Give them some Credit

Having already pivoted, OHPRI survived the pandemic by sticking doggedly to its new business plan

You would have been excused for guessing that the Oliver Hazard Perry would fall an easy victim to the pandemic. But under just-installed CEO Jonathan Kabak, OHPRI doggedly pursued its new path forward: workforce development and credit recovery. It may not be the business plan that its founders envisioned, but the future looks bright.

Marlinspike spoke to Kabak in early June.

Marlinspike: It’s been a while since we talked — before COVID — when you were new to the job, and OHPRI was in the midst of a major transition. I’m sure that that COVID didn’t do you any favors. I expect it brought you more and different challenges than the ones that you were already facing when you accepted this role!

Jonathan Kabak: I had just stepped into the leadership role as CEO. The organization had decided to reboot itself. I was brought in, and we embarked on this magical journey to find a place for ourselves in the universe!

We got through 2019 with some sailing and a big rig project, and 2020 was looking pretty bright — and then COVID happened. You’re right, it certainly didn’t make any of the existing problems easier. [Laughs] Nope. It presented new ones. It did present some pretty interesting and unique opportunities. There’s still challenges, and we’re not out of the woods yet, but I think it’s an exciting time to be us.

MS: Tell us about those opportunities, because that’s not something that I hear about COVID very often. Did you really feel like COVID presented you with something that maybe hadn’t occurred to you before?

JK: It presented us with some interesting opportunities to do things that we had already identified. It validated what we were thinking.

When we embarked on the reboot, we decided we wanted to be in the workforce development space. And during COVID, there was a sizable amount of workforce development funding that was released to up-skill and re-skill Rhode Islanders that had lost their jobs or were transitioning into new careers. So in some respects, we found ourselves at the right place at the right time.

And that wasn’t serendipitous. We wanted to be there. We had done a fair amount of research and data mining of everything from Brookings Institution reports to white papers from government agencies about what the need was.

The programs that the ship ran were always exceptional. The quality, the caliber, the impact on students — that was validated, both anecdotally and in written commentary and solicited feedback. The challenge was always, how do you pay for it? And here we found ourselves working in spaces that were well capitalized and presented some nice opportunities. So we ran a handful of workforce development programs for the state, and we continue to have conversations about expanding that portfolio of business. We developed some new programmatic relationships with schools that didn’t exist before.

To a certain degree, the pressure to not have to be up and running in full operational mode allowed us to invest in longer-term strategic initiatives because [during COVID] people were willing to say, “OK, you know, this isn’t gonna be a year of big productivity.” It allowed us to be creative in terms of what we were going to do, and what we were trying to do, and really assessing where we wanted to be at the end of COVID.

But if I look at the horizon of opportunity for us, I really like where we’re headed and I like what we’re doing. And I think that we are being seen as innovators in the space.

MS: So for OHPRI, you might describe COVID less as a pivot and more as an embracing opportunities you had already identified.

JK: The real pivot for us happened right before COVID. You know, there was some tacking back and forth, but I wouldn’t categorize our operations during COVID as a radical pivot from one thing to the other. I think we found ourselves executing the pivot that we had envisioned.

MS: So what is your programming going to look like this summer?

JK: We’re returning to what I call “mid-duration” voyages, right? Week-long programs. We have a number of programs that are funded through the Department of Education here in Rhode Island that are week-long residential programs for high school students, open to anybody that is enrolled as a student in the state, which is pretty exciting. The state has stepped up and said we recognize the value and opportunity in funding overnight, residential programming aboard the state’s flagship.

One program thematically is focused on the BIPOC (Black, Indiginous, People of Color) maritime history of the region. And the other one is an introduction to concepts in marine engineering. And that takes up the bulk of our July…

MS: What age groups are we talking about?

JK: Those are high school students: rising sophomores, juniors, seniors.

And then in late June, we have a trip to Maine scheduled to make good on some of our pre-COVID promises…

MS: Windjammer Days, up in Boothbay Harbor?

JK: Yep. And then we come right back down to do a program for teachers in partnership with the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s education department on the Gaspee affair and on the maritime history and heritage of Rhode Island.

We’re also working on a very bold credit-recovery initiative both at the state level and with a number of the local schools. We have partnered with all three (Aquidneck) Island school departments or school districts to create opportunities for credit recovery. This was something that we literally started with a week-long pilot, right before COVID shut everything down, but we sort of kept chipping away at, and we’ve had students that have achieved credit recovery and remediation through our afterschool programming and through our spring break programming.

