About The South Carolina Preservation Toolkit and WeGoja Foundation
About Us
The South Carolina Preservation Toolkit is a one-stop shop of resources, tools, information, and community building for African American historic preservation throughout the state. The Toolkit was created by the WeGOJA Foundation with grant-funded support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is specifically designed to bolster African American historic preservation in the state, equip local communities to preserve their history, and increase accessibility and engagement with Black history.
Our team has been working on the Toolkit since May 2023 and we expect to launch and reveal the final Toolkit in February 2025 during Black History Month. We began this project by conducting Listening Sessions throughout the state during the fall-winter of 2023. In addition to the Toolkit, the two-year Mellon grant assisted with capacity building for the WeGOJA Foundation and helped establish a sustainable fundraising structure.
Learn More
Learn more about the community feedback we gathered through our statewide Listening Sessions focused on feedback around the issues and challenges facing communities working to preserve African American history and cultural heritage.
Our Why
Why did we create the SC Preservation Toolkit?
- We saw a need for one comprehensive statewide resource that would address the needs of our local African American communities – a hub of information in one stop that gathers together preservation resources that are currently spread out and hard to access
- We saw a gap in access to historic preservation between African American communities and white communities in SC
- We know there is a severe lack of preserved historic Black spaces and places
- We acknowledge and recognize that historic preservation as a field was not created for Black spaces or people
- We know that the processes of historic preservation – particularly the ones that involve governmental regulations and funding – are complex, and more often than not, impossible to navigate without professional guidance
- An opportunity to reframe preservation for our community – to take the tools of historic preservation that have historically been used to oppress, compromise, gentrify, and develop our communities, and instead use those tools to save our history, honor the legacy of our ancestors, and tell our story for future generations.
Our Goals
Decrease barriers
- Make preservation less complex
- Decrease regional barriers – connect spread out communities throughout the state so that we all feel less alone in doing this work
- Decrease the barrier to access knowledge and information
- Diversify who can do preservation – we want you to be able to understand how to preserve your space without having to get a graduate degree in it!
Make preservation accessible
- Provide transparent access to resources, advice, and tools – rather than that information being held behind institutional walls and professional degrees
- Make preservation easier to understand
- Offer resources that teach about preservation processes
- Offer databases of information that you can search when you need help
- Make preservation understandable for beginners and those new to the field
Empower and equip local communities in their work to preserve African American historic spaces and places
- Build community action and energy around Black preservation
- Equitable and community-based knowledge sharing
Our Team
The Preservation Toolkit project is a statewide program and mission is led by preservationists, activists and advocates from across the state with the goal to decrease barriers, make preservation accessible and empower and equip local communities.
Our Partner
This movement would not have been possible without the leadership, partnership and investment from The Andrew W Mellon Foundation. The foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and they believe that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through their grants, they seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
In 2023, the foundation invested $750,000 in the WeGoja Foundation to build the nation’s first of it’s kind statewide preservation toolkit, under the auspices of their “Humanities in Place” grant making area with a strategic focus on promoting greater engagement and understanding.