By the time this paper hits the streets, the Island Institute will have begun its new fiscal year – our 20th for those who might be counting. Our cherished bean counters have put their eyeshades on and are tallying up exactly how we ended the year. With a staff of 30, another 12 Island Fellows and an annual budget of $2.7 million, there are a lot of beans to count and other moving pieces to account for. In most enterprises, if you reach 98 or 99 percent of your goal, you get an A for your efforts. But in our case, a shortfall of 1 or 2 percent is, as they say, “real money” and you get a failing grade for a shortfall. We are proud that in the past 19 years, we’ve never run a deficit and we have every expectation that the depth of support for the skilled work of the Institute is undiminished even in the economy’s present straitened circumstances.
We’ve been thinking a lot during this past year about how to build a more solid foundation under the Island Institute. A recession followed by two years of stock market uncertainty tends to focus the mind. We’ve been talking to our members, donors, staff, trustees and year-round island constituents and I can report there is a remarkable degree of consensus. Everyone agrees we need to figure out a strategy for living less hand-to-mouth, for being less dependent on annual fundraising marathons and more reliant on a new generation of leadership to make a transition to an organization that will outlive its founders.
To that end, the Institute advertised for a new senior management position – that of Chief Operating Officer-to tend to the complex day-to-day operations of the organization while Peter Ralston and I work at defining a long term strategy for the Institute. I am pleased to inform you all that we have found a dynamic person to lead the Institute staff. He is Bart Morrison, most recently of Washington, D.C., by way of Cooperstown, NY; Baltimore, Maryland and Rockland, Maine.
Bart Morrison first saw the Maine islands almost 20 years ago from the decks of a Hurricane Island pulling boat and he never forgot them. After five years of leading expeditions and assuming senior management roles within the Outward Bound organization, Bart was tapped to lead the Clark Foundation’s community center programs in Cooperstown. After seven years there, he left to pursue a doctorate in nonprofit management from Case Western Reserve University while also returning to Maine and serving as the first Executive Director of The Board Network in Portland that organizes training workshops for nonprofit boards and staff. From there Bart went to Washington, D.C., to run a national nonprofit organized by funders including the Ford and Kellogg Foundations that helps local communities across the U.S. create new philanthropic resources.
After 20 years as co-founder and founder of the Institute, Peter Ralston and I will begin to focus our efforts on long term development issues for the organization. Almost as a matter of pride, we have raised the funds for each successive year based on the accomplishments of the organization in the prior year. We have only a very small endowment that contributes less than one half of one percent to our operating budget.
As Bart takes over day-to-day operations, Peter and I will devote the majority of our time to strategic development, enlivened with a few new writing and photographic projects for the Institute. Through our publications we will continue to focus public attention on the fate of Maine’s islanders, fishermen, wharf rats, concerned summer residents and marine research geniuses. We are developing broader coalitions of individuals and organizations that will work to save this coast from looking like every other recreational waterfront along the East Coast of the United States – as necessary and important as recreation is to the coastal economy of Maine. We are making progress despite the rising tide caused by the insatiable appetite of our fellow Americans to buy up every pretty native place in the countryside until it is no longer pretty and the natives are pretty much gone. That’s a legacy none of us want to share … certainly not here.
The pressures on Maine’s coastal and island communities are greater than ever. How we avoid the fate of everywhere else is the subject of intense discussion among all the different constituents with whom we interact. If you have a good idea, tell us; if you see a problem that needs attention, call us; if you have a vision of what the Maine coast and islands ought to be, please share it with us. Everyone counts; we are all part of the picture. Ultimately, though, the quality of our future will be won or lost primarily by individual action and initiative at the local or micro level while simultaneously making sure that big solutions are really that.
Philip W. Conkling is president of the Island Institute.