“Working to Preserve Our Heritage: The Incredible Legacy of Greek American Community Services” is an important contribution to the literature on immigrant community institutions, cultural preservation, and voluntary social welfare in the United States. Written with evident affection for its subject and a clear sense of purpose, the book offers both a celebratory institutional history and a serious resource for scholars of diaspora studies, social policy, and ethnic history.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its human scale. Interwoven with institutional description are vivid personal profiles and oral-history excerpts that animate otherwise technical matters of governance and fundraising. These narratives provide readers with an on-the-ground sense of how services were delivered, how volunteers sustained operations, and how community values—religion, family, reciprocity—shaped practice. The inclusion of photographs, program flyers, and reproductions of founding charters (where present) strengthens the book as an archival source as well as a readable history.
Methodologically, the book is commendable for its multi-sourced approach: archival documents are balanced by interviews and contemporary program evaluations. This triangulation enhances credibility and allows the author(s) to trace not only what organizations did but also how their roles were perceived by clients, volunteers, and local officials. The attention to fundraising strategies, governance structures, and inter-organizational networks will be especially valuable to students of nonprofit management and social policy.
That said, the work is not without limitations. Its strengths as a local and institutional history sometimes come at the expense of broader comparative analysis. Readers looking for systematic juxtaposition with other immigrant service models (Jewish mutual aid, Italian fraternal orders, Armenian community agencies) will find only occasional and brief comparisons. Similarly, while the book documents achievements and adaptations, it is sometimes less forthright in addressing tensions—political, generational, or gendered—that have shaped internal community debates about leadership, priorities, and cultural representation. A more robust engagement with these conflicts would have enriched the interpretive frame.
Nevertheless, these caveats do not diminish the book’s overall value. Working to Preserve Our Heritage succeeds both as a commemorative account and as a practical manual: policymakers, community leaders, and scholars will find in its pages useful case studies of resilience, volunteer mobilization, and cultural stewardship. For Greek American readers it preserves memory; for local historians it fills an important gap; and for the wider field it offers a model of how community-based organizations can be studied with rigor and affection.
In sum, this volume should be added to the shelves of public libraries, parish halls, and university courses dealing with immigration and nonprofit studies. It stands as a timely reminder that the preservation of heritage is not only an archive’s work—but the ongoing labor of communities who organize to care for their own