Artists for Environmental Restoration

Formally Heartland Community Reconciliation Center

2022 saw our nonprofit organization go through some big changes, resulting is a significant shift in our mission and focus, and the re-naming and re-branding of our NPO. 

We started in December, 2019 with Marc and Christel Gopin on our board and working together with us on ways to offer reconciliation workshops and trainings in to our local community. Marc has 30+ years of experience in back-channel diplomacy, working overseas with Israel, Palestine, Jordon and Syria. Marc and Christel were interested to expand their work to include domestic reconciliation services, and saw the Midwest as an area in the U.S. that was experiencing deep social conflicts.

After almost three years, the scope and intensity of Marc and Christel’s international work had grown to the point that they could not take on additional work, and they expressed their need to leave the HCRC board. They left with good wishes, and we are grateful for their shared expertise.

We now have a new board member, Karen Danielson, who started working with us in July and brings much expertise in leadership, wordsmanship, and overall positive energy. We have had multiple brainstorming sessions with Karen as we worked to re-name and re-brand our NPO, and we are grateful for Karen’s ideas, her detail-oriented approach to many aspects of her work, and for taking on the responsibilities of a board position in our newly re-named organization, Artists for Environmental Restoration (AER).

AER’s focus is to inspire dialogue to raise awareness of the power and path to environmental restoration amid the destructive and disastrous effects of climate change and global warming. We hope that you will take the time to read over our HOME and EVENTS pages to get a more in depth understanding of our mission, our vision, our objectives and goals.

Lastly, we want to thank for our website designer, David Reedy (reedydesigns.com) for his knowledge of website design and his expertise in many areas, including branding and social media. David has taken on this important project with enthusiasm, and he regularly shares his ideas about how to make our website more impactful and user friendly.