Our Hero of the Year is chosen by popular vote. In January, more than 600 people cast ballots to select our 2024 Hero of the Year: Joseph Quinata!
Quinata is the Chief Program Officer of the Guam Preservation Trust and served a three-year term (2021-2023) as the Chairperson for the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) Advisory Group and an ex-officio member of the NTHP Board of Trustees. Quinata is a founder and board member of the nonprofit organization Asian & Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP), which is dedicated to protecting historic places and cultural resources significant to Asian and Pacific Islander Americans through historic preservation and heritage conservation. The video below was played on the big screen during National Historic Preservation Advocacy Week to recognize Joe!
Congratulations to our 2022 Hero of the Year, Meghan Elliott!
Meghan Elliott has dedicated her career to historic building redevelopment. In 2011, she founded New History, a Minneapolis-based consulting practice that works to make historic sites and buildings socially, physically, and financially relevant and viable. Nearly 300 projects later, Meghan has become a resource and leading advocate for building reuse across Minnesota. Meghan co-founded RevitalizeMN in 2020 to advocate for the extension of Minnesota’s State Historic Tax Credit and continues in that work. But Meghan’s real distinction in 2022 was the successful completion of one of Minnesota’s most challenging redevelopment projects, and her first as a developer: the long-vacant historic St. Louis County Jail in Duluth. The building, renamed and reimagined as ‘Leijona’, has revitalized downtown Duluth’s historic civic district, restored one of the true architectural landmarks of Greater Minnesota, and created 33 units of mixed-income housing where there once were 99 detention cells.