by Brigid Hogan
As an off-coast tourist destination, the population of Nantucket swells and dwindles with the seasons. In winter, about 13,000 Nantucket natives reign on the island. Come summertime, the population bursts upward to 50,000 as a result of tourist traffic. Amy Durbin, the Manager of Education at the Nantucket Historical Association, talks about the unique struggles of this human migration pattern. “It’s a difficult balance to strike,” she says, “how do we cater to the people who can fund us, the tourists who keep our lights on, while also understanding that they are not our primary audience for eight months of the year?”
Durbin has been in this role for almost a year, and she has responded to the challenge admirably. Previously, Durbin worked at the New Haven Museum, managing their education and visitor experience as one of only seven full-time staff members in the entire museum. While her three plus years in New Haven gave her invaluable background in designing and running educational programs for museums, she still felt a considerable adjustment when she entered a staff nearly four times the size of New Haven Museum’s.
At the NHA, Durbin’s first course of action was to assess the strengths of her new department, and the people in it. She conducted a long and careful observation each staff member in their work to determine whether they were most comfortable working with children or adults, tourists or locals, or if they’re the rare type (like Durbin herself) who is comfortable speaking to anyone. In a location subject to radical demographic shifts, it can be difficult to know which audience is going to show up for which events, so Durbin finds herself preparing for any and every audience. This is a lot easier to do when you know which members of your staff will be best equipped to help you in each possible case.
As Manager of Education, Durbin meets with every single class in the entire Nantucket school district. That’s around 2,000 students in all. She works hard to support class learning with real world examples. Luckily, she claims there is relatable material in Nantucket Historical Association on virtually any subject. Literature? Moby Dick. Economics? The whaling industry. Immigration, exploration, scientific discovery, native communities, manifest destiny, civil rights—if you take time to look through the records, Nantucket proves itself to be a microcosm of the vast American culture.
In collaboration with the Chair of Education & Community Relations, Durbin helped to spearhead a program called “We All Speak Moby-Dick,” a multi-lingual reading event that brought out many of the cultural communities of Nantucket to celebrate themselves and each other. Durbin pulled on many of the connections she had made through her outreach to local schools, and was able to create a hugely successful and diverse event that spoke to a broad cross-section of Nantucket.
Still, she says, there was room to grow. During the event, a number of people approached her asking where the representatives of the Jamaican community could be found. Durbin was forced to admit that she had not been able to get a reader who spoke Patoi; considering the sizable Jamaican population of Nantucket, this absence was pretty glaring. “It’s a lesson learned,” says Durbin, who ironically found that a recently hired coworker spoke Patoi the morning of the event, but didn’t have time to adjust the programming in order to make room for another reader. The lesson? “Always do a deep change analysis after your event. And know your coworkers.”
Beyond her more traditional efforts as Manager of Education, Durbin is pushing to involve the NHA more deeply in town, state, and national government, trying to bolster the strength of her community through political efforts. LAMs are in a unique position between the government and the people, and she strongly believes in their capacity to lead community action and help underserved populations. Her vision is to make the NHA a resource that can benefit every one of her constituents, and also to be a source of support and strength for other cultural institutions. Helping your allies can only help you in the long run. With these dual goals, a typical month can take her from designing the NHA’s free lesson plans for local teachers, to attending LAM advocacy events across the country. She has both the strategic mind needed to understand networks of social and political power, and the moral clarity required to redistribute that power where it is needed.