Downtown diva | Shannon Haines, Executive Director, Waterville Main Street, Waterville
Photo/David A. Rodgers
Shannon Haines: "If I want to see something happen, I'm not just going to write a negative letter to the editor."
Shannon Haines works in a small office on Main Street cluttered with multi-colored benches painted by local artists. One bench has fish swimming through its slats, another shows lanky mermaids lounging in the sea, and a third is decorated with the long, black feathers of a raven. Next spring, volunteers will move these benches to spots around downtown for pedestrians needing a pause.
The art benches are just one of the many projects Haines, the 32-year-old executive director of Waterville Main Street, has organized over the last five years to give a lift to Waterville, which, like many communities around Maine, had struggled after its factories closed down or moved overseas. But Haines — who talks in a measured, direct way that belies her considerable energy — is determined to reawaken the city.
Since taking the job at the nonprofit in 2003, Haines’ efforts have not only helped drive more business to Waterville — including the much-celebrated $65 million rehabilitation of the Hathaway mills into mixed-use development — but they have also garnered the city international attention. Haines recently learned that the American Film Institute in Los Angeles had selected Waterville to host Project: 20/20, its film tour that invites international filmmakers to screen their movies in cities around the world.
When Haines first heard the news, she asked the project’s producer, “Do you know how small Waterville is?” The woman answered that the project had no problem with small cities — the institute had, after all, also selected Salt Lake City in Utah. Haines swallowed and told her Waterville’s population was 16,000 — less than a tenth of the size of Salt Lake City.
But the reason Project: 20/20 opted to include Waterville is because the city has become an important hub for filmmakers. The annual Maine International Film Festival in Waterville has grown from 3,500 movie tickets sold in 1998 to nearly 9,400 this past summer, its budget has doubled to $125,000 and the number of films shown has expanded from 47 to 100. Meanwhile, Haines, who also is the director of the festival, says she is working to extend the 10-day summer spree into year-long programming with regular screenings and talks.
The film festival is just one of the successes Haines has generated through a combination of devotion to her cause, realistic optimism and a quick embrace of original ideas. Working on a Waterville Main Street budget of less than $250,000 — which she has doubled since the program’s start in 2001 by expanding the number of business and individual donors from 12 to 80, writing more grant applications and generating revenue with new downtown events — her achievements set the standard for economic development leaders around the state.
Haines is tireless: In addition to the work already detailed, she has also set up a year-round farmer’s market downtown, helped businesses improve their façades with public grants and rounded up more than 100 volunteers to assist with her diverse projects. Waterville Main Street pushed the city to invest $80,000 to build an outside seating area for downtown restaurants and raised $20,000 locally to commission a huge outside mural to honor Waterville’s Lebanese community — the oldest and largest in the United States. And this is just the beginning of a long list of accomplishments too numerous to mention here.
Waterville stands as an example of a community that has embraced arts and culture to bring more people downtown. The daughter of a boiler operator at Sappi Fine Paper mill and a former Hathaway Shirt Co. sewer, Haines was born in Waterville and attended Skowhegan Area High School, graduating at age 16. She studied Japanese and environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, but gravitated to a community-activist job in Maine because she says she wanted to make a difference at the local level, which she has done, working six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day.
“I sell Waterville; it’s the best place on the planet,” Haines says. “And one day it will be because of that positive energy.”
Rebecca Goldfine
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