Nebraska Never Quit winner helps protect her community’s history

Diane Laffin says every person she talks to thinks her job is cool. It’s easy to see why.

An architectural historian at the Nebraska State Historical Society, Laffin helps federal agencies take into account the impact that their projects will have on her community’s cultural resources and historic properties. Every time she goes out to a particular site that the U.S. Department of Transportation, for example, will be working on, she’s responsible for reviewing the built environment to determine if it’s historic.

“I’m a person who could be out there discovering a new historic site,” she says. “I’m out there on the front lines, watching these things every day. And it’s important to have somebody out there doing that. Imagine what could be lost.”

For her service to her community, Laffin, a member of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees(NAPE/AFSCME Local 61), is a winner of our union’s Never Quit Service Award. The award recognizes public service workers who go above and beyond the call of duty to make their communities better.

There is a lot of work to be done and sometimes, Laffin says, “it’s a struggle to keep up with the due dates and the time frame.”

But she knows that there is “a lot of undiscovered history out there,” and that it’s her community’s history that binds the people together.

“I love my job so much,” Laffin says. “It has to deal with history every day. And that to me is indescribable.”