It’s time to cast your vote for Preservation Action’s 2025 Hero of the Year! Meet the four quarterly heroes from last year below, and then make sure to vote. Please have your vote in by Friday, February 7th!
Cara Bertron works to shape more equitable cities through community and cultural preservation. She is currently managing community engagement around the City of Austin’s new Equity-Based Preservation Plan. Created by a 26-member community working group and informed by more than 300 people, the plan proposes improved and new policies, programs, and tools that meet both historic preservation and equity goals.
Dr. Joy Banner is Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit foundation committed to the liberation of the Black descendant community through the dismantling of inequitable and discriminatory economic, environmental, and social systems inherent in the violent legacies of slavery. As part of this work, Dr. Banner is on the front lines of the struggle against environmental racism in the form of petrochemical plants along Louisiana’s River Road, otherwise known as “Cancer Alley.”
Phillip Howard joined The Conservation Fund in November 2022, where he serves as the program manager of the Civil Rights People and Places program. As program manager, Phillip leads the effort to conserve, interpret, restore, and protect African American heritage sites in Alabama and Mississippi.
Hanna Stark is the Director of Policy and Communications at the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, where she advocates for policies that protect historic spaces while encouraging sustainable development. Hanna enjoys translating complex preservation policy initiatives into accessible and actionable advocacy strategies at the federal, state, and local levels.
Congratulations to our 2024 Hero of the Year, Joseph Quinata!
Congratulations to our 2023 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.