In 2015, The Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums challenged and outraged the orthodox heritage community. In this episode, we catch up with the Museum Anarchist himself, Franklin Vagnone, to talk about how embracing change has helped progressive historic sites survive Covid, and how continuing to reinvent the heritage paradigm will be essential to thriving in the new normal.
In 2015, The Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums challenged and outraged the orthodox heritage community. In this episode, we catch up with the Museum Anarchist himself, Franklin Vagnone, to talk about how embracing change has helped progressive historic sites survive Covid, and how continuing to reinvent the heritage paradigm will be essential to thriving in the new normal.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:10] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Open Door where we work to create a brighter future by understanding the past. Presented by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:23] AH: COVID changed everything and everything needed to change. The pandemic has been reshaping our society in lasting ways from economic, to social, to cultural, in every community and every industry, down to our everyday human interactions. It’s forced us to refocus on issues that were calling for our attention before any of us heard the word coronavirus. Historic sites and museums which have long been leaders in promoting culture, social identity and informal education need to change too. Along with everything else, we need to find ways to rebuild for the new and improved normal.
Today’s guest has consulted, lectured and taught around the world. His is leadership in re-envisioning historic sites has challenged and inspired many, including us, at the Brown Homestead. It has also led to numerous awards, including the 2020 American Institute of Architects Advocacy Award. He’s the president of Twisted Preservation, a cultural and museum consulting firm. From 2009 to 2016, he was the director of the Historic House Trust in New York City, overseeing 23 landmark sites. Since 2016, he’s been the president and CEO of Old Salem Museum and Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
We first became aware of his work through a book he co-authored with Deborah Ryan in 2015, the same year we founded the charity to protect the Brown Homestead. The Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums was a wake-up call to heritage community with his revolutionary ideas about historic site preservation. In essence, the book called for a complete paradigm shift, moving away from the traditional approach that grew out of the 20th Century preservation renaissance towards a new model, focused on community engagement, inclusivity and re-envisioning the visitor experience. Once considered dangerous, these ideas are now central to most heritage thinking and it play a significant part in our work here at the Brown Homestead.
With that, believe it or not, condensed introduction, I like to welcome well-known historian and one of the museum world’s great creative minds, Franklin Vagnone.
[00:02:36] FV: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
[00:02:38] AH: Franklin, we couldn’t think of anyone better than you to discuss this crossroads moment with us as it relates to historic sites and house museums. You arrived at Old Salem in 2016 with a plan, you got to work, started to gain traction and then COVID hit. What went through your mind when you realized that this was serious and it wasn’t going away?
[00:02:58] FV: Because of the Twisted Preservation cultural consulting that we do, its international and we had colleagues and friends all over the world and we were conversing with them. Particularly, some in Paris at the time. We knew how serious it had home and it was only a matter of time that that was going to get to the United States. Old Salem actually closed, I want to say two weeks before the governor of North Carolina stated a lockdown. I think, what that did was allow us a kind of runway to move very quickly into taking care of things that needed to be taken care of, and not be so crisis driven that everybody else was closing at the same time. For us, I think probably us having a broader international perspective really helped the site that I’m managing right now.
[00:03:53] AH: What were the first steps you took once you realize change was necessary. Obviously, you closed the head of the mandate, but what else did you do.
[00:04:00] FV: Well, actually, it occurred a few weeks before. I insisted and mandated that every one of my senior leadership team get on Microsoft Teams and I insisted that we start having meetings online, virtually. Now, understand, this was — I had people laughing at me for insisting on this kind of effort. But what I did realize was, in a few weeks, this was going to be absolutely important. The week before we actually closed, we started having our staff meetings on teams. By the time we actually closed on that Friday, we had a special emergency meeting where we were all technologically savvy enough that all we had to do was log on. There was no lag time, there was no problems because we really had looked at it a couple weeks before.
Because of that, we very quickly transformed all of our gardens, which were educational gardens on the living history site, to producing vegetables for local food banks. We moved all of our historic bakeries over to baking just white bread for local food banks. We knew that food scarcity was going to be an issue in our region. Because we had jumped to getting things virtually, we were able to move very quickly to use the assets that we had in our historic site to actually benefit the larger community. At this point, I think that we have donated over three tons of produce and I want to say, over 18,000 loaves of bread to local families in need. More than anything, the fact that we were able to move so quickly in this direction was very meaningful. Not only to us and our board, but to the larger community.
[00:05:53] AH: That’s really wonderful. I think that’s a great example of what can be done, and preparedness is what made that possible. We were in a little different situation than you. Being a new organization, we had a smaller staff. It was easier for us to work remotely and we also had a lot of programming plan, but we weren’t depended on it for revenue. What we were able to do was repurpose some of our programming money, partner with the United Way here in Niagara and use those funds to benefit the community in the same way that you’re talking about.
When I look back, I think being a small organization benefited us because we didn’t have the staff in place that you had. We didn’t have the existing programs that we were dependent on. It was a much bigger challenge in your case.
