Our Impact | Your Museum
Community Partner Award: Project Fine
Collaboration and partnerships are core to who we are. Each year, we acknowledge one community partner that helps us move us closer to realizing the vision we want our work to accomplish - a more compassionate and connected world, for all.
For 2024, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum wishes to acknowledge the work Project FINE does not only with and for the museum, but across Winona County. Project FINE is a nonprofit organization that helps newcomers integrate into the community. They provide foreign language interpreters and translators as well as opportunities for education, information, referral, and empowerment for immigrants and refugees. Project FINE’s work is accomplished through a small staff, volunteers, interpreters, and extensive collaboration with local service providers, like the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.
In 2024, Project FINE continued to show up for every one of MMAMs Seasonal Saturday events, providing translation services for our newcomer community members and introducing these families to the museum. In 2024, Project FINE went above and beyond by organizing a story telling session for immigrant and refugee community members at the museum, sharing numerous intercultural ways in which communities connect with water through art. Project FINE also executed the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s first Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) to measure the intercultural competence – the capability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural difference and commonalities - across the organization and for each full-time staff member. The extensive study suggests MMAM has the capacities to from Minimization (orientation that highlights cultural commonality and universal values and principles that may also mask deeper recognition and appreciation of cultural differences) to Acceptance (orientation that recognizes and appreciates patterns of cultural difference and commonality in one’s own and other cultures) by 2027, and from Acceptance to Adaptation (orientation that can shift cultural perspective and change behavior in culturally appropriate and authentic ways) by 2030.
Project FINE will remain a core partner for the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, helping the museum move closer to its vision by providing intercultural training sessions for staff, board and volunteer members. We are grateful and humbled to have them in our community.
In 2021, the museum acknowledged the Winona Community Foundation as a stabilizing force in our philanthropic community, helping make our community more resilient, healthy and supported.
In 2022, the museum acknowledged Winona Health for their commitment to moving health care out of the clinic and into the community, supporting organizations like the Minnesota Marine Art Museum to create more connectedness within our own community.
In 2023, the museum presented the award to Engage Winona, a nonprofit organization that drives equitable civic action and social change by working to ensure everyone has access, voice, and power in community planning, decision-making and changemaking.
Together, we make our community a better place to live, work, learn, create, and play.