A New Year, with New Strategies

The Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History thanks Justin Pollock and Dan River Nonprofit Network for facilitating the May FLIP (Financial Leadership in Practice) seminar.

FLIP brings leadership teams together to learn and develop strategies that strengthen the link between financial process and community impact. Over the course of a 2-day workshop and three follow-up tutorials with consultant Justin Pollock of OrgForward, leadership teams explored frameworks, tools, and plans that foster stronger conversations among board and staff after the pandemic.

In this course participants engaged to tie the financial, programmatic, operational, and leadership efforts of the organization together to develop a richer understanding of the organization’s impact to strengthen how financial information is used to support mission-focused decision making.

A Small Step in the career of a Museum Collections Manager, becomes a Large Transformation for the Danville Museum

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to our collections manager, Annie Chappell, who will be moving with her family to Georgia. Annie first started working at the Museum in the summer of 2019; she helped organize and install the exhibition The Movement – Danville’s Civil Rights. Annie is a graduate of Emory University, and her work in collections pulled together a three-year long collections clean-up and collections organization. This was a Herculean task that fell on the shoulders of an extraordinary team of individuals. As Annie prepared the succession binder this month, we realized how important it was to give a shout-out to the many who completed what seemed initially an impossible task. We thank Kate McDannold, Aidan Thomas, Tripp Hayes, Aidan Lawrence, and Daniel Shogan, as well as librarian, Mary Kent, for the hundreds of hours spent sorting, labeling, filing and digitizing as well as meeting with education groups, education community partners, private collectors, and with the Board Collections committee, chaired by Dr. Syed Ahmed.

We also want to thank the American Alliance of Museums and MAP (Museum Assessment Program), and, in particular, our AAM- designated peer reviewer, Jeanne Niccolls, for meeting with us in November 2021, to provide not only a MAP workbook, but also a MAP Collections report that truly points us in the right direction for all our future collections programs.

Since November (2021), Annie Chappell and Mary Kent have “moved mountains” by doing one simple thing that changed our collections system, and now makes it the most valuable museum archive in the Dan River Region: They made sure that all artifacts were lifted off the floor and onto archive shelving with a new tagging system in place. This “simple thing”- in conjunction with well-organized hard files and digital files - is what now makes our DMFAH collections easy to research, and a welcoming space for scholars. It also allows us to better present exhibitions and education programs. Our job is to insure optimal maintenance. UVA fellow Arden Dalton, and Berkley Pritchett

(MLS), will be working in Collections through the summer, until our Collections Manager position can officially be filled.