[00:06:36] FV: Yeah. I will say that my family jokes that I’m a worst-case scenario person, and that I really do kind of collaboratively lead in that way. I want to know what the worst-case scenario is and then back away from that. The first thing I did is I asked our leadership team to put together an analysis of what the worst-case scenario was going to be, and that we were going to be closed at that time through December of last year. That was the worst-case scenario at that time. We figured out we would be looking between a $3 and a $4 million deficit given the size that we were.
What we had to do was just backup from there and start really managing using real data. So much about historic museums and cultural organizations come from emotion, that I really insisted with my team that we look at the data and make decisions based on data. We continue to do that today, but that got us through last year in a fairly stable situation and it’s getting us through this year in an additionally stable situation. Although there’s been pushed back from people wanting to open quicker. Now that the Delta variant has reared its ugly head, we’re now looking a little more clearheaded to other people, because we never opened and have to close again. We’re just gradually opening as demand and COVID precautions allow.
[00:08:08] AH: That’s a really interesting area and I’m going to ask you about that in a second, about how do you navigate this new political schism that’s growing up around coronavirus. But from what you’re saying before, what it sounds like to me as part of your preparedness came from the fact that you already developed and started to institute a more progressive approach, more progressive model and a position not only to withstand the impact of the pandemic, but also to be adaptable. As an adaptable organization, you were ready to adapt. I know you talk about that and in a lot of detail in an article you released in February in the American Alliance of Museums blog and we’re going to share that link on our website. But maybe you can summarize for us the way your new model, the model you’ve been building pre-COVID help you navigate those challenges.
[00:08:54] FV: Well, let me step back and give you a few just data points. In 2008, Old Salem Museums and Gardens and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts was running a deficit of around 1,000,006. They had a staff size of 226 employees and there were some endowments which they were drawing not industry-standard 5% but 25%. They were in real financial crisis. Now, after analysis when I got there in 2016, I realized that they just started cutting things, but they didn’t change their operations. They didn’t fundamentally rethink what it meant to be a living history site.
The work that we’ve done since 2017 up to when we closed for COVID moved us from between an $8 and $9 million operating budget to around $6 million operating budget. Our staff went from 226 to 137. We really were rightsizing our programs. When I came in 2017, 70% of our programs were losing money. By the time COVID came, 100% of our programs were making money and we had started to move those endowment draws from 25% to next year actually. We will be at industry-standard of 5%. As you can tell, all of these things in the four years prior to COVID brought us to a point where we were really solidly healthy, and that we could make these pivots and these changes easily and without crisis.
I would guess that if COVID happened in 2017, it would have been an extraordinarily difficult and crisis driven situation for the organization. But as it was, we had already formed a collaborative leadership team. We had already worked on expanding our community engagement. For us to kind of go into making produce and baking bread was just really a part of the new kind of ethical equity ideas that we had established in 2017. You’re right, that article actually wrote two articles with my leadership team. One about the transformation up to COVID and one about the COVID pivots, both of those outlined in great detail. Probably more than you or any of your listeners would care to hear.
We did feel like this radical transparency was necessary, because most history sites and culturals are afraid to do this. If we could provide some kind of safe place to talk about it, then it would be useful.
[00:11:54] AH: They are dense articles, but they’re must-reads. I really admire the transparency that you showed in those, I think it’s important. It’s important to remember that, what you said, a lot of organizations haven’t been changing. The need to change existed before the pandemic, before COVID.
[00:12:10] FV: Absolutely.
[00:12:11] AH: There were many sites that understood the need to change. But as you said, were afraid to change. They were limiting themselves to making incremental changes to failing systems, which wasn’t enough. Something else you’ve talked about is the fact that the pandemic offers historic sites the opportunity to hit pause and do that full reboot that’s needed.
[00:12:30] FV: That’s exactly right. Some are doing that. I would say there are a lot that are not. I would probably — I’m not judging. Of course, I’m not judging. I want everybody to be successful. That’s my personal goal. But I do think that there are systems in place, both issues of equity and parity, staff relations, unlimited interpretation, the size of the organizations are too large, the list goes on and on. A lot of those were discussed in the Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums. Let’s not forget Andrew that when I first started lecturing about Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums, I had people get up and leave my lectures, calling me an idiot, a menace. I think I was called the seven-headed dragon of the apocalypse for history. These were serious critiques to the point where I really was wondering, are these ideas really that difficult and bad for history?
As you stated, here we are after, or really let’s just say in the middle of a COVID pandemic. The ideas about community engagement we mentioned Black Lives Matter, equity initiatives, expanding narratives beyond the typical white male narrative, rightsizing organizations, making sure that your operations fit the amount of fundraising that you could do. All of those things were in that book and they just slapped the face of the existing history and cultural sites, in a way that was scary too many of them.
