NORTHAMPTON — After several years of financial uncertainty, Historic Northampton has balanced its budget and tapped two new co-executive directors, who hope to breathe life into the 111-year-old organization housed on Bridge Street.
Laurie Sanders, a naturalist, and Elizabeth Sharpe, a historian, will begin their new roles May 1, and are approaching the job with complementary perspectives. As they explain it, one is enamored with all things living, the other fascinated by the dead.
In rethinking the organization’s presence in Northampton, the two will focus on “intersections between the natural world and human history,” Sanders said, such as how this area’s original stream patterns mapped later street layouts and the ways in which past vegetation contrasts with the modern realities of climate change.
Sanders, of Westhampton, formerly hosted the weekly series “Field Notes,” about natural history on radio station WFCR, and last fall gave a six-part lecture series on Northampton’s ecology to help Historic Northampton garner donations and new members.
Sharpe, of Amherst, formerly served as director of education at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and is the author of “In the Shadow of the Dam: The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874.”
The women have worked together in the past — Sanders produced a radio piece on Sharpe’s Mill River research — and said they are looking forward to collaborating again.
“Two heads are better than one,” Sanders quipped.
Sharpe and Sanders will work part-time and make approximately $15,000 a year, board vice president Stan Sherer said. They succeed the organization’s board treasurer Nancy Rexford, who has volunteered as acting executive director for over a year.
It’s due to Rexford’s hard, unpaid labor, Sherer said, that Historic Northampton is in the stable financial position it’s in now — crediting her with a “heroic rescuing of the museum.”
Board president Kiki Smith concurred, saying that Rexford’s passion sustained the rest of the board.
The organization ended fiscal year 2015 with a balanced budget. With the exception of two years in the mid-1990s, this is the first time the organization has done so since 1988, according to information provided by Sherer. Its direct operating funds of about $115,000 consist primarily of membership dues and contributions.
Through Rexford’s efforts, Historic Northampton gained 500 new members and contribution income grew from $5,000 to $44,000 in a year. Among the organization’s fundraising efforts was a membership challenge grant, in which it solicited donations to match an anonymous $25,000 gift.
The organization also acquired more than $300,000 in Community Preservation Act grant money, which will fund repairs to its Parsons, Shepherd and Damon houses. Heating and insulating upgrades have in turn reduced energy costs.
“We are very careful about what we take on, what kind of expenses, but things have really been stabilized,” Sherer said.
Now, Smith said, “We have to try to pull ourselves out of just-survival mode to long-term planning.”
And first on the new co-executive directors’ agenda is a strategic plan. This will involve long-range financial planning, including developing new revenue streams and building an endowment.
This is something they plan to do with community input, Sharpe said, noting that it’s “not something were going to make up for ourselves.”
Sherer, who joined the board five years ago, said he is looking forward to the co-executive directors’ creative thinking.
“It always seemed to me that Historic Northampton was a semi-invisible institution in Northampton,” Sherer said, noting that many people he met were not aware of the organization or had yet to visit it, and his objective was to “bring the place alive” and draw new people in.
“I wanted the place to become both an intellectual and artistic center where history and the present become connected and made important,” he said.
Recent lecture series have done well at attracting new audiences, Sherer added.
This emphasis on outreach resonates with Sanders and Sharpe. To them, Historic Northampton is much more than just a museum or dusty research center.
For many years, Sanders said, the organization had an academic and scholarly focus. But recently it has focused more on broadening its reach to other areas of the community, an effort the two new directors hope to continue.
“It will be an evolution,” Sanders said. “But I think in the last year and a half the organization has really pulled a lot of pieces together and is now on a different trajectory.”
Northampton’s history, they said, extends beyond the city proper, to the Hilltowns and other outposts along the Connecticut River, as well as south through slavery. In thinking of areas of focus, the two women plan to look not only at the city’s roots but also at its abolitionist history, the state hospital, the work of local pacifist Frances Crowe and the rainbow crosswalk downtown, among other things.
They envision a wide range of programs, including hosting old-fashioned games in the yard and wine-and-cheese functions with local agricultural products.
Through the years, Smith said, board members have realized that however exciting particular exhibits may seem to them, the projects can at times cost a lot and reach few people, meaning focusing more on events might make sense.
Smith said she is excited by the different skills the two directors bring to the table, noting Sanders’ background in fundraising and natural history knowledge, as well as Sharpe’s “awareness of trends and vibrancy in collections.” A tour through Northampton led by the two of them, Smith proposed, could be a fascinating way to look at both the city’s natural and human past.
Sharpe is particularly excited about the potential of refurbishing the Parsons House, built in 1719. “What went past its front door?” Sharpe asked, describing a potential exhibit that explores Northampton through the decades from that vantage point.
“Historic Northampton isn’t just a bunch of buildings on Bridge Street,” Sharpe said. “It’s the whole town, it’s the whole city.”
Stephanie McFeeters can be reached at smcfeeters@gazettenet.com.