One of my hopes for GMRI had been not just to develop the science, this education, this community capability, to do the things were doing today, but to develop an institution that had the responsiveness, the core intellectual horsepower to be able to see very new and different kinds of opportunities and challenges arise, and address those.
What we’ve begun to realize is that our place in the region is really serving as a catalyst, introducing new ideas, earning support by traditional stakeholders for these new ideas, and then doing the hard technical work of... Well, how do you really implement a new idea? How do you construct a harvesting sector? How do you actually build an education program that’s going to lead to science literacy in a region?
2008 was a very unusual year. We started off the year very focused on results... How do we take this community capability, this education capability, this science capability we’ve put together and really focus on having an impact...a measurable impact here in the Gulf of Maine region? Then of course, as the year wore on we began to realize that we were at the mercy of an extraordinary financial meltdown. The latter part of the year was really colored by... How do we tighten up, how do we reduce our budget and position ourselves to survive what could be an exceedingly difficult period of several years? And then as we wore into 2009, we made very difficult decisions to reduce staff. We tightened up by about 15 percent. So we got through that in the early part of the year and digested those changes.
And then we’ve had, as the year’s worn on, more extraordinary development. Our science group was selected to be part of a consortium called the Cooperative Institute of the North Atlantic Region to serve as NOAA’s sole source science advisor. We’ve been co-chairing the governor’s task force on ocean energy. Our effort to support the evolution of the groundfish industry to harvesting sectors has really been one of the foremost achievements of the institution since its inception. We’re in the middle of an incredible paradigm shift in terms of rationalizing how groundfish are managed.
We’re interested in... How do we conserve and sustain the Gulf of Maine, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how do we use it as an economic engine and really contribute to the lifeblood of communities around the Gulf of Maine region?
There’s been an extraordinary community of individual contributors, corporate sponsors, foundation contributors, federal agencies that have supported our work, state agencies that have supported our work, and frankly, we wouldn’t exist but for the incredible support we’ve had from all these entities. Not just here in Maine, but New Hampshire and Massachusetts, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and frankly, from outside the region as well.
As I look out over the next few years, what strikes me is we’ll be living in a totally different world economically, and so we’re going to have to be very smart and attentive to how we focus on having an impact, how we evolve our business model, and how we make sure we’re serving critical interests in the region. And I’m frankly excited and optimistic about what I see happening. The public is increasingly aware of the importance of the ocean, I think in part due to our growing awareness of the threat of climate change. The country is very focused on science literacy, and coastal communities are really taking on the challenge of how they define their future in this new economy.
I think we’re positioned to serve all these needs in very unusual ways, we have an extraordinary staff, a deep group of supporters, and I’m really excited frankly, when I look ahead.