[00:14:12] AH: The book landed pretty hard. We could do a really interesting podcast episode, I think just on the experience you had, the reaction, because it’s really fascinating in some ways. But just for people who aren’t familiar with that book, maybe you can give us just an overview of the premise of the book and what led you to write it.
[00:14:30] FV: Sure. At the time, I was running as you said the Historic House Trust for the City of New York, 23 historic landmarked sites. The mayor was my boss, the park’s commissioner of New York City was my boss. I had friends and board organizations at the 23 sites. Very complex organization. And here I was trying to run these various sites and being very frustrated by my inability to move the sites into directions that quite frankly, by today’s standards are fairly common. That is talking about the narrative of the enslaved, expanding the narratives, all of that stuff. The book really came out of a frustration that I felt like I was not doing my job well and that for some reason, I thought that I was doing best practice for museums and culturals and it didn’t seem to be making a difference.
The Anarchist's Guide was really this attempt to invert traditional best practice, which put architecture and collections at the top of the pyramid. What I felt, visitors and staff at the bottom of the pyramid, and the money, and the resources, and the empathy and the caring never got to the bottom of the pyramid. It always stayed at the top. Anarchist’s Guide was about inverting the pyramid, making the visitors and the staff primary. Dealing with them first and then thinking of the buildings and collections as ancillary, and advisory to that visitor experience. That’s really what that entire book is about. The reason why as you say it hit hard, is because it did completely invert what traditional best practice was.
[00:16:25] AH: The reaction you got stemmed out of that, but the flipside of that reaction is, that it inspired a lot of people, including myself. I’ve told the story enough times that I should probably retire at it, because it’s a foundational story for our organization. But I’ll tell you one more time. When Jennifer and I established a charity to purchase the Brown Homestead, we were new to the world of heritage. In our first episode, a very brief history of the Brown Homestead. We refer to it as Amateur Hour. We were learning as we went. When you want to learn to do something, you consult the people who were doing it.
We spoke with many people, people you’re talking about who told us how things were done, but it wasn’t adding up to us. The business model didn’t seem to make any sense to us as outsiders. But you think these are the people who are doing it, they know what they’re talking about. We just listen more; we’ll crack the code. Then when I read your book, I had this moment of great relief when I thought, maybe I’m not crazy.
[00:17:25] FV: Or maybe we both are as you like to say.
[00:17:29] AH: You know, at the time, that was a reasonable theory, but not anymore, I don’t think. Because your work since then shows that and the changes you started to talk about show that. The book was not just a philosophical jab at the establishment, it was a blueprint for a new way of doing things. You were actually doing the things you talked about in New York and in your consulting work around the world.
[00:17:53] FV: I would say that, that I think when the book first came out, again, not thinking in the past history, but for the future. When the book first came out, I think a lot of people thought they were just unproven concepts and that there was no street cred to them. But in fact, I think that just came from Deb and I not writing about our experiences of trying these things. I think since that time, hopefully, it’s been very clear. Old Salem is an example of it, that these things can increase attendance, increase fundraising, increase community engagement, transform boards, transform staffing situations, increase equity imparity. These things are not kind of theoretical and academic. These things are very real concepts that push these organizations in the future.
As you know, there are people who are even farther beyond, way farther beyond what Anarchist’s Guide was suggesting at this point in terms of equity and inclusion. All of those things are absolutely important and necessary. I think Anarchist’s Guide, I’m very happy to say was just a very small piece in that that kind of stepping forward.
[00:19:15] AH: Yeah, piece of that movement that was overdue and was beginning, and for I think a lot of people, was maybe a rallying point as well. One of the interesting things to me about, about the timing of the book was it was not long after that, that you ended up at Old Salem. This was back when the hypothesis that you were crazy was still a viable one. New York is supposed to be a little bit crazy, but how does it come about that the board of a traditional historic site in a conservative state hires the infamous museum anarchist to run the show? Give us some background on that.
[00:19:51] FV: Sure. Well, I already have you the data points about in 2008 that they were in real solid economic troubles. They had several presidents that were moving it very strongly in a very fiscally responsible directions, but what they needed was somebody in the museum field that really knew how to change the hard stuff, that next layer. In fact, they contacted me, my husband and I were in Australia, we were consulting for the National Trust in Australia. My first interview with Old Salem was at 3:34 in the morning in Australia. At the time, I said, “I’m an out queer professional living in New York City, very liberal, progressive. This doesn’t seem to be a good match.” I think that the board and the Search Committee had for so long try to fix it themselves that they realize that having some outside perspective was necessary.
They had read the Anarchist’s Guide book and I told them I was too radical. I think they felt like that radical perspective was exactly what they needed. The very things you list about me, I do believe that the history site had gotten to a point where they knew they needed to do something radical and that the book actually presented that radical. I would say that if Old Salem and MESDA were not at the financial position that they were when they were interviewing me, they probably wouldn’t have jumped at such a radical option. I mean, that is unfortunate right, that organizations tend to inertia and status quo, unless they’re forced otherwise. Old Salem was forced otherwise, even though they wanted it, they had been placed in a position that made it absolutely imperative that there is a new radical way of thinking.
