The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative Announces Eight New Grantees Protecting and Activating Historic Black Places
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The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative (OPI), founded by Dr. Andrea Roberts and supported by the Mellon Foundation announces the recipients of its second grant cycle. Housed within the Center for Cultural Landscapes, OPI advances research, education, and grantmaking that support descendant-centered approaches to Black placemaking and preservation. Selected from a highly competitive pool of 100 applications, this year’s eight grantees represent community-rooted projects led by descendants, artists, educators, and local leaders preserving and activating Black historic settlements in Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and California.
Members of this year’s grantee cohort were selected for their deep connections to place, their capacity to facilitate descendant return and revitalization, and their commitment to preservation as a living practice. From family land and historic Black settlements to churches, gathering spaces, and migration routes, the projects reflect the many ways communities continue to care for places that carry history, identity, and belonging. Each initiative is grounded in local knowledge and shaped by the people most closely connected to the stories being shared.
Collectively, the projects explore how communities remember, sustain, and reimagine Black places across generations. Through place-based projects and community engagement, grantees are strengthening relationships between people, place, and history while contributing to a growing network of community-centered preservation efforts.
The OPI Round 2 Grantees are:
Popsie & Vivian's Lowlands
Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana
Utē Jozéfinn Petit, Founder and Lead Steward
Project Title: Popsie & Vivian's Lowlands
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Popsie & Vivian's Lowlands is a land stewardship and cultural preservation initiative rooted in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward. Led by interdisciplinary artist, farmer, and descendant Utē Jozéfinn Petit, the initiative reclaims family land lost following Hurricane Katrina and the state's Road Home Program. Inspired by the legacies of Petit’s great-grandmother Vivian Petit and Afro-Houma ancestor Natalie Verrett, former family home sites are being transformed into a cooperative farm, sculpture park, and gathering space that honors Black and Indigenous histories.
Farming, public art, and community gatherings will transform former home sites into spaces for cultivation, creativity, and collective care. Storytelling circles, quilting gatherings, community workdays, and a Maroon festival will bring residents together to celebrate the history, creativity, and resilience of the Lower 9th Ward. Photographs, quilts, and other works created through these gatherings will capture the community's continuing relationship to the cultural landscape.
Justice for Our Land
Crockett, Texas
Antoinette Anderson, Project Lead
Project Title: Justice for Our Land: The Legacy of Rosie Washington
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Justice for Our Land explores the legacy of Rosie Washington and the experiences of Black landowning families in freedom colony settlements surrounding Crockett, Texas. Led by descendant Antoinette Anderson, the initiative draws on family heritage and oral histories to examine the challenges and opportunities surrounding heirs' property, land retention, and generational ownership in East Texas. Through interviews with descendants and community members, the project highlights the ways Black families have worked to protect land from ecological threats, encroachment, and land dispossession.
At the center of the project is a documentary film that uses Rosie Washington's story to examine broader questions of inheritance, landownership, and belonging. Community screenings, descendant discussions, and educational workshops will create space for families, legal practitioners, preservation advocates, and residents to reflect on the challenges facing inherited property today. By connecting personal experience to a larger history, the project positions storytelling as a tool for learning, dialogue, and community action.
The Garcitas Community Preservation Project
Victoria & Jackson Counties, Texas
Robin J. North Sr., Project Lead
Project Title: Deep Roots, Buried Histories
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The Garcitas Community Preservation Project preserves the history and cultural landscape of the Garcitas Freedmen's Community, founded by formerly enslaved families in the 1870s along the border of Victoria and Jackson Counties, Texas. Led by artist, educator, and descendant Robin J. North Sr., the initiative centers places that have anchored community life for generations, including Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, the Garcitas Cemetery, and the Hudler School for Coloreds. Together, these sites tell the story of the families who built and sustained Garcitas across generations.
Deep Roots, Buried Histories will bring together family photographs, archival records, and community stories in a digital archive, StoryMap, and photobook that traces generations of life in Garcitas. Contemporary images of descendant return will be woven alongside historical materials, illuminating the people, relationships, and traditions that shaped the community across time. By bringing these stories together in one place, the history of Garcitas remains accessible to descendants, scholars, and community members for years to come.
Learn more about The Garcitas Community Preservation Project
Virtual Friends & Family Genealogy Group (VFFGG)
St. Landry Parish, Louisiana; Texas; and California
Joyce Rideau Metoyer, Dolores Rodgers, and Cynthia Sam, Project Leaders
Project Title: The Descendants' Gathering: The I-10 Creole Migration—Freedom, Faith, and Community Across Louisiana, Texas, and California
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The Virtual Friends & Family Genealogy Group traces the migration journeys of Black Catholic and Creole families whose roots stretch back to freedom settlements in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. Formed through virtual family gatherings during the pandemic, the network connects descendants from communities including Rideau, Prairie Laurent, and Frilot Cove with relatives now living in Houston, Beaumont, Los Angeles, Oakland, and beyond. Their work reveals how generations carried traditions of faith, music, language, and community life westward, creating cultural connections that continue to link families across the I-10 corridor.
