Dear CPHS Members and Friends,
I will be stepping down as executive director effective June 30, 2019. It’s eight years since I started with CPHS as staff person and four since I became executive director, a tenure that has overlapped with five board presidents. It’s time for me to pursue other projects and for someone with new energy to help lead CPHS.
Working for CPHS has been everything I hoped it would be when Dick Jorgensen and Lois Orr hired me back in 2011. I have had a chance to learn how historic preservation works in DC at the city and neighborhood level; I’ve learned an enormous amount about the history of the neighborhood I grew up in and its experience with preservation since the 1980s; and I’ve loved serving as historical reference person for Cleveland Park. I’m happy to have been able to build and expand relationships between CPHS and DC’s preservation, local history, and educational communities. Collaboration with the Tregaron Conservancy, the Rosedale Conservancy, he Cleveland & Woodley Park Village, the Art Deco Society of Washington, the Historical Society of Washington, DC, tJohn Eaton School, and the American University Public History Program, as well as local and national experts in architectural and landscape history, have enriched our programming in recent years.
CPHS’s board and ARC members and neighborhood partners who support our year-round work, especially web designer Danna McCormick and administrator Meg House of the Cleveland Park Congregational Church, have made running the organization as easy as it could possibly be.
I hope you will continue to support CPHS by keeping up your membership and by volunteering to get involved in programs that interest you. If you have an idea for something CPHS could be doing, let the board know and then offer to get it started yourself. And tell new neighbors about their local historical society!
Carin Ruff
