May 7, 2009

On behalf of the Mesa Historical Museum and Society, we are pleased to announce an exciting new opportunity to promote and preserve Mesa’s heritage. Beginning this July, the Mesa Historical Museum will restore its more than 40 year relationship with the City of Mesa. Our renewed collaboration will provide the resources needed to not only care for the museum’s collections, but to carry forth our mission to enrich the lives of our community through meaningful exhibitions and programs.

Highlights of this collaboration include:

• The City of Mesa has committed to the long-term care of the collections of the Mesa Historical Museum. This will include working with staff and the Mesa Historical Society over the next fiscal year to create a five-year strategic plan to continue to catalogue, store, and secure the collections according to national standards of excellence in the museum field. The collection will continue to get the care and conservation it has always had.

• The Mesa Historical Society will continue to function as a support foundation for the museum’s activities with the main goals of advocacy and preservation of Mesa’s historic resources, including the current collection. This group will continue to raise funds under its 501(c)(3) to support these goals and will support history-related programming such as the annual Historic Home Tour which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in January 2010.

• The Mesa Historical Museum will collaborate with the Arizona Museum for Youth to develop a dynamic new model of celebrating history and art, for all ages, to be announced in 2010. For the next few years, exhibitions exploring history and art with a unique interactive approach will take place on the current Arizona Museum for Youth campus. This collaboration will feature an expansion of our wildly successful exhibition “Play Ball,” re-opening February 2010. In addition, future exhibitions will draw heavily from the museum’s permanent collection of Mesa and regional history. Partnering with the Arizona Museum for Youth will allow the Mesa Historical Museum the ability to utilize greater resources including space, marketing, visitation, and experienced staff including their renowned exhibition and design team. The collaboration will also allow the Mesa Historical Museum to take history to a much larger audience drawing from the more than 75,000+ individuals who attend the Arizona Museum for Youth each year (current MHM attendance is near 20,000).

• History will come to you! Staff will work with the City of Mesa to utilize city and community resources to develop “legacy” exhibitions throughout Mesa. Libraries, schools, the Mesa CVB, City Hall, and the airport are all examples of the public spaces people routinely visit and are excellent destinations for showcasing our museum’s vast collection of Mesa’s History.

• Members get two for the price of one! Beginning this summer, all members will enjoy a complimentary membership to the Arizona Museum for Youth and will still be the first to hear about new programs and plans. In 2010, all members of both museums will be the first to experience a great new museum in the heart of downtown.

This is not an exclusive list. Many more opportunities to expand our historical knowledge, our historical consciousness, and to secure history’s place in the future of our community await.

This collaboration will also include a long-term plan for the Lehi School (owned by the City of Mesa). Although the Mesa Historical Museum has seen unparalleled growth over the past three years, the Society does not have the resources to sustain growth at the Lehi campus. The two main buildings need more than $10 million to upgrade the facilities. The Lehi campus will close to the public by the end of the year so that staff can prepare to open new exhibitions at the Arizona Museum for Youth and in other community locations. However, some staff will continue to work with the City of Mesa to support some operations and collections needs at the site over the next fiscal year. The Society and the City will work together with stakeholders in the community to envision a new use for the Lehi Campus which also preserves the site’s historic integrity.

We are not going away or closing! The Mesa Historical Society will help develop new exhibitions in 2010 in downtown and will emerge as a stronger, better utilized, and more resourceful organization. You can visit our website at www.mesahistoricalmuseum.org to follow our progress as we move forward. This isn’t the first time the museum has relocated in order to expand. Our more than 50 years of stewardship of Mesa’s history are a true testament to the longevity of the Mesa Historical Museum.

The new collaborative opportunity with the City of Mesa will allow the museum to touch tens of thousands more people with our diverse stories. Recent successes in new programs and national recognition awards have made the Mesa Historical Museum a leading historical institution in our state. Of course, our success is directly tied to your involvement. We hope that you will continue to offer your support of history as we explore these opportunities. We appreciate your service to history. It is your dedication to the preservation of our heritage which makes it all possible. We hope to have your continued participation at our events ─ the annual Home Tour, as volunteers, the opening of our new space in February, and our new exhibits and programs. We value your input. Please let us know what suggestions you have for helping us achieve our program and preservation goals.

Looking to a new, exciting and dynamic future,

Lisa A. Anderson
President and CEO

Vic Linoff
Chair of the Board of Directors
Mesa Historical Society