The Place Matters Toolkit is a guidebook to help you identify, promote, and protect places that you care about. The toolkit was originally created and published by the Place Matters program of City Lore in New York City. In June 2016, Baltimore Heritage started working with Place Matters staff and preservation advocates to revise and expand the toolkit to create a new open educational resource for the Local Preservaton School.

The Local Preservation School is an open learning environment where preservation advocates and volunteers share with people how to save and sustain historic places in their communities. Our goal is to teach you how to get involved with historic preservation in your community through free online courses, easy-to-use tutorials and fun projects. Beginners are welcome!

Learn more about the Local Preservation School 👉

If any of the following is true, we encourage you to contribute to the Local Preservation School project:

• You have expertise in historic preservation, cultural heritage, public history, or related topics
• You want share your knowledge as part of a collaborative open source community

You can contribute to this toolkit/course, our main project website, our handbook, or our resource repository.

Read our Contribution Guidelines 👉

The Place Matters Toolkit is published by the Local Preservation School with permission from the Marci Reaven and City Lore under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This site is published using the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme which is available under an MIT License.

This project is led by Eli Pousson, Director of Preservation & Outreach for Baltimore Heritage. The original Place Matters Toolkit was written by Marci Reaven and edited by Emily Gertz. If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch with Eli by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @elipousson.

The Local Preservation School project is supported by funding from the National Park Service/National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers. The original development of the Place Matters Toolkit was supported by the the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the New York Community Trust.