PLACES 2025 | Session Proposal Guide

Ready to Submit a Session to PLACES 2025?

This Session Proposal Guide incorporates everything you need to know to create a strong and successful PLACES 2025 Session Proposal. As you develop your Session Proposal, keep in mind the following Guiding Questions, Tips and Tricks, and Session Types.


Guiding Questions

Every year, we focus the PLACES conference on three central themes or guiding questions. These questions help shape our sessions, educational offerings, and additional programming. This year, our guiding questions are:

Question 1: Maker economy. How can we empower local makers, tradespeople, and cultural industries to both strengthen our local economies and ensure the preservation of cultural heritage for future generations?

Question 2: Place-based belonging. How can we continue to expand the reach of our work to foster a greater sense of belonging in the preservation fields, our communities, and our downtowns?

Question 3: Resiliency and livability. Given ongoing challenges our state is facing, what practices can we adopt to ensure the resiliency and livability of our historic neighborhoods?

Question 4: Evergreen ideas for the Evergreen State. What are our tried-and-true preservation practices, community organizing principles, and place governance models?


Tips and Tricks

In keeping with our guiding questions and ideas, we’re hoping to see the following in every session. We’ll work with each presenter on developing or enhancing these once your session is accepted, but we welcome you to strengthen your proposal with the following:

  • Practical advice and how-tos: When attendees leave your session, they know how to apply the principles or what next steps they can take to enact a similar project/program. This includes sharing specifics about partnerships and funding (e.g., defining partnership in the context of your presentation and sharing what your funding sources were). Don’t just tell us what you did — tell us how!
  • Audience engagement: Attendees are involved in your presentation throughout, whether with opportunities to reflect, invitations to ask questions or share their perspective, or even just with beautiful photographs.
  • Place-specific content: This is a place-based conference after all! Tell us what about your project, program, or process is unique to your place and what’s transferrable to other places.
  • Success: What did/does success look like for you in this project? How did you measure it? Would you use the same metrics if you did it again?

Session Types

All sessions are categorized into one of the following session types. Be prepared to identify and select which kind of session type best describes your proposal in the proposal form.

  • Tactical Solution Sessions: One concept or idea in a clear, quick format. This could be a case study, product demo, or project overview. (30 min)
  • Crash Courses: Topic- or skill-specific courses that help attendees develop skills or content knowledge in a specific area. (30-60 min)
  • Workshops: Structured and interactive sessions that encourage participants to learn from each other, consider their own solutions, and apply the gained knowledge both inside the workshop and in the wider world. (60 min)
  • Discussion-based panels: Involve a moderator who facilitates a discussion between a group of three to four experts, with the goal of being informative and entertaining. (60 min)
  • Presentation-based panels: Feature three to four experts who deliver short presentations on a related topic or theme, followed by a Q&A session moderated by the experts themselves. (60 min)
  • Mobile tours/field sessions: Educational walking tours or workshops that take attendees through specific projects and/or sites in the area. (2-3 hours)

Ready to Propose Your Session?

All Session Proposal submissions open February 5, 2025, and are due March 28, 2025. All submitted Session Proposals will be notified of their selection or rejection in mid-April.

Select Plan a Session to download a copy of the questions included in the Session Proposal form. Session Proposals must be submitted using our online form found at Submit a Session. Please plan to complete the online form in one sitting.

Thinking about an idea (or a few ideas!) and need help refining? Have questions about the form or process? Email our team at to ask your question or schedule office hours.

Banner photo by Sydnee More Photography.