[00:21:50] AH: Maybe that’s one thing we can get out there today, is that idea that don’t wait until you hit rock bottom. Change is coming, embrace it today. Now, I have to assume, knowing you that when you went there, you were given a mandate for change. You got the support that you needed. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been there.
[00:22:06] FV: That’s exactly right. I actually asked the previous president, the one who was leaving to list the top five things that she wished she were able to do. I typed those out and put them in my office. Every year, I write a list of goals and I will say that going into my fifth year, I have established substantively all of the top five things that she wished she were able to do. I really see myself as a continuation of the board’s, previous president’s move towards rightsizing the organization. I’m certainly not somebody who just jumped in and radicalized everything they were doing. I am a collaborator in decades long consistent work, but I did bring probably a really concentrated cultural museum skillset, which was that that piece they needed to bring us to the 5% endowment drawl to rightsizing the staff, and the physical, all of that.
[00:23:12] AH: And they deserve credit for even under duress for making such a bold move. We need more bold moves in heritage these days. Now, you referenced earlier, you said, this is often a business of emotion, history and historic sites. Here we are, you and I talking about money, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable. But ultimately, sustainability is not just a buzzword. It means keeping the lights on, right? Now, admittedly, it has to be purpose driven. I believe that there’s an onus on historic sites to be community building organizations. That if the story of our site is the story of our community isn’t the most fitting legacy to continue to participate in its development. You’ve already shown that you do that through your COVID-19 initiatives. I think that’s probably a position that resonates with you as well. Yes?
[00:24:04] FV: Yeah. Let me restate something you just said and that was one of our mail goals is to keep the lights on. Remember, I’m inverting traditional best practice. My main goal is to get salaries paid and families fed, because history organizations and culturals and museums are essentially the people that run them. The buildings and collections are secondary to the people. When I fund raise, I’m not fundraising to restore a building. I’m fundraising to pay the salaries and benefits of the people that will facilitate for instance that renovation or facilitate the paying of the electric bill. My goal is to humanize the qualities of history and cultural sites that we value. I know you do value people before the buildings themselves.
For me, the staff and the individuals are the reason why I do everything that I’m doing. Even during COVID and unfortunately, I’m the first one to say how difficult it was that we did have to lay off people at Old Salem, but we also maintained a core leadership group of 21 people that represented all departments, all salary scales. This was not just top-level executives, it’s the exact opposite. Even though that laying off people was difficult, we still worked toward maintaining the core of what Old Salem is, which is the individuals running the place. That’s where I live in my management of these sites. It’s not about making them pretty and nostalgic. That is a result of all of the hard work of the people who run the sites.
[00:26:17] AH: That’s a critical perspective. It’s important both in terms of today, but also in terms of how we look at history. I’ve had that conversation with someone recently and I got a bit of a dirty look for a comment I made. I said, really, it’s about the people. I said, this house is beautiful, Georgian stone house of ours. Without the people who lived here, it’s just a pile of rocks. That didn’t go over too well, but I think that’s true. Talking about people, at least it’s something that you posted on social media not too long ago. You shared original years ago and you shared it again, but I found it very profound and uplifting. What you wrote was, “You know we’re on the right track when on social media and African-American millennial states Old Salem is my jam.” Do you remember that?
[00:27:02] FV: Yeah, I do. I do. It’s amazing when you come to a site that really wasn’t telling the larger narratives of the marginalized, the enslaved in a way that was publicly consumable. When you get that as a response, you’re hitting something that’s really close to the center. That makes me so happy to read that.
[00:27:32] AH: It made me feel great just to see it. What I love about it is, it’s a short little clip, but it speaks to so many important points at the same time. In the sense, with this episode, we’re going to be unpacking that statement and everything that goes into that statement. Historic sites are community spaces, it’s a space for everybody. Let’s start with the youth card, that includes engaging young people. You and I have both heard that tired complaint. Young people don’t care about history. But that’s not true, is it?
[00:28:04] FV: No, not all. Not at all. They may not care about the kind of history that is communicated in the traditional sense even with our generation and before, but they love history. So no, I don’t buy that at all. What they do insist upon is a history that tells a much more broad story and puts people first. There’s something I talk about in my presentations and that is that, generations, millennials and Gen Z and forward, the idea of labeling something is not a positive one for them. They actually want multiple meanings at the same time. We’re coming out of a generation that’s all about the period of interpretation. The specific building date. We’re coming out of a period where best practice was as finite as possible. Well now, we’re with generations that want the exact opposite. They want choices. They want variation.
That’s where history can live. That’s really what history is, it’s just that we through best practice, have narrowed it down because we’ve been told that our visitors can’t manage multiple narratives at one time, or even conflicting narratives at one time. The Anarchist’s Guide and we have proven that to be completely false. In fact, visitors appreciate conflicting narratives. It makes them think more deeply about history.
