This is my first blog for the Museum, and I intend for this to be a message of hope against the backdrop of a period of heightened pain and anxiety in our country.
我相信我们的团队，使命以及两者都可以解决社会中最严重的问题的事实。我将尽力解释我们的团队的姿势和方法，这代表了我们的观点，即我们可以同时清楚和诚实地对社区中的缺陷诚实，并对我们的集体未来保持积极和乐观。
So, in this post, I will put our mission up against this moment in our nation’s history. If it stands up (and I believe it does), I want to show that our beloved Museum – and cultural institutions like us – can be a powerful tool to build the prosperous, peaceful, and vibrant communities to which we all aspire.
The starting point for our team is always service, empathy and love. To begin a conversation about how our Museum addresses the challenges of the moment, it is important to me to go first:
我爱并尊重我们团队中的黑人和布朗男人和女人，没有他们，我无法想象我们的团队。我对我一生中的黑人和棕色领导人感到谦卑和感激meas a leader.
在我们的社区中，我希望我们的黑人和棕色邻居，同事和朋友在纽波特新闻，汉普顿路和其他地方阅读这篇文章，以便知道水手博物馆是您的博物馆。我们致力于讲述您的故事。我们关心您，当黑人和棕色生活蓬勃发展时，我们的社区到处都更好。
开始前的最后一个想法：不可能看不到当今世界上的邪恶。问题是，我们将被那种邪恶克服，还是我们会用善良克服这种邪恶？让我们开始吧…
THE MISSION
Many readers of this blog will know that in the summer of 2016, our team at The Mariners’ Museum and Park committed to a new Mission statement:
The Mariners’ Museum and Park connects people to the world’s waters, because through the waters – through our shared maritime heritage – we are connected to one another.
我们选择了这些特殊的词来指导我们的工作是有两个主要原因：
1.博物馆宪章：我们最初的1930年宪章在公园内建立了一个博物馆和图书馆，该博物馆保存并促进了海上遗产“以促进公共福利”。最后一句话“促进公共福利” - 提醒我们，我们上班时就不会简单地“玩博物馆”。我们的宪章迫使我们的团队在世界上表现出色。
2.社会资本：Today, we interpret our charge to “promote the public welfare” as building social capital in our local, national, and global communities. Most definitions of “social capital” capture a few key elements: the degree to which individuals identify as a part of a larger community; the level of trust between people within that community; and the frequency and quality of social exchange between people within that community. A growing body of literature finds that the higher the level of social capital in a community, the more resilient that entire community is and the greater potential for economic growth that community possesses. Those are pretty good components of “public welfare,” too.
现在，您对我们引人注目的使命和背后的知识框架有了一些基线理解，我急于展示我们如何实际应用它。因此，让我们今天忍受新闻的紧迫性。几乎整个国家都惊恐地观看了一个月前一名明尼阿波利斯警察杀死乔治·弗洛伊德的视频。我们的团队以我们的使命为指导，已经开始以同理心回应历史上的这一刻，并以我们四年前学到的方法并从那以后练习过。
该方法
During one week in July 2016, police officers killed two African American men on two consecutive days, in two different states: Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Later that week, an African American veteran killed five police officers in Dallas. Nationwide protests and demonstrations followed, including demonstrations right here in Hampton Roads, VA. I remember thinking that our team had just adopted this new mission statement about how the water binds us together as a community, and here’s this moment in time when that community felt really fractured.
I was still an interim president that summer, living in Newport News during the week and returning home to my family in Charlottesville over the weekend. I called my wife that Friday afternoon and explained that I was going to stay in Newport News over the weekend to attend Ivy Baptist Church (one of the largest African American Baptist Churches in the southeast community of Newport News) on Sunday. I figured the least I could do was to be present.
I showed up without telling the senior pastor, my friend (and now a Trustee of The Mariners’ Museum and Park) Kevin Swann, that I was coming. Little did I know that Pastor Swann had invited the Newport News Chief of Police to participate in a town hall at the start of the service. When I – a bald White man – walked into the sanctuary unannounced, everyone thought I was a police officer! The ushers promptly walked me to the front of the sanctuary to sit next to the Chief.
在与酋长进行了强有力的对话之后，斯旺牧师上讲坛开始了敬拜活动。他看到我坐在前排的地方说：“在我开始之前，我只想承认海军纳斯博物馆的霍华德·霍格就在这里。It’s good to have friends in the community in times like these.” He was talking about the Museum.
服务之后，几个人感谢我在那里。不过，与一名妇女的交流不过，并帮助我意识到，我们社区中的许多人无法负担我们要进入博物馆的每人14美元的负担。我们的任务听起来很棒，但是以入学价格形式进入的障碍不包括东南社区的许多人，毫无疑问。使用权was a key problem for us to solve.
作为一个团队，我们决定采取行动。具体来说，我们决定先走 - 服务。我们将2016年8月整个月份的入场券降至每人1美元，以提醒人们，通过水，通过我们共同的海上遗产，我们是一个城市，一个地区，一个国家，一个国家，一个世界，一个世界 - 一美元。那个月，我们从画廊的八月平均5500名游客到达over 39,000 visitors，成千上万的非裔美国人是第一次参观我们的博物馆。我们的工作人员涌入画廊，与他们所在的人见面，并说出比我们展品独自讲述的更完整的历史版本。
That fundamental step – to go first, to serve first – led to several additional steps and substantial change to improveaccess在随后的几年中：
- By pursuing corporate sponsorships and private philanthropy, we were able to offer free educational enrichment programs to several Title I schools in our region. Our corporate partners provide a free student membership to every student who participates as a way to encourage their ownership of our communities’ history. This past school year, we were also able to pay for the transportation costs for thousands of students to get to the Museum and participate in those programs.
