Imagining Another Way Is the Beginning of the Beginning.
An opportunity presents its self but the Andersen Museum of American Designer Craftsmen is not yet in place to be in the running. The time for change is now!
I started doing some volunteer data research for the Green Party. There is a national Green Party data specialist who has been participating in our local group who says that Maine has the highest percentage of Greens in the USA and the second-highest number of Greens after California.
I am doing a simple task and before you know it, I came up with some interesting information unrelated to the task at hand. This concerns public education in the Town of Alna
Documenting Residency as of June 30, 2018
To Secure Private K-8 School Subsidy for the
2018-19 and Future School YearsThe 2018 vote of the RSU ended future private K-8 school choice in Alna still allows for public school choice for all residents K-12. If your child was born in Alna prior to June 30th, 2018, and has resided in Alna uninterrupted, he or she maintains the previous private school choice offered by the town.
…..Having purchased a house or signed a lease is not sufficient to establish qualifying residency. Residency means that (a) you have firmly established Alna as your bona fide primary home, and (b) are actually living here in a legal dwelling unit, to the exclusion of other residences as of June 30th. The Selectmen and RSU Superintendent will make the final determination based on a totality of the facts presented.
I don’t know the details of the thinking behind this. I am merely interested at this point in the fact there is thinking going on around what qualifies residency. I never thought I would be here in this space where I would consider that there should be any regulations over who can own property and what they can do with it but the world has radically changed in the twenty-first century and the change is hitting very close to home with former first homes transformed into second homes or Airbnb’s and realtors starting non-profit foundations to solve “affordable workforce housing” using, as their model, a place where “affordable workforce housing” means former inns converted into rooms for rent for the working classes. One can call this model, the new twenty-first-century feudalism- or to use local political speak- “the new” for short, which is spoken as if “new” means better, but it is hardly the case. All this is going on right here- My hometown is ground zero.
And in that vein, I saw a very well-known and large bread and breakfast in downtown Boothbay Harbor come on the market. Watching what happens to that property will be an indicator of where we are now. Will it be bought and continued as an affordable bed and breakfast or transformed into a high-end Airbnb by wealthy developers, or will the new non-profit, The Boothbay Region Housing Trust, snap it up with a short-term loan designed for that purpose?
In the Marthas Vinyard model, the inspiration cited by the Boothbay Region Housing Trust, the 501(3)(C) organization can obtain a short-term loan at one percent interest from a foundation, a financial instrument designed just for the purpose of snapping up property as it appears on the market. Then the BRHT can transform the former inn into “apartments”, code used in the Martha’s Vineyard model for “rooms for rent” for the selective workforces in approved state industries. The state is another funding source.
It is unlikely the inn will be transformed into “affordable visitor housing” for which rooms for rent are actually appropriate. Boothbay is in need of a non-profit foundation to help solve the problem of affordable visitor housing, since who really wants to live in an upstairs-downstairs community like this as much as the southern coast of Maine is as beautiful as it gets, for now, before the new developers have their way with us and build over the peninsula like its New York City in 1799. However, the general public should have a way to enjoy the beauty of the Maine Coast as visitors.
Could the inn be a home base for the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen? If the Museum had its 501(3)(c) in place, it could also set up a short-term loan arrangement via a foundation supporting crafts so that the museum would be able to snap up property as it appears on the market in competition with other local developers.
I do not see the inn as the right space for the central museum but it could be very useful for training residencies if Andersen Design, the private entity, established its own training center with a grant made possible as a fiscal sponsorship project of the Museum that would be set up with such specific purposes in mind in its 501(3)(C) purpose.
Such accommodations would be useful to any designer-craftsman in the region with a similar purpose as our own but Andersen Design is unique in that we have a line of hundreds of slip cast designs and another line of original glazes and decorative techniques that we developed over the course of sixty-five years. That makes our purpose and training needs scalable in a different manner than most.
When Andersen Design has a new setup functioning as a glaze and body design and research center, it will also require a small production studio since one cannot properly test glazes and bodies without testing how they work in a real production kiln which must be filled with many pieces, requiring a full production setup which makes the perfect training environment.
The idea is to train individual studios to make specific products in the line. The studios will be independently owned “means of production”.
I was not thinking about the famous political ramifications of what I was imagining when I first thought of the idea. I was working in the production studio in our basement, slipcasting the line, and thinking that the studio was too small and we needed more studios, but we also needed people who felt as devoted and inspired by the work as I did and how would we create that? Ownership, I thought, since I could not separate my own feelings about the work from the fact that it was an enterprise that we owned, I identified individual ownership of the means of production as something that encourages the character traits needed to pull off an industry like this. Marx never even entered my mind! Good Lord- this is fighting material in internet food fights where everyone not squarely on the far right is called a Marxist!
However, the Marxist ideology assumes large-scale ownership of everything. In Marxist ideology, it is the ”proletariate” who owns the means of production, an earlier version of “the workforce”, considered as a mass and not as individuals. In those days what I am envisioning actually did exist as cottage industries but they were dismissed as not having any relevance for “the new” in much the same way that the local party of “the new” has dismissed the relevance of Andersen Design to the economic development of this community. The “new” has eyes only for “large scale workforces”. My concept of small scale ownership of the means of production is a network of individually owned studios that could be located or attached to a home and fits right in with “the new” twenty-first-century remote workers revolution, which is far too future perfect thinking for the backward-looking party of the new on the Boothbay Peninsula.
The studios can be located anywhere, but in order to train people, the trainees need a place to stay while they are learning the process, just like a college has dorms, but the cost to make a viable ceramic training school is far short of fifty million dollars cost for the proposed for the centrally managed school system to be located on this peninsula. One could multiply my idea many times and still, it would fall far short of fifty million dollars to realize, and it would achieve much the same end as described by the architects of the school design but unlike the fifty million dollar school, a consortium of small scale individual entities would not be centrally managed.
If the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen had that bed and breakfast, it could be set up as rooms for visiting designer craftsmen, educators, and students to stay and also house office and gallery space, as a model for accommodations that such an interactive network would need in any community that encourages the designer-craftsmen industry. It could prioritize designer craftsmen first but allow others if there are openings after that.
But first, before there can be a Museum there must be a board, at minimum three people, who will fill the positions of President, Secretary, and Treasurer. One person can fill more than one position but I am told we need a minimum of three people to be on the board. One day it will happen and then one day some will have very interesting jobs, but where it will happen is the question, which is a point of interest for me in doing the data entry work for the Maine Greens. I get to know about every town in Maine. You can contact me if you have an interest. Please put “Museum Board” in the subject line.