protect, clean and repair treasured objects. Similar to the Community Clinic Programs, participants share the story of their objects and their goals for the workshop. Conservators and conservation graduate students do demos and hands-on instruction so all participants learn some basic techniques for objects like photographs, paper documents, quilts, dishes, and metal boxes. These include learning how to:
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- Create a basic protective housing
- Avoid damage while cleaning
- Repair objects while considering issues like longevity or use
Community Conservation Initiative tutorial on creating a custom protective book sleeve (Image credit: Evan Krape).
Community Conservator Pilot Program
We’re in the process of fundraising for a community conservator to work for 2 years in a New Castle County, Delaware library. In this groundbreaking initiative, the community conservator would be dedicated to serving community members, including individuals and small and midsize institutions, and removing the paywall from conservation information, guidance, and tools. The community conservator will host clinic programs, offer care and repair workshops, provide open studio time, conduct house calls for guidance regarding collections, and hold disaster preparedness and response training and guidance during disaster recovery.
After the pilot, we envision expanding the program to support many community conservators in cultural and civic institutions across the US. We will also build new and accessible training paths for people to become community conservators. See “Ways You Can Get Involved” below for more information.
Training
To provide accessible conservation information, we need to build new and accessible training paths. We plan to create various training modules focused on three audiences: the general public, collections care staff, and future community conservators. For the general public, we’ll rely on handouts and webinars focused on caring for and repairing common materials. We’ll create a series of training topics aimed at collections care staff who want a more hands-on approach to caring for their collections. We’re also hoping to develop a distance learning degree program to train community conservators, so they can stay within their communities during training.
Gravestone Cleaning
In 2023, WUDPAC students Meghan Abercrombie and Alyssa Rina carried out the project “Honoring Ancestors and Cemetery Care at the Village of Fork Branch.” The Village of Fork Branch is a prehistoric Lenape archeological site located on Lenapehokink or what is now modern-day Dover, Delaware. The land is of tremendous cultural significance to all three state-recognized Delaware Bay Tribes: the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation of New Jersey; The Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware; and the Nanticoke Indian Association of Delaware. Ancestors from all three tribes rest in the Fork Branch and Little Union Cemeteries at the Village of Fork Branch. Meghan and Alyssa’s presentation, which you can download below, focuses on the process of cleaning several of the gravestones in order to honor the ancestors resting there and their descendants. The project of teaching others to care for treasured gravestones has continued with work by WUDPAC student Binh-An Nguyen. A few notes from her work have been added to the presentation notes. We hope the notes give you enough guidance to safely clean your own treasured stones but please reach out to us through the email at info@community-conservation.org if you have any questions.
Meghan Abercrombie and Alyssa Rina lifting Sarah Coker’s headstone onto wooden 2x4s (Image credit: RuthAnn Purchase).
Ways You Can Get Involved
Provide Funding to Help Us Grow the Initiative
From a $5 bottle of glue to millions to endow a community conservation faculty position at the University of Delaware, we can put your financial support to good use. Four of our current top priorities are:
- Embedding a community conservator at Woodlawn Library. We have submitted a grant to the IMLS and will learn the results in July.
- Writing guides to help others facilitate community conservation events. For this, we want to pay conservators to write detailed workshop plans aimed at motivated participants with minimal conservation knowledge and average hand skills.
- Developing a distance learning fellowship to take place during the second year of the two-year pilot at the Woodlawn Library.
- Providing paid internships for local high school aged students during the two-year pilot at the Woodlawn Library
If these do not fit your budget or interests we have plenty more. Send us an email at info@community-conservation.org.
Donate Your Time and Expertise
We are in need of conservators to create clear, concise leaflets about a variety of care and repair materials and techniques.
Community Conservation Initiative participant showing a matted photograph (Image credit: Evan Krape).
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