[00:29:51] AH: It’s not just the young people. That one is going up the ladder. I think there’s a shift in how people are looking at it. It starts as you said earlier about getting away from that history being about the dead, rich, white guys. But one of the challenges that comes with that, is even if you start to say, “Okay. Now, we’re going to tell a broader story. We’re going to tell the whole story.” How do you engage the communities that have traditionally been left out of that discussion? There’s inherently going to be some resistance and skepticism.
[00:30:16] FV: Yeah. Well, there are two sides to it, right? The phrase right now, which is very strong and very true: “Don’t talk about us without us.” That’s whether it’s the queer community, or the black community or Latinx community. The list goes on and on. Then there’s the other side, which is the more dominant culture traditional narratives, which is, I’m fine to hear about them but don’t avoid talking about the traditional narratives of dominant culture. It is a juggling act, because – in fact, our goal is to show how dovetailed and tethered all of these narratives are to one another. But we have through our professional practice untethered, pulled them apart, isolated all of these narratives in a way that oddly enough, makes it hard to put them right back where they were originally when we started to look at history.
We’re in a time of mending right now, of reunifying things that were originally fully unified. I mean, for instance, our Hidden Town Project in Old Salem, it’s to study the history of the enslaved in the town of Salem. We found that there were roughly around 140 enslaved individuals right before the Civil War, with around 40 distinct slave dwellings in the town of Salem. Now, when I got here, not a single slave dwelling existed, not a single slave dwelling has been reconstructed and very, very few enslaved individuals’ biographies and names were talked about. We had disassociated that narrative from the site. Our goal is to put back, and reassociate, and retether those narratives. That’s not an easy thing to do and to do it in an empathetic way. It’s difficult on both sides.
[00:32:24] AH: If you do it well, it’s going to hurt. These are hard topics to talk about. I think you’re right on the money, is number one, you want to invite the community in and say in a way, “We’re a platform for you. This is your story. We’re not going to tell it for you,” but also provide that support that you’re talking about. Hidden Town Project is a really magnificent example of this. It’s such a huge and important topic. I think the social media post we talked about earlier indicates there’s some traction there.
[00:32:56] FV: Yeah. I think that for us, I mean, just me personally, I’m older, white, queer individual. My lived experience fits within that world, so I have to be very conscious of managing projects that are talking about constituents that I am outside of. It’s very important that we do our research in our history and pull in – for instance, we’ve got a Hidden Town Advisory Committee, and a Moravian Advisory Committee and all these things to help us translate and interpret these stories beyond just what I as an individual think should be told. In many ways, I need to sit silent and be told how these stories need to be interpreted.
[00:33:46] AH: Absolutely. When you say committee, it brings to mind something, which is that, we can’t pretend that there’s one perspective in these communities. You may take a certain issue when you want to represent that issue in a sensitive, meaningful way. But you’re going to find – you bring in five people from that community, you’re going to have five different opinions as to what’s the right way to do, what’s the sensitive way to do it. That’s one of the challenges you have to navigate.
[00:34:10] FV: One of the comments that we had in the last four and a half years from one of the interpreters from a visitor. Was that as we started to put up Hidden Town text panels talking about the newly researched history of the enslaved and the biographies of individuals, we had a – it was a white visitor, couple and they said, “So you’re woke now. Old Salem’s telling the woke history and turning into a Black Lives Matter site.” The interpreter who is a white male, but majored in history of this period and of this narrative spoke with them considerably in depth about what we were doing. It provided them a platform to have the conversation with someone who had already made up their mind. In that way, just having that conversation was important. I have no idea whether they left changing their minds, but I do feel comfortable that they felt like it was a safe enough place that they could convey their views and allow the interpreter to do their job, which is to tell real history. That was an important story I’ve heard.
[00:35:23] AH: That is important and it goes back to something that you and I talked about years ago when we talked about redefining safe spaces, making them places where people could come with different opinions and be open to each other. Part of why I think that’s such a great story, why it resonates with me is, we’re reaching a point where we can’t have these conversations anymore. Maybe you don’t change people’s mind, but people with different opinions being able to speak to each other civilly, and understand and hear each other. Whether they part in agreement or not is something that is sorely lacking today.
[00:35:54] FV: Yeah. We’ll just tie it to COVID right now. Because as we gradually reopen, we instituted a mask mandate for all inside of the venues that are open and our venues are so small because they’re houses, historic houses, that it’s only a few of them. But we have had a bit of – small bit of pushback with the mask mandates and we we’ve done something the entire time of the pandemic called history nerd alerts. Those are going into our history and talking about things that are on the front page of the paper today. The Moravians were actually some of the first to try inoculations for smallpox. They actually write in their journals about trying to put leaves and masks in front of their face. They quarantined people who had known illness in their houses and put red flags up on their houses.
