Living Legacy Initiative

How the Living Legacy Initiative works

Iron Mountain’s objective is to build mutually beneficial partnerships that represent the best outcomes for our mission, community, partners and business. Grant partners are established on a rolling annual basis, developed by the program manager, and voted on by the Living Legacy Committee. We look at factors including: how partnerships connect and drive our commercial business; an organization’s mission; its geography and catchment area; the historical time period; its ability to affect customer or employee engagement; and the opportunity for public awareness. Living Legacy helps museums and other nonprofit institutions protect and provide access to myriad cultural and heritage data resources by offering a combination of financial grants, in-kind services and customized management expertise.

Why this work is so important

Historical and cultural information is a record of who and what we are as a global community. We must preserve these treasures and ensure that they are accessible before they are lost due to destruction or the passage of time. Iron Mountain strives to support organizations that create a link between the public and cultural, historical and educational legacies. To lose a piece of our culture or heritage is to lose a piece of ourselves.

Historical and cultural information - Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln writing at his desk overlayed on Lincoln's writings. Provided by the Lincoln Presidential Foundation.

Believes we can make a difference - Dr Pauli Murray childhood home restoration

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s childhood home in the midst of restoration with Iron Mountain volunteers and staff from the Pauli Murray Center for History & Social Justice.

Why Iron Mountain believes we can make a difference

We are committed to building deep relationships with our partners so that our support can have maximum impact. We have extensive experience in protecting and managing data and physical assets, which we can leverage to benefit our partners through in-kind services. We believe we have a responsibility to strengthen our communities and the expertise to make it happen.

JOURNEY TO EQUAL RIGHTS

We partner with selected nonprofit organizations on projects with an equal rights component.

As we continue the ongoing fight to achieve social equality for all, the history of the origins of these movements remains largely untold. Through the Journey to Equal Rights program Iron Mountain helps to amplify the stories of activism that continue to shape our world today. We go beyond philanthropy to conduct business in a way that ensures a prosperous future for communities and aligns with our commitment to unlock the value of our past to shape our future.

We partner with CyArk, a nonprofit that digitally records, safeguards and archives world heritage sites.

Join CyArk and Iron Mountain on a virtual journey to five places that have been pivotal in our ongoing struggle to achieve social equality. Explore Martin Luther King, Jr.’s parish, the family home of worker’s rights champion César E. Chávez, the site of the first Woman’s Rights convention, an immigration detention center on the West Coast and the site of an LGBTQ uprising in New York City. Take a 3D guided tour and discover stories of resistance and the fight for change that have propelled these causes forward over the last century. Browse the accompanying lesson plans funded by Iron Mountain that can be used by educators and students to learn more about these important moments in our history.

Take The Journey Today

CURRENT LIVING LEGACY PARTNERS

Lincoln Presidential Foundation

The Lincoln Presidential Foundation and Iron Mountain are continuing our partnership through the project “Warning Signs: Lincoln’s Response to Rising Threats to Freedom, Justice, and Democracy” which utilizes resources from the library and the online Papers of Abraham Lincoln hosted by Iron Mountain.

Learn More >> Lincoln Presidential Foundation

Pauli Murray Center for History & Social Justice

The Pauli Murray Center for History & Social Justice is also the childhood home of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Iron Mountain’s Living Legacy program funded the installation of near field communication technology at the childhood home/center and funded a staff position focused on creating educational content.

Learn More >> Pauli Murray Center for History & Social Justice

National WWII Museum

The National WWII Museum is a long-time partner of Iron Mountain. The most recent project funded by Iron Mountain is “The Real Image of War” exhibit that will explore the supposed objectivity of documentary photography, and examine the motives of the men behind the camera tasked with creating a visual record of WWII.

Learn More >> National WWII Museum

Eisenhower Foundation

Iron Mountain funded the launch of the IKEducation Portal created by the Eisenhower Foundation. This digital archive combined with lesson plans offers teachers and educators of K-12 students a virtual platform filled with rich archival documents, historic photos, and 3-D images of artifacts.

