The Setting

Not a wealthy state, Maine has a limited budget to disburse among many needy and deserving agencies. When all are clamoring for funding, factionalism often arises. As they discovered in Maine, there is a better way to use both human and financial resources than competing for them.

Lobsters, lighthouses, and L.L. Bean. Indelible images of Maine, ones the citizens are proud of. Yet this spacious state is eminently gifted with other natural, cultural, and historic attractions that also deserve attention. And that requires money—something Maine has in very limited supply. In the wake of the 1995 White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, the Maine Arts Commission looked at the statistics regarding cultural heritage tourism and realized it could play a central role in boosting flagging economies as well as visitation to arts and cultural facilities.

As 1990s federal budget cuts for the arts trickled down to the state level, the Maine Arts Commission watched in distress as its pool of legislated funds continued to shrink. According to Kimber Craine of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, it was time to take a new look at funding possibilities. “The competitive grant system was no longer adequate for addressing the issues of access, artistic excellence, and cultural development.”

The answer to the problem of too few funds for too many requests seemed to lie in the opposite direction—with the communities, by teaching them to help themselves through cultural heritage tourism, and among the Maine Arts Commission’s peers, other state agencies, who heretofore might have been viewed more as adversaries for a limited pot of money.

So the Maine Arts Commission took the plunge and sought support from the Maine Office of Tourism to sponsor a workshop to explain the concept of cultural heritage tourism to more than 100 representatives of arts organizations, museums, state agencies, chambers of commerce, historical societies, and businesses from across the state. Following up that successful gathering, the Maine Arts Commission appointed a Cultural Tourism Task Force to work on strategies to develop additional links between cultural organizations and public and private sector groups in the state.

“We needed to raise awareness and educate the players around the state about what cultural tourism is,” explains Abbe Levin, special projects coordinator at the Maine Arts Commission. To do so required funding and that came, surprisingly, from requests to the Maine Humanities Council, the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and the Maine Office of Tourism. “It wasn’t anything particularly official. We were just testing things out by asking each agency to kick in a small amount of money to help pay for the workshops.” What has grown into a mutually satisfactory alliance was actually a major first for the State of Maine. “This was huge,” says Levin. “We had never worked with these agencies in this way.” Maybe not, but after that there was no turning back. A partnership had been formed, however untested.

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