Our response to the current front page of the paper and anti-mask, anti-vaccination has been really just to tell our historic facts and let them decide if that is helpful in any way. That’s really been our way to address what some would say would be a negativity about current affairs, really turning it on its end and using it as a way to explain the historic narrative.
[00:37:29] AH: That’s the beautiful thing about history. It reminds us sometimes that there’s nothing new under the sun when we’re facing these challenges in life. We can look back and find examples where it worked out well and examples where it didn’t work out well. If we’re wise, we’ll heed those.
[00:37:31] FV: It’s interesting. One of the stories in doing our history nerd alerts that we write about is, that the town of Salem wanted to inoculate against smallpox and the villages around Salem threatened to come and burn the village of Salem down, because they didn’t believe in inoculations. It’s really interesting this positive or negative about vaccinations and inoculations occurred even back then.
[00:37:58] AH: It’s fascinating. Now, we’re talking about all this mission driven stuff, but let’s go back to where we started. Reshaping the organization and visitor experience around economic sustainability, because those two things go together. Maybe you can say something about how doing good leads to doing well.
[00:38:18] FV: Yeah. Without question, in the time that I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with other people leading organizations, there have been private foundations and individual contributors who have stepped forward to donate money where they wouldn’t have before for new programs, the Hidden Town Program for instance. We have both private foundations and individuals funding Old Salem’s move towards the production of vegetables and bread for food banks. Doing good can have positive financial implications. If you do good in ways that are mission driven, then contributions to support doing good actually become budget relieving. Because how do we grow vegetables, we were able to bring back our entire horticulture team and pay their salaries and benefits so that they can produce vegetables. We were able to bring back our bakery team because we were doing the community engagement of cooking bread and we got contributions to support that.
Doing good can be budget relieving. As long as you really think about it in terms of mission-driven work, see, it’s a problem because I think a lot of history sites and culturals are used to raising money for projects and it’s called scope creep. You do something that somebody wants to fund. Well, we’ve done the exact opposite and we’ve totally reevaluated development. We want unrestricted money, multi-year grants, funding budget relieving efforts that we do any way with our new initiatives. In that way, there is no scope creep because the money that’s coming in is supporting really valuable mission-driven, community-built efforts in ways that pay salaries, and benefits, all of that. We all win. The community and the organization.
[00:40:43] AH: I’m a huge believer in that and it’s something that I’ve preached often. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is take a look at your bank account balance and say, “What can we afford to do?” You got to forget that. You got to say, “What do we need to do?” and then we’ll figure out how to fund it. Vision has to drive money. Money can’t drive vision or you’re dead in the water.
[00:41:02] FV: Yeah, because that is the scope creep, that somebody has money and they want to do – There have been moments where we have turned down a good bit of money, because what they wanted us to do was outside of our mission really and outside of our budget relieving, general operations support needed, it would have – that’s why 70% of our programming when I got here was losing money, because we just kept going where the money went.
[00:41:32] AH: Mm-hmm. Important, important, important point for sure. Now, looking forward, I’m glad you said it earlier, so I didn’t have to be the one to say it. But some of those radical ideas from the Anarchist’s Guide are practically mainstream today. That’s wonderful. But my theoretical question for you is, if you were writing the book again today, what would you put in there that would be different?
[00:41:57] FV: That’s a really good question. I think I might have even shared the story with you that I was teaching, I think it was UVA and they wanted me briefly to talk about Anarchist’s Guide and I did. One of the students who I’m guessing was a lower 20 something and she just kind of spoke up and said, “I don’t see what the big deal about this is. I just kind of smiled and I thought, “Isn’t this wonderful.” I’m such an old man now that what was considered radical enough to have people call me an idiot and a menace now just seems like, “Duh? What’s the big deal?”
Deb and I have been approached to add to the book, to rewrite the book in a way. I felt like I didn’t want to do that, that it was a really historic – it was a historically significant moment that the book had. If I were to add to the book, I probably would use examples that were more pertinent to the front page of the newspaper today. At the time, the examples that we used were art based, yarn bombing, and mystery rooms and things like that that really kept it at a kind of aesthetic and programmatic level. I would go in – even though we were thinking at a much deeper level, I would go in and tie it much more directly to the front page of the paper, because that is essentially what we were talking about, but we wanted to get there in a way that didn’t seem too adversarial at the time. I probably would light gloved with the example.
[00:43:44] AH: What you’re saying is that was the light gloved approach that you took back then when they brought the pitch [inaudible 00:43:49].
[00:43:49] FV: Which is why I was surprised that people were so upset.
[00:43:50] AH: Well, you know, I think when you have vision, it feels like common sense and we can all get locked in to seeing things a certain way. That’s why it’s great to have some of these young people around who are willing to stand up and say, “Well, of course old man, this is obvious.” It helps keep us in that perspective. That’s something you said to me once not long ago, that you valued that, you valued having the young team members around you to keep you informed and keep you sharp.