Following the paths their families traveled westward, descendants will come together to document journeys, share memories, and trace the connections between historic Louisiana freedom settlements and the communities their families helped build across Texas and California. Family photographs, personal stories, digital mapping, and public exhibitions will illuminate these migration routes while supporting a proposed Texas Untold Marker recognizing the enduring traditions of freedom, faith, and community that continue to connect families across state lines.
Juke Joint at the Crossroads
South Central Texas
Katie Petitt, Cultural Organizer and Project Lead
Project Title: Juke Joint at the Crossroads: An Exhibition and Homecoming Event
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Juke Joint at the Crossroads explores the interconnected histories of Black settlements across South Central Texas through the story of Arthur's Place, a historic juke joint founded by Katie Petitt's grandfather, Arthur Stiles. Rooted in communities including Canoe Creek, Staples, Antioch, and the Dunbar neighborhood of San Marcos, the initiative traces the family, cultural, and community ties that connected these settlements after Emancipation. Drawing on family history, Petitt illuminates a broader landscape of Black life, movement, and belonging across the region.
Hosted in partnership with the Calaboose African American Museum, Juke Joint at the Crossroads reimagines Arthur's Place as a modern gathering space. A multimedia exhibition featuring family archives, historic maps, oral histories, and immersive installations will be paired with a homecoming-style celebration filled with storytelling, shared meals, genealogy activities, and live music inspired by the traditions of the original juke joint. By bringing people together around a shared place and shared history, the project creates new opportunities to remember, reconnect, and celebrate the communities that helped shape South Central Texas.
The Country House Project (TCHP)
Covesville, Virginia
Devon Williams, Founder and Executive Director
Project Title: Kinnection × Covesville History Day: Revisiting Our Roots & Reclaiming Our Future
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The Country House Project preserves the history of Covesville, a historic Black community in southern Albemarle County, Virginia. Founded by sixth-generation descendant, genealogist, and preservation practitioner Devon Williams, the organization explores the family and church ties that have shaped Covesville since the years following Emancipation. Anchored by the legacy of First Baptist Church of Covesville and generations of Black farmers, laborers, orchard workers, and community leaders, the project highlights the people whose lives helped build and sustain the region.
Kinnection × Covesville History Day invites descendants to return home and rediscover the stories, places, and relationships that connect them to Covesville. Through family history activities, storytelling gatherings, heritage demonstrations, and opportunities to preserve photographs, documents, home videos, and personal memories, participants will help preserve stories and memories connected to Covesville. By bringing families together in the landscape that shaped them, the event celebrates the enduring legacy of one of Albemarle County's historic Black communities.
Jonesville Community Connect (JCC)
Wake County, North Carolina
Lori Moss and Guy Jones, Co-Project Leads
Project Title: Preserving the Hartsfield Family Heritage
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Jonesville Community Connect (JCC) preserves the legacy of the historic Jonesville community, one of the earliest Black landowning communities established near Rolesville, North Carolina, following Emancipation. Founded and led by descendants of John Henry and Mattie Walker Hartsfield, whose family helped establish the community, the organization documents generations of landownership, faith, work, and leadership rooted in the area. As growth and development continue to reshape the landscape, JCC works to ensure that the people, places, and stories that built Jonesville are not lost to neighborhood change.
Preserving the Hartsfield Family Heritage will gather family photographs, oral histories, and archival materials that trace the community's history across generations. Gatherings and educational events will create opportunities to share stories connected to family homes, churches, farmland, and community landmarks while informing plans for a future museum and preservation space.
Learn more about Jonesville Community Connect
The Almagro Resource Center (ARC)
Danville, Virginia
Cortney Wilson, Founder and Executive Director
Project Title: Founding Almagro Mapping (FAM)
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The Almagro Resource Center preserves the history and cultural landscape of Almagro, one of Virginia's earliest self-governed Black communities. Founded and led by descendant Cortney Wilson, the organization documents the people, institutions, and places that shaped community life in Almagro from Reconstruction through the twentieth century. Generations of family history remain connected to landmarks including Oak Hill Cemetery, E.A. Gibson School, Winslow Hospital, Peters Park, and the community's historic churches, creating a living record of Black leadership and community-building in Danville.
Founding Almagro Mapping will create an interactive digital map that connects family histories, photographs, oral histories, and land ownership records to the places where those stories unfolded. Descendants and community members will contribute materials through mapping workshops, archiving events, cemetery documentation, and community research. By putting these stories back onto the landscape, the project creates new ways to explore Almagro's history while strengthening efforts to protect its cultural landmarks and family-owned land.
The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation and housed within the University of Virginia's Center for Cultural Landscapes, supports descendant-led approaches to preserving and interpreting Black places and histories. Building on the work of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, OPI advances research, education, grantmaking, and storytelling across Texas, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, and Nova Scotia.
