To Raina Sciocchetti, our Island Institute Fellow who has been with us two years! Raina leaves
us this month with a historical society improved beyond what we ever expected when she
arrived.
She bumped up our presence on Facebook with frequent fun and interesting bits of
Sullivan and Sorrento’s history. People have loved it and responded with fun and
interesting bits of history of their own.
She looked under the hood of our very out-of-date website and attacked it with
mysterious technological thingies like “search engine optimization” and “parallax
scrolling.” Its new, fresh design is attractive, useful, and best of all – easy to use!
She created a monthly online “History Hour” for winter evenings when a virtual
gathering and information-sharing perked us all up. The speakers gave us new insights
into Sullivan and Sorrento’s past and the comments during and after told us this new
program was a hit!
Over months of hard work, she transformed our jumbled collection of Sullivan and
Sorrento’s history from stacks of mystery boxes and piles of unrelated papers to a well
organized, well labeled system. She found treasures we didn’t know we had! Now we
can locate things much easier and care for them properly.
She rejuvenated our museum! She muscled big display cases into tight corners,
sometimes with help, and filled them with treasures that had been out of sight for twenty
or more years. New labels, more lighting. She made us shine!
And so much more.
Raina’s skills and hard work over two years – during a pandemic – gives Sullivan and Sorrento a
great jumping-off place to plan for the future of the historical society.
Good luck to Raina as she moves to Boston where she will attend graduate school at Simmons
University for Library and Information Science with special studies in Archives Management.
We like to think we had a hand in her choice of specialty!
Along with the Fellowship program that brought Raina to us, the Island Institute team was always in the background to offer support, materials, organization, and trouble shooting. The skill and experience of the Fellowship team helped us find focus and make best use of the Fellowship and the resources we have. And now, even with Raina’s leaving, the Island Institute’s Community Leadership Team has stepped up to help us through a “visioning” process to sustain the hard work Raina did for us and to plan for the future. Our thanks to the Island Institute and its outstanding teams!
Raina is our guest speaker at the August 10 program, 7:00pm at the Sorrento Community Building about “Maggie’s Journal.” Also on that evening we will celebrate Raina and her work with a few words of thanks. There will be cake!!!
We hope you can join us for both the program and the celebration.