Almost from the day the Spy started in 2009, we have been fascinated by the impact of certain philanthropists on our small communities of the Mid-Shore. From marinas in Chestertown to culinary investments in Easton or revitalizing the tiny downtown of Trappe, these highly successful people have invested real capital into the hearts and bones of these sometimes struggling communities.

The common word used for these folks are “angel” investors, someone who appears out of nowhere and decides, against serious conventional wisdom, to provide major bucks for what they perceive to the greatest needs in a community.

For John and Janice Wyatt, that great investment opportunity in Dorchester County has been to increase the reading skills of young children significantly. 

After a successful career as a serial entrepreneur based out of Fairfax, Virginia, and with the very lucrative sale of his sixth business, John and Janice began fulfilling their genuine passion for philanthropic investment. John, growing up in his native Australia, became forever grateful for that country’s investment in public education. So he was stunned to see how the United States, for all its mighty resources, had failed in giving its children “a fair go,” the OZ term for a fair chance. 

With that in mind, the couple formed the John and Janice Wyatt Foundation. It started to apply an entrepreneurial approach to early childhood education. And they also wanted to focus their work on three unique communities. First in their home community of Fairfax County, secondly to the far more rural town of Winchester in the western part of the state, and finally to Dorchester County, where they had bought a second home in 2015.

And over the last few years, the Wyatt Foundation has made it one of their principal objectives to triple the reading test scores for young children in Dorchester. After the Wyatts’ due diligence in studying the challenges, the hiring of former Mace’s Lane Middle School principal Jymil Thompson, and affiliating itself with the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, this radical new approach kicked off last month. 

In his Spy interview, John talks about the nucleus of the Wyatt Foundation, his rationale in making Dorchester a priority, and how he and Janice will be measuring success over the next few years. 

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. For more information about The John and Janice Wyatt Foundation please go here.

When one thinks about the Women & Girls Fund, and what they have accomplished during their twenty years of existence, it is quite understandable to notice a tear in one’s eye. For two decades, the Fund has dedicated itself to supporting some of the Mid-Shore’s most innovative and successful programs to not only lift women and girls but empower them for a brighter future.

Behind this remarkable story is the Women & Girls Fund founder Alice Ryan. With the help of friends and a passion to find a way to support women and girls at a time when resources were few and far between, Alice worked with the Mid-Shore Community Foundation to form this unique organization in 2002.

And now with a history of over $800,000 in grants and a $1 million endowment, the Fund has become one of the Mid-Shore’s most respected philanthropic organizations. Beyond their direct support, the Fund has taken seriously the task of working with their beneficiaries to become stronger, more independent organizations and at the same time have developed creative ways to nurture a new generation of women philoinatioposits.

In light of these extraordinary accomplishments, the Spy will be working with the Women & Girls Fund board members over the next year to put a well deserved spotlight on the causes they support and the special women leaders that lead those efforts.

We begin this “Twenty Years and Counting” series with founder Alice Ryan. Last week, we sat with Alice at the Fund’s offices in the Bullitt House in Easton to understand her original motivation in starting the program, what the Fund has accomplished over the last twenty years, and her hopes for the Women & Girls Fund as it enters its next twenty years of existence.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Women & Girls Fund please go here.

One of the inevitable questions that every artist will be asked in the years to come is what impact the Covid pandemic had on their work.

This traumatic health crisis has dramatically changed the lives of all humans, but it seems to have had an enormous impact on artists in particular. Unexpectedly forced to retreat from daily routines, many found that this involuntary isolation opened a creative door which moved them into totally new directions.

That has certainly been the case with Stephen Haynes. The well-known Plein Air artist, who has been represented by the Trippe Gallery in Easton for many years, found himself far removed from his professional duties as a commercial creative director over the last two years. And like many, he began consuming countless hours of podcasts and websites with this newly found idle time.

And it was during this time that Haynes stumbled on a website entitled, “This Person Does Not Exist.”

Using the power of a warehouse full of computers, and a software program using artificial intelligence, the website creates photographic images of faces that were entirely the product of computation. In short, none of these people ever lived on this planet.

Beyond the fact that he found himself totally amazed at the results, Stephen started to envision another possible step for these artificial souls. In due course he started to doing portraits based on these images.

But it didn’t end there. In the artist’s mind, he could see yet another step where his portraits would be reduced to pixels again, and feed back into the same computers that had created the first image and using an entirely new algorithm produce another series of endless new faces.

The Spy caught up with Stephen via Zoom last week to hear more about his Portraits of People That Don’t Exist project.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Stephen Haynes please go here. For the Trippe Gallery please go here.

Over the last three years, Trappe Town Council member Brian Schmidt has had a first-row seat, or some would say, on the frontlines of an ongoing debate about the Lakeside residential community development on the east side of Rt. 50 in that small town. First, as part of the town’s Planning Commission and then as an elected member of the town council, Brian not only participated in legislative conservations about the project but also unwittingly became a modest expert in wastewater treatment plants and their technology along the way.

Brian’s intense dive into wastewater treatment is, he says, a simple extension of his approach to business challenges in general after almost two decades of running a successful catering business. But it’s clear from the Spy’s interview with Brian earlier this week that the real motivation is his long history and love for Trappe itself.

Born and raised in Talbot County with grandparents and summertime memories in Trappe well before he and his wife decided to raise their family there, Brian Schmidt takes his role of stewardship of the town and its future very seriously.

And because of those reasons, it’s safe to say that he’s more than troubled by some of the misunderstandings surrounding the development and the thoughtful role the Town of Trappe has played to ensure his community’s environmental integrity.

This video is approximately nineteen minutes in length. 

Something really great will happen on March 28th in St. Michaels around 10 am in the morning. With a modest number of spectators, quite a few proud board members, and perhaps the entire staff of Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum on hand, one of the largest cranes in the Mid-Atlantic will slowly and very carefully lift the new Maryland Dove into the Chesapeake Bay waters for the first time.

Painstakingly built by the CBMM talented boat builders and volunteers to replicate as much as possible the 44-foot vessel that arrived on the Chesapeake Bay(along with its sister ship, The Ark) in 1634,  it carried  passengers who would form the State of Maryland and become one of the state’s iconic symbols of the colony’s earliest days.  

Set to replace the current replica in St. Mary’s, which James B. Richardson built in a shipyard near Cambridge in 1978, the new Dove represents an extraordinary partnership with CBMM and Historic St. Mary’s City. Working together over the last two years, the two cultural institutions have used their combined resources to bring back to the Chesapeake Bay this extraordinary relic.

After the Dove hits the water next week, it will embark on its maiden journey over the St. Mary’s, where it will be permanently on display when not visiting Chesapeake Bay port towns every year.

As the CBMM prepares for an emotional send-off, the Spy wanted to talk to the Museum’s curator, Pete Lesher, and Historic St. Mary’s City’s director of education, Peter Friesen, to help our readers understand the significance of the Dove in Maryland’s history, including the tragic consequences these new white settlers had on the Native-American community and culture. 

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum please go here. For information about Historic St. Mary’s City please go here.