Vote for the 2024 Preservation Action Hero of the Year!
In 2023, we recognized four outstanding preservation advocates from across the country who are making positive impacts in their local communities and beyond. Please cast your vote for one of the following Preservation Action Heroes before January 31, 2024.
Our Hero of the Year will be honored during National Historic Preservation Advocacy Week in Washington, DC, March 4-7! Learn more about our heroes below and cast your vote today!
Sydney Andrea Landers is an emerging historic preservation professional with a passion for equity in preservation, affordable housing, and comics. A native Texan, she is now based in Los Angeles and works in historic preservation consulting. She is a past recipient of Preservation Action Foundation’s Bruce MacDougal Advocacy Scholars Program Scholarship.
Sehila Mota Casper is the inaugural Executive Director for Latinos in Heritage Conservation, where she works to ensure that the preservation field is inclusive, equitable, and rooted in community. She previously worked as a senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the City of Austin, where she championed a just preservation movement.
Noah Isaiah Oliver is a Cultural Geographer and GeoArchaeologist for the Yakama Nation Cultural Resource Program (YNCRP), also known as “Námí Tamánwit” which translates as “The Creators Law” in the language known as Ichishkinsinwit. The Creators Law is the fundamental principle that YNCRP is tasked with supporting. It includes five elements that make up the Yakama Nation’s approach to perpetuating and protecting its cultural heritage and traditions – and by protecting and being caretakers for these resources, we honor the gift of life.
Joe Quinata is currently 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.
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.