Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill

I am doing my internship at the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill which is located in Hyde Park. The center is a non-profit organization housed on the property of Eleanor Roosevelt’s home, Val-Kill, which is part of the national park site housing the FDR estate. The center does a lot of work with leadership programs with youth in the area, along with human rights education. The goal of the center is to try and help create a better world like the one Eleanor Roosevelt had once envisioned. A world where everyone is equal, respected and accepted. Eleanor Roosevelt was a great humanitarian and defender of human rights and because of this she is largely viewed as one of the most influential women in American history. She believed in moral leadership as the cure to many of the social, economic and political ills that our country faced. The non-profit organization was created in 1976 by a group of people who wanted to preserve Eleanor’s home and use it as a place to continue the kind of activism that she had been doing there in her adult life, especially after the death of her husband. The website for the center states that their three pillars are “revolutionizing youth leadership, igniting civic engagement and redefining global activism” (ervk.org). They continue Eleanor’s work through education and leadership programs.
Although the Eleanor Roosevelt Center is a non-profit organization, it is housed on a national historic site and its work is deeply entrenched in using the past as a way to create a better future. The center also has many primary documents on site such as photos, letters, newspaper articles, furniture and more. On site we have a lot of her and her family’s books. Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated the later years of her life to the promotion of the importance and preservation of human rights. She did a lot of work with the United Nations where she was an appointed delegate and eventually a chairperson on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She played an integral role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was also an outspoken supporter of the civil rights and women’s movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s dedication to creating a world where everyone’s basic rights are respected and where everyone is seen as equals, is commemorated by the work done at the center. We use history, with a focal point on the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, as a way to spread knowledge on how to create a better future and to address her concerns.