Power and Preservation
It's a dessert potluck power presentation! All are welcome to join us at Deepwater Theater on Tuesday, March 15th, at 7pm. Come out and satisfy your sweet tooth, and learn all about what OPS is planning for 2016! The guest speaker is Heidi Smith of Tideland EMC, who will talk about the history of electric power on Ocracoke and the new changes that are coming.
OPS recently sent out their spring newsletter, which included this message from OPS director Amy Howard:
We are on the cusp of spring which means summer is just around the corner, so I’m sure a visit to Ocracoke is on everyone’s mind. We had a roller coaster winter of alternating summer sun and frigid, windy nor'easters. I think we are all looking forward to longer and consistently warmer days.
Even though we close down for the winter, we are not idle. We have been working at freshening up the museum for the upcoming season. Chad O’Neal fixed our porch railings, the National Park Service loaned us the Caribsea nameplate to display, we are redoing our extensive shell collection exhibit, and we have been working on new product designs.
This year we have added a social media manager to our staff. If you are enjoying our Facebook posts and our new website, you have Karen Rhodes to thank. Although the additional year-long position stretches our budget, we believe these improved communications are a critical part of including you in our Ocracoke family. By actively using our website to make donations and purchase great OPS products, you will help us keep this position alive. Karen spends hours researching stories, finding old photos and taking new ones to share with you. We have been thrilled with the positive responses we get from all of her posts. We hope we can continue it into the future! We now also post a blog about four times a month on our website. If there is something you would like to know, ask and we will do our best to publish a response in the blog.
Our January Art Auction was a hugely popular event again this year! We had 92 contributions and brought in over $6400! Despite the fierce winds and chilly temperatures, over 80 people came out to share in the food, fun, and art. We hope you will join us in 2017, but if you can’t, you can still participate in online bidding.
On Tuesday, March 15th, come join us for our annual Spring Membership Meeting at 7 PM at Ocracoke Alive’s Deepwater Theater on School Rd. We’ll provide all the refreshments and an interesting program.
In addition to encouraging membership and other forms of participation in OPS, we urge you to investigate giving through estate planning. More and more organizations like ours rely on the long-term thinking and consideration of our members and supporters to help guide us successfully into the future. In the past two years, we have received over $25,000 from the estates of people who loved and appreciated what we stand for. This money has helped us make improvements to our museum in the form of expanded programing, exhibits, structural repairs, and access to information that we can then share with you. To those of you who have already written us into your wills, we thank you for your commitment!
Our summer programs start June 6th and run through August 19th. Mondays and Fridays are Museum Tours, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Porch Talks and Wednesdays are our Kids Create-A-Craft programs. All events begin at 1 PM, though occasionally some adjustments have to be made. We have a $5 fee for our kid’s program to offset our materials cost, but all the other programs are FREE!
As always, we love meeting and visiting with all of our members and supporters, so stop in when you are on the island to say hello and see what we have going on!