- 在每个月的第二个星期日，我们现在提早开放，以“友好时间”开放，其中包括1美元。友好的时光是一个包容性的时期，具有移动性，认知或身体挑战的客人可以在不那么拥挤的环境中体验博物馆，声音和照明降低。
- 我们开发并定期提供了描述非洲和非裔美国人海事体验的节目，目的是更加完全承认所有在塑造我们共同的海上遗产方面发挥作用的人的贡献。
该方法– NOW
现在，在2020年6月，我们的姿势和方法 - 以及最肯定的是我们的使命 - 保持完全相同。在乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）的死和其他人之前的其他人之后，我们的同理心首先向内转。我们的团队开始了关于我们自己的个人经历的开放，内部对话，这是由于世界上的不公正而引起的恐惧，愤怒和不信任。我们可以彼此看到我们希望在社区中修补的骨折的伤痕。随着过去四年来我们的习惯，我们随后转向向外，开始确定我们可以立即为社区服务的事情。我们迅速介绍了一个不一致的信息，即我们在我们采用的一方面为服务和授权的任务之间发送给非裔美国人社区，以及博物馆建立的纪念碑，是为了纪念Matthew Fontaine而建立的纪念碑。莫里在另一个。认识到这种不一致的潜在伤害，我们的董事会于6月19日投票通过了将莫里湖名称为“水手湖”的正式进程。
水手的博物馆在早期形成了我们的湖1930s by building the Lions Bridge to dam Water’s Creek. The Museum’s first trustees named the new lake in honor of Matthew Fontaine Maury and his significant contributions to oceanography that made him known as “The Pathfinder of the Seas.” Maury made those contributions as an officer in the US Navy in the early 1800s, but at the outset of the Civil War, Maury resigned his commission and joined the Confederate Navy. Before the war, he explored the idea of and advocated for establishing colonies in Brazil and Central America where Southern slave owners could relocate or expand their operations. Following the Civil War, Maury served the Emperor of Mexico as the Imperial Commissioner of Colonization. Regardless of the original trustees’ intentions in the lake’s name, preserving his name on a lake inadvertently makes an implicit value statement that we, today, honor and value all of Maury’s work and beliefs, which we do not.
为了更进一步，我们的团队正在积极计划将皮划艇和独木舟放回我们的湖泊。当我们讨论将名字更改为水手湖时，我一直在脑海中运行一个场景：我们的教育团队的成员正在领导Local 5th所有的水平人都在水上乘船。想象那5个thgrade students is an African American boy exhilarated by his experience on the water. What happens when that child asks, “Who is Lake Maury named after?” With one simple question, that young child’s meaningful and experiential access to science and education is completely flipped into – at best – a shocking and confusing emotional moment that steals a piece of the innocence of a child discovering the world around him. Matthew Fontaine Maury’s story is completely out of context for both the lake and how our visitors – not just this one child – will experience it.
So, we are changing the name to better reflect both our mission and our community. We still tell the story of Maury’s role in history within our galleries and I suspect that we will continue to tell it. Our galleries are the appropriate place to do so. But we want our Park and Lake to serve its original purpose, perhaps explained best in a 1932 letter found in the Museum’s archives:
“这个奇妙的公园可以完成的辉煌的事情之一就是改变公众的情绪，对善良，高架，适当的精神。”
We have already stepped up our efforts to reveal this nation’s hidden历史，这是并且将越来越多地成为我们本人的核心。这些努力始于我们自己机构的隐藏历史。我将这些照片包括在视觉上提醒您，狮子桥大坝的文字基础创造了水手湖，我们的博物馆建筑物的基础由熟练的非裔美国人手奠定了基础。那些同一只手竖起了博物馆建筑物，我们决心命名那些男人和女人，并正确地认识到他们在使我们心爱的博物馆成为特殊地方的角色。
我们未来的承诺
We are not perfect at this work. While we have established baseline access for many in our community, we are not yet reaching everyone. We do not yet know if we are actually building social capital in our communities, but we are at the beginning stages of working with the Center for Educational Partnerships at Old Dominion University and others to figure out how we can measure whether or not we are actually having the desired impact our mission suggests we can have.
虽然我们不是完美的，但我们完全致力于这项任务。在过去的四年中，我们的步骤和上个月的行动都旨在在社区的每个角落都唤醒，一种超越种族，种族，性别，年龄，社会经济学以及所有方式的共同海事遗产的感觉有时我们会感到彼此不同。如果我们能做到这一点，我们可能会增加一些社会资本，甚至扭转我们社区面临的最棘手问题的潮流。
Does all this sound a little too lofty? Maybe a little beyond the “scope” of a museum? Our founder, Archer Huntington, who established The Mariners’ Museum to “promote the public welfare,” provided the beginning of an answer in the early 1930s:
总体而言，我认为精神不愿意为其他博物馆所做的事情而烦恼，这是不好的，鉴于我们永远不希望这样做的事实。如果水手博物馆没有新的工作，也没有新的博物馆原则可以证明，那就是浪费时间和精力。
我们决心要善于亨廷顿对我们的指控。回到起点：我们认为，我们社区中的韧性和经济增长潜力取决于社会中的社会资本，部分原因是我们社区的共同历史的意义。为了使所有人认同和珍视我们的历史，我们的历史必须识别和重视所有人。I am proud that our team’s posture of service, empathy, and love has led to an approach for our Museum that might actually make our communities stronger.