State officials are working to establish annual funding for Bishop Museum to support and help stabilize Hawaii’s flagship repository of Hawaiian culture, science and community as it moves forward under its fourth CEO in the past seven years.
In his biennial budget, Gov. Josh Green proposed $15 million in state support for the museum and $4 million to Iolani Palace over the next two years.
“We are working with all parties to support the Bishop Museum, a Hawaii treasure,” Green told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in a statement.
According to the House Committee on Finance,
$7.5 million for Bishop
Museum and $2 million for Iolani Palace is currently funded for the coming fiscal year in their version of the budget. The Senate version of the budget currently
appropriates $1 for the
museum.
Senate Committee on Ways and Means Chair
Donovan Dela Cruz, a supporter of recurring state funding for the museum, told the Star-Advertiser he wants to continue the discussion into conference committee and see the results of a state Attorney General’s Office investigation.
The office is investigating following a complaint Opens in a new tab made by an art dealer and an anthropologist who accused the museum’s board of directors Dec. 21 of breaching their fiduciary duties and dissipating the museum’s charitable assets.
“The Attorney General represents the public interest in the protection of charitable assets and is authorized to investigate and act to prevent or remedy the misapplication, diversion, or waste of charitable assets, where necessary,” read a statement to the Star-Advertiser from the
Department of the Attorney General. “While we cannot comment publicly on any particular investigation at this moment, we take all complaints seriously.”
Securing all forms of recurring, sustainable funding in the form of state appropriations, private and public grants, donations, fundraising and new revenue has been a “lifelong journey for the Bishop Museum,” President and CEO Dee Jay Mailer Opens in a new tab told the Star-Advertiser in an interview.
Mailer started working as interim CEO on Feb. 2, after the museum’s board voted to fire three top executives following a six-month investigation into grievances raised about the work environment at the 15-acre campus in Kalihi.
On March 29 the board acted on “enthusiastic feedback about Mailer’s leadership from staff, donors and community members” and dropped the interim tag, voting to appoint her to a three-year term.
The Kamehameha Schools alum, who served as CEO of Kamehameha Schools Bishop Estate from 2004 to 2014 and as a museum board member from 2012 to 2016, takes great pride in helping secure the strategic way forward for the museum, which was established in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop to honor his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
In an interview with the Star-Advertiser, Mailer said her first priority was securing the staff, who “had some areas where they didn’t feel supported” and wanted more transparency about what was happening next.
“People, when they are in that space, are reluctant to step out and do the work that they are very capable of doing,” said Mailer. “When I came on board, I talked to the all staff group at Bishop Museum my first day, and I said, ‘Look, the first thing for me … is to secure you.’”
What security looks like, Mailer said, is making sure that employees have the tools that they need to do the “good work that they are doing,” enabling them to emerge from the silos to which they were previously confined.
“It also means that they need to make sure that whatever they are getting to do their work is sustainable,
because part of the issue for Bishop Museum over the years has been sustainability of funding,” Mailer said. “So making sure people have an environment where they are respected and heard and that they receive information on an ongoing basis about how we are doing and where’s our next steps … People are coming our of their bunkers and looking up and saying, ‘OK, we can do this.’”
Organizations like Bishop Museum largely depend on multiple funding streams,
including reliable donors, Mailer explained, and “some are sustainable, some are not, and so the Bishop
Museum is no exception.”
“We have tremendous grants that come in. … The grant part of the organization is strong, it’s building, it pays for a lot of our science and collections and culture work,” said Mailer, noting that the museum’s grants are either one-year grants or two- to three-year commitments. “To sustain the staff, to sustain the work and to also build out the strategic outcomes that we’re looking for, we need to not only have those kind of legitimate initiation funds; we also have
to have sustainable funds.”
The museum has funding from the Charles Reed Bishop Trust, and as long as the museum continues to perform, that money will continue to be shared with the museum, she said, because “that’s what Mr. Bishop’s wishes were.”
Mailer described the museum’s internal budgets when she took the reins as being the type of setup where officials were “robbing Peter to pay Paul or Paul to pay Peter.” Money was moving between different museum departments to cover outstanding debts and expenses.
The museum had not had a chief financial officer for two years, she said, one of several positions Mailer filled. Money appropriated during previous sessions of the Legislature while Gov. David Ige was in office — $10 million for capital improvements and $7.5 million for operating expenses like electricity and salaries — was lost during the transition to Green’s administration, she said.
The $10 million in infrastructure improvements
included updating an antiquated information technology system, improving fire retardant measures and repairing leaking roofs — critical jobs, Mailer said.
“We have the funding now; we got it … three or four months late into the
fiscal year. We are playing catch-up and are now substantially into the CIP (capital improvement project) $10 million, which is great,” said Mailer. “Every night I kind of lie awake going, ‘Oh my gosh, if we had a fire or if we had something horrible go on, even a water (issue), like sprinklers going off, we would lose so much that would never be restored.’
All of our collections, our culture, our science are in those buildings, and so
are our people.”
All bills were being paid on time and were current when she came aboard, Mailer said, but the museum could not continue operating that way and risk breaking into lines of credit and other funding options.
“It was a tough way to say we are going to freeze everything right now and we are going to pay our debts and then we are going to look for funding to cover release of the freeze, and then going forward strategically on the most strategic projects,” said Mailer. “We got money, we have been using it, but it’s not going to sustain us until next year.”
Mailer, who was living and working on health care and education initiatives in Idaho and Europe after leaving Kamehameha Schools in 2014, “didn’t need to work,” but when she was pitched on a plan to step in and lead the museum out of a tumultuous time, she had to come home.
“I guess my heart just sort of cried out. I know that museum to be part of the legacy of the Bishops,” said Mailer, who has a photo of the couple in her office. “I know that story. How could I not go home and help that vision?”
