Please support SHA’s 50th anniversary initiatives

Dear SHA members,

I hope you are enjoying a great new year and that you were able to join us for a fabulous conference in Fort Worth earlier this month. If you were there, you saw many of your colleagues wearing SHA 50 for 50 pins and may be wondering how you can obtain one. Here’s how.

I encourage you to make a tax-deductible contribution to the SHA’s 50 for 50 Campaign ($50 in honor of the SHA’s 50th Anniversary in 2017), if you haven’t done so already. An SHA member has pledged a matching challenge (of up to $3,000), so your $50 donation will be matched and doubled to $100. All new donors will be mailed a pin and donors will be noted in next year’s conference program, as they were in Fort Worth.

The funds generated by this campaign will help support the SHA’s Diversity Initiative and student endowments. With racism continuing to impact national events, it is imperative that we as an organization do our part to counter racism and bring the light of historical archaeology to the lives of the disenfranchised, lives that will otherwise remain in the shadows.  We are committed to making the SHA an anti-racist organization.

The Diversity Initiative is already underway. As we did in Fort Worth, we are inviting teachers and students from local HBCUs to attend the January 2018 New Orleans conference on a one-day pass at no charge. We have developed web content on abandoned cemeteries that will help descendants understand how archaeologists identify and document abandoned cemeteries and the laws governing those resources that we will post in February. Funding from the 50 for 50 campaign will also hopefully allow us to fully endow our student awards, including the Tubman travel award, and will support the SHA’s next generation as we move into our next 50 years. Please click on https://sha.org/donate/ to make a donation if you haven’t already contributed.

Thank you,

J. W. (Joe) Joseph, SHA President