The Importance of #GivingTuesday
In simple terms, #GivingTuesday is a celebration of generosity. Created in 2012, Giving Tuesday was born and incubated at the 92nd Street Y and its Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact in New York City. The movement was built as a way of making a day of the year that encourages people to do good and is meant to reimagine a world built upon shared humanity and generosity. By giving to community and through collective action, we show up in a variety of ways for the causes we believe in and build our communities for the better. In this uber-consumer world we live in, the tradition of giving needs reinforcement! That is why #GivingTuesday has become so important. Here at Village Preservation, we celebrate all of the multitudes of ways our members give so generously to the communities we all love so deeply.
Did you know that over the past year, our supporters sent 337,663 (and counting!) letters to city and state officials in support of our 21 active advocacy campaigns in defense of our neighborhoods? That is substantial support and generosity of time and effort! And we are so grateful for each and every letter sent!
Andrew Berman, residents, and elected officials rally to save 14 Gay Street
Here’s just some of what your collective support
has allowed us to do over the past year alone:
* Secure a “Seven To Save” designation from the Preservation League of NY State for our proposed South of Union Square Historic District, naming it one of the seven most important and endangered historic sites in NY State.
* Lead a successful campaign to defeat a statewide measure to lift the limit on the allowable size of residential development in New York City, which would have allowed “supersized” towers in residential neighborhoods.
* Help support a victorious campaign to convince Mayor Adams to veto a punitive measure that would have penalized longtime SoHo and NoHo residents with crippling fines.
* Lead a successful campaign to eliminate proposed cuts to the Landmarks Preservation Commission from the city budget, which would have crippled the agency’s ability to landmark areas, enforce existing landmark regulations, and expeditiously process applications for changes to properties.
* Call out the City and developers for their neglect and wrongdoing in the Meatpacking District and on Gay Street, allowing landmarked properties to be destroyed, and demanding stiff penalties and full reconstruction of the buildings.
* Unveil three new historic plaques at:
—The recently landmarked 70 Fifth Avenue, which served as the headquarters of NAACP and The Crisis Magazine in the early 20th century, where landmark civil rights campaigns were led and prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance were first heard, as well as being home to a broad array of other groundbreaking civil rights, civil liberties, social justice, human rights, and progressive organizations.
—159 West 10th Street, a ca. 1830 house and home to one of NYC’s oldest bars, and its oldest gay bar, Julius’ Bar. In 1966 Julius’ Bar was the site of a trailblazing civil protest for gay rights, more than three years before the Stonewall Riots.
—206 East 7th Street, the former home of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, where they both lived early in their careers and hosted (and famously photographed on the fire escape) Jack Kerouac.
* Hold 75 educational programs attended by thousands of people, including the reintroduction of in-person indoor programming for the first time since COVID.
* Serve an all-time high of 2,734 students in our children’s education program, 90% of which were from high-need schools that participated for free or at a reduced cost.
* Publish multiple studies and opinion pieces debunking arguments for eliminating or reducing landmark and zoning protections based upon the false promises of benefits from allowing unrestricted market-rate housing development.
* Produce Village Voices 2022, our highly anticipated second annual outdoor interactive public art exhibition, which is free and open to the public. From September through October, more than 3,000 visitors participated in our much-heralded event.
VILLAGE VOICES, our 2022 public outdoor exhibition
Your financial support on this #GivingTuesday means so much to us. We rely on your dedicated generosity to vigorously pursue our decades-long mission of documenting, celebrating, and preserving the history and culture of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, while also supporting our local small businesses and cultural institutions.
We are so grateful for the donations we receive from individuals like you throughout the year. These personal gifts constitute the vast majority of our annual revenue, and have allowed us to landmark over 1,250 buildings, secure nearly a dozen historic districts, and provide programming and resources about our neighborhoods’ rich histories that reach tens of thousands each year.
We hope that you will take this #GivingTuesday opportunity to send us a special gift on this special day of “radical generosity!” And we thank you for all you do!
