Today we’d like to introduce you to Maryanne Long

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

I’ve MORPHED – It seems that over the past few decades, I have embraced challenges, learned new skills, and created new versions of myself along the way. I began as an educator and taught at every grade level at some point in my 23-year career, whether it was library skills to elementary students or business writing to college freshman. But, for the most part, it was teaching middle-grade students learning skills. I referred to it as “how to learn despite the teacher.”

After an early retirement at 45 years of age, I moved to Hawaii and turned my life in a whole different direction. I was hired as an aide to the Honolulu City Council, basically resolving constituent concerns on almost every level, from potholes, to traffic safety, to environmental issues, etc. at this stage, I really learned the importance of building a network, people on the local, state, and federal level to whom I could turn to when we needed help in our communities.

After government work, I spent the next 10 years involved in the non-profit arena. I was fortunate enough to have received training from the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation in non-profit management. One of my proudest accomplishments was co-founding and managing an entrepreneurship program at our local high school, for which I won the Weinberg AIM for Excellence award in management in 2002. The basis for the award was that we had turned our non-profit into a self-sustainable program. We taught students to run a business from concept-to-cash register by designing, producing, and selling school-logoed items in both the school store and worldwide on the Internet.

During much of this same time period, I served as Office Manager-Volunteer Coordinator for the PGA and LPGA golf tournaments in Hawai`i. That experience taught me so much about time management, resourcefulness, people skills, etc. My volunteer time helped our school store project qualify for grants from the golf tournaments, bringing in initial funding to make our fledgling business financially viable.

The last ten years again morphed me into a whole new arena – the art world. I learned to paint and draw (I know, it should have been the other way around). I got involved in art guilds and met so many incredibly-talented artists. I found that I got more art gratification learning about other artists, which led to a twice-a-month newspaper column in a Honolulu weekly with a circulation of 250,000 copies. My love of art has expanded even more to curating art shows and adding to my own personal art collection.

What’s next? Well, it’s kind of back-to-the-future for me. Interest is being generated in some of the creative thinking educational pieces I wrote decades ago. So I hope to be offering workshops to families to help their children learn creative thinking strategies, study-skills, and other methods to be successful in life.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

There will always be bumps in the road in every program or project. In government programs, it is usually bureaucracy that gets in the way. In the non-profit world, funding is usually the biggest obstacle.

Actually, I have been quite lucky. Many of my undertakings already had financial backing, or like the school-store project, it had elements that made it a winner so it became self-sustaining.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

Retiring early allowed me to dedicate my time to volunteer work. I had no business management training, but turned the school store project into a very successful enterprise. I knew nothing about golf, but used my organizational skills to set up systems that helped the tournaments run smoothly. I had the ability to figure things out and get them done. I learned to adapt to situations and seek out and use accessible resources.

I’m not sure that I could say anything sets me apart from others. We all have different strengths and interests. I will say, though. people always tell me that they trust me; that they like when I am in charge of something; they like that I try to find a place for everyone in the program; and I give people opportunities to succeed.

What was your favorite childhood memory?

We were lucky enough to have a summer cottage on Cape Cod. On Friday nights we would go down to the Cape, about an hour’s drive from the city where we lived. Once we got the car unpacked and everything put away, we would go down to the fish pier and watch the fishing boats unload. We were always so fascinating seeing the shiny fish sliding down the ramp into the bins that took them into the processing plant. The big treat while we watched was eating the pack of OREO cookies my mom had brought for us. P.S. I never ate fish until I moved to Hawai`i. I disliked it intensely as a kid; now a Spicy Ahi Sushi Roll is my go-to lunch!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://longlostart.weebly.com
• Instagram: maryanne_artist
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MaryAnneLongHI/