Historical Society hosts annual meeting

The Lorain Historical Society highlighted the successes of the last year in their annual meeting and banquet on May 10.

The 800-member strong organization gathered at DeLuca’s Place in the Park in Lorain, lauding their efforts in increasing membership and highlighting efforts to continue their work in telling the stories of Lorain’s past.

“We’ve had quite a year. We opened our

children’s room so that was a big deal for us, said Executive Director Barb Piscopo. We’ve been very involved in the Better Block event through the Lorain Proud movement. We received a grant of $125,000 from the state of Ohio for our permanent exhibits which we hope to install in the next three to five years.”

Piscopo said she believes studying the past is only as important as it can inform our present and future, and invoked the role of the Lorain Charrettes, the series of community conversations held throughout the city to try to get people to understand the aspects of Lorain they loved and ways they can improve it.

“We’ve come a long way since those first Charrettes which were a little over a year ago. And the Charrettes led to the #LorainProud movement, which is a grassroots effort to take concrete action on behalf of their city. To improve it, and to increase the pride

that people feel in Lorain,” she said.

The Historical Society has plans to install permanent exhibits on the second floor of The Carnegie Center that will embrace the unique facets of Lorain’s identity. Al Harsar, President of the Historical Society’s Board of Trustees said renderings of the exhibit have been completed.

Harsar also noted the organization’s continued collaboration has allowed them to reach out to new community partners and said he hopes to grow membership to over 1,000 over the next two years and added their permanent endowment fund currently sits at more than $700,000, allowing the Historical Society to invest in programming and displays.

“There are some new faces here tonight which we always like to see,” Harsar said.” We’re starting to get the word around. We’re starting to run into people involved with other nonprofit organizations in the community and they want to share ideas with us, and that’s what we want. We want to be a community

center where everybody gets along, everybody remembers Lorain and we just appreciate it.”

South Lorain native Richard Desich, chairman and founder of Equity Trust Company served as keynote speaker. Desich shared lessons from his career in finance and his philanthropic efforts in emphasizing the importance of education which have, in finding creative solutions, built Lorain County Community College’s Stocker Center, The Boys and Girls Clubs of Lorain County’s Desich Family Campus and LCCC’s Desich SMART Commercialization Center among others.

He said The Historical Society has an opportunity to continue building on their recent successes.

“I think if they keep promoting successful things like people who have been successful in different ways and occupations and emphasizing some of the strengths that Lorain has, emphasizing the future and what it could and what it would take to get there and have a plan to do it,” Desich said.