The Year of Making it Real

Bill Zoellick
December 8, 2009

During the coming year Acadia Partners and Acadia National Park will move from “trying things out” at SERC to implementing a Research Learning Center on a campus of our own design. We will move from experiment to reality.

The steps we take during this coming year build on everything we have learned over the past five years. We have moved from broad ideas and hopes about what might be possible at SERC to an understanding of what we really can do and need to do.

We built this understanding of what works by trying things out. For example, a few years ago we hooked the water back up in the old medical/dental building, hooked up some temporary Internet access, opened windows, aired the place out so that we could try using it as office and lab space for researchers. As another example from around that same time, we contracted with the College Board to initiate a few Advanced Placement Summer Institutes for teachers, using instructors that the College Board could round up.

We learned a great deal from these trial efforts. That learning is integrated into our plans for transforming SERC over the coming year. We will transform the medical/dental building into George M. Wright Hall, which will contain lab space, year-around offices for researchers, and science classrooms. Wright Hall will be equipped to house our Advanced Placement program, which we have grown from generic, “vanilla” Advanced Placement Institutes into specialized, advance offerings, using instructors that we have cultivated and supported, providing training to teachers that builds on the unique opportunities available in Acadia National Park.

This step -- going from “trying things out” to making SERC real -- is an exciting one. We should take a moment to celebrate what Acadia Partners and Acadia National Park have been able to do in this short time.

But we also need to recognize that taking this step involves a change in the way that we do our business. Making SERC real will require that we think about ourselves and what we expect of ourselves in new ways.

Our use of the old medical/dental building for research is a good example. Because we were not really sure about just how to make the most of SERC, it made a lot of sense to just hook up a little of the plumbing, leaving most of it disconnected. Everyone understood that we were just “making do.” The same was true of the early Advanced Placement courses. We used empty yogurt containers as “lab equipment.”

Making it real means that we can no longer “just make do.” Our Advanced Placement instructors will not continue to offer courses if we cannot supply lab equipment. Researchers will not continue to work in places without heat and working plumbing. Consequently, the park will invest a couple of million dollars in building a real lab. And now we have grant funding in place to purchase real microscopes and other lab equipment. In short, people are now expecting us to move beyond being a start-up, make-do operation and to become one that is fully functional and reliable.

Just as we need to upgrade buildings and equipment, so must we upgrade our internal processes. When we were small and starting out, it made sense to use spreadsheets and other simple, inexpensive tools to keep track of accounting, room reservations, meal planning, and so on.

But now we have moved from pilot initiatives to real programs that we will sustain and grow. We now manage meals and accommodations for more than 800 middle school students over the fall months. Throughout the summer we bring multiple groups at once to SERC, involving hundreds of people at a time. What that means is that, in this “Year of Making it Real,” we need to implement accounting systems, reservations systems, and other support systems so that we can ensure that SERC’s operations are high quality, reliable, and cost-effective.

This will be a challenging, demanding transition. It is the same transition that small companies go through when they move from selling to a few, early customers -- often friends and business associates -- to a broader market that is more demanding and less forgiving.

This coming year is the start of a sequence of steps that will unfold over several years as we fully realize our vision of SERC as an important, visible, innovative asset to the National Park Service as a whole, to Acadia National Park, and to the communities that surround it. We know that it will take 18 months or more to fully complete the physical transition of the campus, and it will also take several years for us to build the volume of education, research, and college and university partnership activity that we need to have SERC really become the resource that we know it can be. But this next year -- the Year of Making it Real -- is pivotal. During this coming year we create the infrastructure -- both physical and operational -- that we will stand upon as we reach even higher in the years that follow.