The Seal Beach Historical Resources Foundation has made a commitment to engage, delight, educate and celebrate our community’s unique history and spirit — and we are looking for community partners to help us expand the exhibits, programs, and events that we can offer each year.

Below is a list of projects we are actively considering. Becoming a sponsor for one of these not only supports the Foundation’s projects, it allows us to support you, to put your name, or company name, on one of our activities and increase your visibility among an important targeted audience.

• • Historical Calendar (two sponsors per month)

• • Red Car Campaign – Your sponsorship of this committee will help us fund the repair and maintenance of the symbolic Red Car. Final numbers for this are not in yet, but our estimated goal for the first two years of this are around $35,000 per year.

• • The first Surf City – while other cities claim the title of Surf City, Seal Beach was the first town to ever host a surfing contest (1914), and was home to the first two national surfing champions (Jack & Mike Haley) and as we all know . We are working on this in association with the Seal Beach Boardmen’s Group.

• • Seal Beach Hall of Fame – While it may be a long-term project to find a permanent space for this exhibit, one immediate idea is to make individual posters celebrating Seal Beach honorees and have the poster placed in the windows or in the stores along Main Street and elsewhere.

• • The Woman of Seal Beach – a display celebrating the powerful women who have shaped Seal Beach and local history. Virginia Haley, Mildred Blankenship, Jessie Reed (who in 1942, became OC’s first female mayor)

• • The Neighborhoods – While Old Town is the obvious and natural symbol and focal point of the Foundation, Seal beach is much more than that. From Leisure World (the first complete independent seniors Community in the world) to the College Parks to the Surfside Colony, The Hill and the Rossmoor center — all have a unique and interesting story and we want to make sure it is properly documented and celebrated.

• • Seal Beach in Space – from North American Rockwell to Boeing, Seal Beach has played a big role in getting America to the moon and other out-of-this world accomplishments. We want to make sure this history is not lost.

• • Newsletter – we will begin with a quarterly newsletter, and update it to monthly. Your ad

• • Newspaper archive – we are working with the Sun (and its parent Community newspapers, Inc.) to digitize past issues (some of which go back to the 1920s) and make them available for searching as a benfit of membership. We are exploring possible grants on this, but another way to expedite fund it is to allow locals to sponsor the digitization of a paper for one or more months. This would initially include pre-1990 issues of the Sun (and its Journal predecessor) which go back to 1968, the Mariner, the News-Enterprise (which heavily covered Seal Beach from 1962 into the early 2000s) and other short-lived local papers. Some of the smaller papers could be done for $250 a year, while the larger papers would cost a little over $500/year.

We will announce more information on all these projects in the upcoming months, but if you are interested in showing your support for our work, please contact us.