Greenfire was proud to sponsor Fire Nation, the Forest County Potawatomi Community drum circle, at the Opening Plenary Session of the Past Forward 2025 Conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Tribal member Nick Shepard opened the session with a land acknowledgement, recognizing the ancestral lands of the Potawatomi people. Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson welcomed attendees and issued an official proclamation marking the occasion.
The Opening Plenary took place at the Warner Grand Theater, now home to the Bradley Symphony Center of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The session featured author Clint Smith, whose book How the Word is Passed is a #1 New York Times bestseller. Smith spoke on how slavery has shaped the nation’s collective history and participated in a conversation with National Trust President and CEO Carol Quillen on building a national commemorative landscape that tells the full American story.
Past Forward 2025 was held in Milwaukee September 16–18, the first time in the National Trust’s 75-year history that its annual conference has convened in the city. More than 800 preservationists, architects, planners, developers, historians, and community leaders gathered for 35 educational sessions, 100 speakers, and field studies to significant historic sites including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, the Domes, and the Milwaukee Soldiers Home.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a nonprofit organization chartered by Congress in 1949. For more than 75 years, it has worked to protect historic places, tell the full American story, and use preservation to strengthen communities. Past Forward serves as its annual convening to share knowledge and strategies for preservation at the national level.
As a tribally owned construction management firm, Greenfire connects preservation to its ownership and its work. Greenfire manages historic renovations throughout Milwaukee and Wisconsin, bringing experience in renovating and repurposing historic structures, creating new uses that serve communities today and into the future.
