TALK OF THE TOWNS
What’s Culture Got to Do With It?
The Impacts of Arts & Heritage Organizations in Changing Times
STONINGTON, ME, MARCH 24, 2025 – What’s culture got to do with it?! Join the Town of Stonington, the Island Institute, co-host Mollie Cashwell of the Cultural Alliance of Maine, and special guests on Wednesday, April 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Reach Performing Arts Center in Deer Isle for a room-wide conversation on how our communities can lean into the strengths created by our arts and heritage organizations. What can bring us together when everything seems intended to divide us? Where do we look to build on our community strengths? What role do local cultures play, and how do arts and heritage organizations and businesses – libraries, historical societies and museums, arts organizations, galleries and more – bring us together around them, helping us to understand, create and contribute to our communities and futures?
Learn and be in dialogue with each other as well as very special guests Hannah Cyrus, Board President, Jonathan Fisher House; Perry Price, Executive Director, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; Chris Ross, librarian, Stonington Public Library; Erika Sanger, Executive Director, Opera House Arts; Lori Sitzabee, Artistic Director, New Surry Theatre; and Sarah Sockbeson, award-winning Penobscot Nation artist and board member of the Abbe Museum.
The Talk of the Town events are room-wide community conversations on issues that bridge, matter to, and unite our regional communities. They are intentionally structured to include everyone in the room in addition to special invited guests, and direction will be driven by what those attending most need to discuss and to learn.
Doors for the free evening open at 6 p.m. with a social hour featuring a selection of beverages, snacks, and desserts sold by Deer Isle-Stonington theater students as a fundraiser for their upcoming theater trip to New York City. The facilitated conversation starts at 7 p.m.
“Our communities are culturally rich, and we’re in a historic period when culture matters more than we might give it credit for,” said Linda Nelson, Stonington’s Economic & Community Development Director. “How can we attend to and leverage these unique and place-based strengths to continuously improve our communities as places to live, work, and play?”
This is the fourth in the 2025 Talk of the Towns series. Recordings of the seven previous events are available on the Town of Stonington’s YouTube channel. Additional 2025 dates are May 21 on “New Ways to Think About Rural Education: Workforce Skills Development, Pathways, & Digital Equity” and a special summer edition on August 27.
For more information on the Town of Stonington, and a one-sheet on its Economic Resiliency Strategy created with nationally-recognized Camoin Associates, go to https://www.stoningtonmaine.org/gov/economic-development.php.
The Island Institute is working to preserve and protect Maine’s working waterfronts, support coastal livelihoods, and build resilience for our marine economy and those who depend on it. More at islandinstitute.org.