Learn More >> Eisenhower Foundation

French Heritage Society

Iron Mountain funded the restoration of the 18th-century Louis XV Salon, also known as the Cabinet du Roi (the King’s Study), which will open up to the public for the first time in 2022 as part of a major restoration campaign in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Learn More >> French Heritage Society

British Film Institute

Iron Mountain is supporting the restoration and sharing of the Stoll Pictures’ Sherlock Holmes Film collection of 45 episodes and two feature films. This complete set has been previously inaccessible and needs some restoration which will allow film aficionados around the world to enjoy this collection once again.

Learn More >> British Film Institute

Rosedale Collective Foundation in partnership with The GRAMMY Museum & the National Museum of African American Music

Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services and Living Legacy Initiative combined funding streams to fund the Rosedale Summit and amplify the reclamation of BIPOC voices in country music. Living Legacy’s funding portion allowed the GRAMMY Museum Foundation and the National Museum of African American Music to create five middle school level lesson plans using content from the summit.

Learn More >> Rosedale Collective Foundation

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Iron Mountain is proud to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the discovery and digitization of archival materials from the Nuremberg Trial U.S. Prosecutors, which helped prosecute Nazi leadership after WWII. Nearly 300,000 pages containing post-war documentation will be organized and digitized that share the atrocities of the Holocaust and set the statge for international law.

Learn More >> United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

CyArk

CyArk and Iron Mountain have partnered since 2015 on the digitization of cultural heritage sites throughout the world and the creation of 3D virtual tours and online lesson plans to bring those sites to students. Projects in 2021 included: National Women’s Rights Historical Park, MLK Jr. National Park, Angel Island, Stonewall Inn, and César Chávez National Monument.

Our most recent project, the Journey to Equal Rights, amplifies the stories of activism that shape our world today.

Learn More >> CyArk

Military Women’s Memorial

Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services (IMES) and the Living Legacy Initiative is partnering with the Military Women’s Memorial on The appreSHEation Tour: Sharing the Stories of America’s Military Women. IMES is providing the digitization of the Memorial’s most at-risk oral history collection and Living Legacy is supporting the traveling exhibits, educational materials and scholarly access platforms so these stories can be enjoyed and studied by future generations.

Learn More >> Military Women's Memorial

The Tulalip Foundation

Iron Mountain is funding the creation of seven pop-up exhibitions with accompanying curriculum focused on the Tulalip Indian School, a boarding school that used to be located on the Tulalip Reservation in Washington State. The exhibit is titled Between Two Worlds and tells the story of how Native children in boarding schools were not allowed to be Native and were not accepted as part of the white world either.

Learn More >> The Tulalip Foundation

University of Central Florida

Iron Mountain is supporting the Parramore project at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities. The mapping and digitization project is focused on Black entrepreneurship and homeownership within the Parramore neighborhood and offers a unique perspective on how urban areas with primarily Black residents fell victim to urban development and road building and how that affected the economic vitality of the neighborhoods.

Learn More >> University of Central Florida

LIVING LEGACY STORIES

Batchworth Sea Scouts Go Digital Thanks to Iron Mountain and AWS Partnership

Batchworth Sea Scouts, Rickmansworth, England

The Batchworth Sea Scouts may be far from the ocean, but they are a significant part of the maritime community. Iron Mountain Digital Services is helping to digitize their records as part of an upgrade to their facility.

Learn More

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans

The Real Image of War: Steichen and Ford in the Pacific explores the supposed objectivity of documentary photography and examines the motives of the men behind the camera who created a visual record of the war in the Pacific.

Learn More

Military Women's Memorial's AppreSHEation Tour: The Color of Freedom

“The history of minority women in the military is often untold and underrepresented,” said Britta Granrud, Director of Collections and Curator for the Military Women’s Memorial.

Learn More

Corporate Responsibility