[00:44:17] FV: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know where I read this, so I apologize that I can’t cite it. But someone said that when you reach a certain age, it’s important not that you mentor younger people, but that you allow the younger people to mentor you. I very consciously have to restate that to myself, because I am constantly learning incredibly valuable lessons from 28, 25, 24-year-olds that really bring home where my mind should be. It is something that I have to keep reminding myself that I need to listen. I need to listen.
[00:45:01] AH: It’s important. I agree 100% and we have a great team that way too. We’ve got some really sharp, young people who definitely keep us on our toes and make sure we hire the personalities who will let you know when you’re not listening. That’s good.
[00:45:14] FV: That’s right.
[00:45:16] AH: Keeping the eye on the front page. That’s something that is important. State of heritage communities today, what are some of the additional areas we need to make progress? Let’s assume everyone buys in to what we’re talking about, what’s the next stage? What do we need to focus on?
[00:45:32] FV: If you’re asking me to kind of be critical about the situation, I think a lot of sites have moved in the direction to address issues that have in their minds popped up in the last year. Although, we all know these have been around forever. Black Lives Matter, and equity and all of that. There’s a part of me that is a bit frustrated, because I’m concerned that the sites that are showing their interest in these front-page issues, the inertia of status quo will take over eventually after the pandemic and make them go back to exactly the way it was before. For me, I’m really conscious of substantively transforming policy and organizational structure such that that that inertia cannot pull you back. Because water is going to go into the crack in the lowest point that it can, no matter what. We have to raise the lowest point.
If I were to be critical, I would say – now, I’ll include my organization as one of them. We have to constantly be aware that we need to fill the cracks, raise the lowest point because status quo is going to bring it back to that point. We’re at a moment where we can make real change. I say just make that change in a way that we can’t go backward after that change been made. It’s really important, that’s right. That’s why I keep saying over and over again, policy-driven change, build it in – when I got here, the CEO position to the lowest paid was seven to one. No one’s done this study in nonprofits. We’re now from four to one. My salary to the lowest paid. I not only brought my salary down. We have greatly increased the lowest paid.
This kind of ratio should probably be built into policy of the equity initiative at Old Salem, so that the next president understands that it is an important thing to lose. These things have a way of just being eroded away and status quo will take us right back to inequity, non-parity, everything that you and I know that we’ve been working against.
[00:48:13] AH: And you touched on something that’s close to my heart as well, because one of the mistakes, I see a lot of nonprofits make and this is outside of even our little subset of it is, money is hard. Money is challenging and people are operating on shoestring budgets and it’s the staff that suffers for that. People who work in the nonprofit sector are underpaid. If our mandate above and beyond anything is to do good within society, shouldn’t we be paying people a living wage? I mean, if we’re not going to do it, who is?
[00:48:45] FV: Yeah. We love to have programs that talk about equity in larger community issues. But when I got here, we were paying 725 minimum wage. To people with two history degrees. I had no idea when I was hired here that that was the case. I’m not blaming the previous administrations. I just think there were such financial conditions that didn’t allow them to move the equity initiative. That’s one of the reasons why you right size the organization, not so that you can pay the electric bill necessarily. But as I said before, so you can pay a living wage for the people who will be processing the accounting to pay the electric bill, those sorts of things. That’s why you right size an organization and I think we’ve gone through the ’80s and ’90s, which were all about getting bigger. If you create it, people will come.
I am a firm believer that you form the organization in a way that is comfortable, and is manageable and you grow as demand increases. Fundraising dictates, not the other way around.
[00:50:02] AH: Absolutely, that’s key. You have to be able to pay your electric bill, but the person that walks in the morning and flicks the switch has to be able to pay their electric bill too or you don’t have anything.
[00:50:14] FV: That’s right.
[00:50:16] AH: I want to touch on something else that I know is important to you, but doesn’t quite fit in any of the categories that we’ve talked about today. One of the biggest issues facing our community and many others is affordable housing. One of the occasional arguments that’s made against preservation is the idea that heritage buildings somehow contribute to gentrification. But it seems to me, there’s a great benefit or potential benefit to repurposing existing structures, including heritage properties as affordable housing. I think it’s an opportunity we’re missing. Do you think I’m right on that?
[00:50:50] FV: It’s a complicated discussion. You can add the link that I wrote probably in June of last year about racism, systemic bias and preservation. It’s a complicated layering situation. Historic districts can be wonderful. They can increase property values. They can maintain pride of place, but they also can be economically exclusionary. They can maintain a dominant culture aesthetic. We know that historic districts generally want single-family residence. There’s a long list of how preservation and historic resources commissions codes and decisions are exclusionary. There is no solid answer to what you just said. I absolutely believe.
