Dear Michigan Lighthouse Alliance friend,

It’s that time again and we want you to “Save the Date”! The MLA is hosting it’s upcoming biennial conference May 22-24, 2012 once again in beautiful Traverse City MI, at the Haggerty Center building on the campus of Northwestern Michigan University.

The theme this year is “Lights and Ports, Building Our Future” For the first time we’ll bring together the members of the Michigan Port Collaborative and Michigan’s lighthouses to the same conference to talk about how the symbols of harbors and also those lighthouses that connect them can work with Michigan’s ports as a way to stimulate local economies and help return attention to Michigan’s “front door”.

In a jam packed conference program that is attached, learn who all the players are in the Ports world and how they can use our potent symbols of Michigan’s rich maritime history to draw attention to developing local harbor based economies, in turn benefitting lighthouses by increasing visitation revenues to bolster budgets. This will help keep our lights on as Michigan continues to aggressively promote it’s coastlines as a destination, and works to improve maritime infrastructure, benefitting all of us.

We hope you’ll join us as the lighthouse world moves more into it’s ultimate challenge; how to turn our restoration worksites into centers of publicly accessible historic maritime educational facilities. We need new volunteers, revenue and ways to reach beyond our original focus, and we’ll need to learn new skills such as promotion, partnerships and polish as we seek to become truly sustainable partners, if not leaders, in Michigan’s brighter future. Please join us!

Sincerely,
Your Michigan Lighthouse Alliance Board of Directors