When hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and tornados strike, they don’t just devastate homes and businesses—our nation’s museums, archives, and historic sites are hit as well. Priceless collections, family histories, and irreplaceable cultural heritage are often at risk unless trained responders arrive quickly.
That’s where the National Heritage Responders step in.
Through the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC), the National Heritage Responders deploy teams of highly trained conservators and collections professionals to disaster sites—helping museums recover from hurricane damage, stabilizing archives after floods, salvaging soot-covered collections, and guiding local volunteers through the painstaking process of saving what can be saved.
Recent events have shown just how urgently this work is needed:
- Floodwaters in Texas, New Mexico, Iowa, and Kentucky have swept through historical societies and small community museums, leaving soaked documents and fragile objects on the brink of loss.
- Wildfires in the Los Angeles area, Hawaii, and across the West have reduced historic structures to ashes, requiring emergency triage to salvage surviving collections.
- Hurricanes along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts continue to wreak havoc on archives, libraries, and heritage sites year after year.
But we can’t respond without you.
Every deployment and every hour of advanced training for FAIC’s National Heritage Responders is funded by people like you—people who believe our shared history is worth saving and who know that the resiliency of our cultural heritage is tied to the resiliency of our communities. Your gift helps ensure that when disaster strikes, our responders are ready to act immediately with the skills, supplies, and travel support they need.
Our National Heritage Responders need you! Your support is especially important right now as federal support for our vital work has been eliminated. Let’s not wait for the next disaster to strike.
Donate today to the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation’s Emergency Programs.
Your contribution will directly support:
✅ Specialized training sessions to expand our network of National Heritage Responders
✅ Emergency deployments to disaster-stricken communities
✅ Supplies and equipment that keep responders and collections safe in critical moments
Together, we can make sure that when disaster threatens our heritage, help is already on the way.