THE WRECK OF THE OCEAN CLASSROOM Part 5: The Decisions [This eight-part story is published in full in the Fall issue of Marlinspike, which mailed on Monday, September 29. To subscribe, visit marlinspikemagazine/subscribe.html or call 978-561-3020.] Peter Neill’s decision to hire Greg Belanger as Executive Director, and the subsequent decision to charter the troubled schooner Amistad, have drawn considerable criticism. Belanger, who was running the struggling Amistad America at the time, was told by Mystic Seaport in 2011 that it was time to find a new home for Amistad. The Seaport suggested he talk to Ocean Classroom, and the resulting discussions led not only to OCF taking on Amistad, but to Belanger leaving Amistad America to become ED at OCF. “Greg and I met when I gave the keynote at the ASTA Conference in Halifax seven or eight years ago,” recounts Neill. At the time, Neill was serving as OCF’s interim ED. “Greg came up to me afterward and we started talking. He wanted the job; we were looking for an ED; I offered him the job. “Greg had been a board member [at Amistad America] who had been asked to be the ED at a difficult time, but he took that ship to Africa, to Cuba, he did some remarkable things. How many people have taken a ship to Africa? Pretty formidable accomplishment, and it all gets forgotten. So he came over.” The hiring was not well received in the office or on the boats. “We came in for a staff meeting one day and boom! Greg Belanger was hired,” recounts Graham. “They didn’t interview anybody. We were suggesting people who wanted the job and were much more qualified than Greg Belanger.” “We were all pretty upset,” remembers Flansburg, who was on Spirit at the time of Belanger’s hiring. “It appeared that there was no vetting of any other candidates for the job. We all had our own ideas; we thought there were several candidates who would make great executive directors; and this guy who we’d never heard of came on. “Now, I’ll give Greg credit, he came down and sailed in Spirit to the Dominican Republic and he listened to a lot of really harsh criticism from myself and other crew who had been with the company for a long time. And he seemed to take a lot out of that.” Neill argues that he had been shopping the job around for some time. “We offered that job to three people. We offered it to people who were Outward Bound types; we offered the job two or three times and we were turned down, always by people who surprised me by their aversion to risk. “It was clear to me we needed a highly-skilled ED. We had done a search and we had interviewed all these people. Greg interviewed with the board, and we hired the best guy in the world! I think he was the best guy available. By far. “And if Aly [Graham] didn’t get the chance to say no, I’m very sorry. Maybe we didn’t do it as diplomatically or democratically as we could have. But you know, I had worked in that [OCF] office myself as ED. I knew the personalities, I had felt the same sea-anchor effects of anti-change and office politics. I knew what was going on. I felt it myself. I knew, and I am convinced it was the right decision — that attitude had to be broken.” Neill scoffs at the suggestions, which have appeared principally in The Day newspaper of New London, that Belanger was guilty of mismanagement, or worse, while at Amistad America. “He will be exonerated on all of that,” insists Neill, who believes the newspaper’s claims are politically motivated. “They’ve been all through our books. All of that will come out in the end, and he’ll be a creditor. They owe Greg six figures in back salary! “Greg was a lightning rod because all of the other board members left. But he’ll tell you, ‘I’ve been through this now twice. The board members at Amistad fled the minute there was trouble.’ He said, ‘the board members at OCF have stayed with me until the bitter end and been a huge help.’ And I have said to him personally, I am here with you now, and maybe beyond, because I know what you’ve done here, at great personal cost, and maybe nobody beyond me really understands it.” Graham sees it differently. The longtime OCF program director says that even as the wheels came off the cart, OCF was less than completely honest with itself and with its partners and customers. “We continued to accept tuition payments for programs we knew we might not be able to run. They told us ‘We’re going to get the Irving Johnson.’ That fell through, but they were telling Camden National that we were going to have the boat, and we went ahead signing contracts, until I just stopped doing it. Because I knew we weren’t going to have a ship for these people.” OCF management also scheduled a yard for Gamage in Gloucester for which they could not pay. “Greg Bailey, Chris Flansburg, and Chris Dimock spent all this time and energy getting the yard ready. We had made a down payment, they had all these deckhands ready to go, these young deckhands making $400 a month, everybody was there ready to work, the shipwright, everyone. Greg Belanger comes down three hours late, the day before the yard is to begin, and says there’s no yard, because there’s no money. “He had told them all a week earlier that Proctor Academy was going to pay for it. Heck, I knew they weren’t going to pay for it, and I didn’t even work there any more! He’d known a month earlier that Proctor wasn’t going to pay for it. “So there they are at the yard with no money, and out of the kindness of their hearts and their love for the ship they’re putting everything back on board Gamage until two weeks later, the credit card stopped working and they couldn’t even buy food. It’s just despicable.” “I know there’s a lot of anger out there among some of our former employees,” Neill responds. “And although I have the greatest respect for their abilities, they may someday be asked to do the rest of the job. The rest of the job is just as hard as sailing the boat safely and educating the kids on board. The rest of the job requires an entirely different set of skills, which also need to respected. “I had the same problem at South Street. The waterfront was always grousing about the way things were being done. They leaked to the bureaucrats and the Building Department and the press and did everything they possibly could to subvert and sabotage the project! But we ended up with a very successful, very public restoration of Lettie Howard. I’m sensitive to all this stuff. But the proof is in the pudding.” NEXT: Amistad
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 12:30:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015