I think the term now at least in Winston-Salem is worker place housing, which are people like us who make $60,000, something in the middle, which is kind of where worker’s salaries come in can live, but you’ll always see that in historic districts, houses that may be in 1990 sold for $14,000, or maybe a million two now. It’s a complicated thing. In a lot of historic districts, modern zoning didn’t exist at that time. You’ll see there are quadruplexes on corners that look like single-family residences. There were just much more nuanced ways to overlap different economic conditions in individuals. That’s what’s needed with historic codes and regulations, is someone needs to go in and make that point that it’s not just about the color of the windows or was that stair there originally. There’s a lot more about preservation, about preserving the economic viability of a city that matters more than the color of the windowsill or the shutter, something like that. It’s a fairly complex amalgam of preservation issues from my perspective.
[00:53:17] AH: It is. You’re right, and I don’t want to oversimplify it, but I think part of the answer comes too in expanding the perspective. The same way we talked about earlier with programming and other things, you’re talking about heritage conservation districts. They pop up and have popped up because of valuing a certain historical perspective. We value the factory owner and we preserve his house, but we don’t preserve the working-class streets, which have their own beauty, and importance and tell the story of the city more so even than the house that belong to the factory owner.
[00:53:56] FV: I think we are finding more and more historic districts of less-wealthy areas are popping up or areas that are districts which were predominantly black, Latinx. Those sorts of districts are really valuable for the narrative they tell, but part of the issue is that people are saying that when you place the historic covenants on buildings and districts that it is a form of gentrification. The very reason why you’re doing it pushes out the people that are part of the narrative. It takes a deeply thoughtful and there are people that are doing that. I think the historic Macon has been doing that for decades. I think historic Seattle is doing something similar. I think they’re all throughout really the world that are dealing with how to in a more nuanced way keep preservation of place, without pushing out people. But it’s a difficult economic situation.
[00:55:01] AH: It absolutely is. There you go. There’s part of the future of heritage to start to delve into that and figure that one out. We’re going to close here with a hard question that I’ve been holding back from here. Are you ready for this one?
[00:55:18] FV: Go ahead.
[00:55:20] AH: In addition to everything we’ve talked about today, you’re also a visual artist. Your work is both wonderfully unique and compelling to anyone who loves old things. I was hoping that you could say a little bit about your work and the inspiration for your work, and also, let people know where they can see it.
[00:55:35] FV: Well, thanks for mentioning it. I mean, I’ve always considered myself a sculptor. It’s really just recently that my public history work and my professional artistic work has joined forces. I have for most of my life collected artifacts, and things, and pieces from restoration site. I’m also a trained architect. I would just collect pieces and fragments of things, and I started to put them together. It really started to have some meaning for me when these things were put together in ways that many people said felt cobbled together. I really felt like I was building people, I was building individuals with flaws and problems just like all of us.
Public history to me was about the kind of cobbling together and re-mending these disparate parts. My sculpture is all about this overlap of these fragmentary parts of history recombined in ways that can tell new stories. Yeah, I do have a website, and you can post to that link as well. Our work is about the process of remaking our history and telling a wider narrative.
[00:57:02] AH: Yeah, it’s really a fantastic stuff. I encourage everyone to check it out. We’ll definitely post that link as well. I wanted to thank you so much for joining us today, Frank. It’s always great talking to you. We always have a lot of fun.
[00:57:16] FV: Yeah, thank you for the invitation. As always, love chatting with you.
[00:57:20] AH: You’re very welcome. I also want to throw a little shout out to my nephew, Josh, who is my youthful advisor in all things podcasts, who reminds me that call to action, you need a call to action and we reach that point. This one is going to be a little different, so let me know what you think, Josh.
During the recent federal election campaign here in Canada, there was a lot of talk in the heritage community about what each party might do if they’re elected. It’s a reasonable topic. But if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this discussion today, it is that there’s already a blueprint for moving forward and we’ve touched on it today. Let’s call it Anarchy 2.0. We don’t need to wait on government policy or money. By all means, advocate for change. By all means, pursue the government funding that’s available. But first and foremost, roll up your sleeves and get to work. If you care about heritage or you realize the progress and preservation are not alternatives to each other, but partners in building a better future, then get involved. You don’t have to run a big historic site like Old Salem or even a small one like the Brown Homestead to make a difference. You can visit or volunteer. You can donate or advocate. But whatever you do, get involved. This may be a time of hardship, but it’s also a time of opportunity and we’re all responsible for building the new normal for making tomorrow a little bit better than today. How did I do with that one, Frank?
[00:58:45] FV: All change is local.
[00:58:48] AH: All change is local.
[00:58:49] FV: All change is local and change can happen in your everyday work at a history site or cultural organization. All change is local and it lives within each of us.
[00:59:01] AH: Well said. Stay safe my friend and keep doing what you’re doing.
[00:59:04] FV: Thank you. Bye-bye.
[00:59:06] AH: Bye.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:59:08] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Our Halloween episode is coming soon. Dr. Adam Montgomery joins us to talk about death, dying and cemeteries. Subscribe today so you won’t miss it. To learn more or to share your thoughts and show ideas, visit us at thebrownhomestead.ca on social media. Or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
[END]