What is The South Carolina Preservation Toolkit

The Preservation Toolkit

About The Toolkit

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. 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. The Toolkit is created by the WeGOJA Foundation with grant-funded support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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.

Learn More

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

How To Use

We wanted to make the Toolkit useful and easy to navigate for both beginners and seasoned preservationists. That’s why we developed two easy ways to explore the resources and tools.

Search by preservation topic

Do you know what you want to preserve, but not sure where to start? Are you a beginner preservationist? Click on a specific preservation topic to learn more. Each of these pages curates all of the resources we have on that topic in one easy place to access.

Preservation Topics

Search by specific Tool

Are you already familiar with preservation and know what you need help with? Click on specific Tool icons to go straight to the Tool you need quickly.

Preservation Tools