So we have a student remediating geometry and chemistry on board right now, and they’re doing that through functional experience on the ship, building toolboxes or exploring chemistry through the mixing of two-part coatings and paints. We received a number of grants, which we’re about to put out a release on — we have to wait for the funders to announce it first — but that are investing in our continued exploration of this space and programming. We really see that as a tremendous success.

People are finally seeing the ship as platform and the organization as resource to solve some of the really big problems that we’re experiencing socially. The disengagement of students due to distance learning during COVID has multiplied existing weak points and failure points. If you look at who’s failing at greater rates, it’s socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, it’s students in the inner city, urban core, right? And to create programs on the Perry that are giving these students opportunity, allowing them to get school credit and see that there’s this bright, vast horizon of opportunity in front of them is incredible. And that’s what we’re doing right now.

I have students from Central Falls and Providence and East Providence, as well as students from here in Newport, and they’re not just learning how to turn wrenches or learning about electrical theory. They’re getting math credit and science credit, and we’re addressing need in a powerful way that I think will change the way students engage in sense of place. I mean, here in the Ocean State, every student should have a meaningful relationship with the ocean. And that is an incredible place for the Perry to be.

MS: You must be spending a lot of time at the State House these days.

JK: Not as much as I probably should be! But we recognize that if we’re the state’s flagship, we’re foolish not to have a meaningful engagement with the state at a number of different levels. And because we work with a number of different state entities and agencies, we recognize both the opportunity and value in that relationship.

MS: Fortunately it sounds like there’s people in the state government who appreciate the unique forum and the unique programming that you can offer.

JK: There are more and more every day. I mean, that has been an interesting challenge through COVID. The best selling mechanism is to get somebody on the ship to see what it can do. And that’s been hard during COVID where people have been working from home and not taking meetings in person. And, you know, every time it looks like people are kind of back to business, then it’s another round of, oh, we’re working from home again, or we’re not doing meetings. So there have been challenges in getting people to the ship. Once they get to the ship, they immediately recognize and realize what a marvelous platform it is.

A classic example of that is the Commissioner of Education, Angélica Infante-Green, who came to visit us during our spring break navigation program, and just was blown away by the capacity of what the ship could do and offer. Her brain just started going off, like “You should be engaged with our CTE programming… You should be doing this...”

It was great to see a leader at the state level really recognizing the capacity of what the ship has to offer.

MS: This is one of the few positive COVID stories I’ve heard. It sounds like it’s all coming together for you guys.

JK: I would like to say it’s a combination of good luck, good timing, and perseverance. You know, when we did the pivot, we said, “We want to focus on serving our community in Rhode Island.” One of the things that watching our [sail training] community over several decades now has taught me is that if you don’t build meaningful community engagement and local support, it’s hard to weather challenging times.

MS: That would be the Ocean Classroom lesson.

JK: But it’s also the positive lessons of South Street Seaport Museum and Ernestina-Morrisey and Elissa — there are any number of organizations where their volunteer population and local activism really helped the organization transition through challenging periods.

So we said, “We’re gonna work to serve more Rhode Islanders.” And that’s why we stopped going south. We said, “We want every Rhode Islander to have a meaningful relationship with the organization and the ship. We want the Perry to be seen as the statue of Liberty of Rhode Island. Iconic!

I think the interest from the state house and the various state agencies is a testament to our effort to build those relationships, because we recognize the importance of those relationships.

MS: I can easily imagine that people drive down from the state house to Fort Adams, get out of their cars and see the ship and say, “Wow.”

But to change topics a bit, I think there were people in Rhode Island, before your pivot, who believed OHPRI was building a full-rigged ship in order to run traditional longform sail training programs — similar to what SEA does what does or what Ocean Classrooms did. For those folks, your pivot must have run counter to what they had envisioned for this ship.

JK: One of my greatest joys is seeing many of those people that were involved in the early iterations of the organization be really excited about what we’re doing now. I wouldn’t suggest that they’re disappointed, or at least, they haven’t conveyed that to me. I think they’re really excited by what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and seeing the success we’re meeting with

One of the challenges is we don’t know what we don’t know. And for many of us in the sail training community, if that was the model you knew and understood, and that was the only one you knew and understood, that’s what you did! It’s been great to try new and different things and see those same people who were fierce advocates for that type of programming going, “We love to see what the ship is doing now. We get excited that you’re working in all these new and different spaces.” At the end of the day, what everybody involved in sail training really wants is the impact of the experience on the individual. And we are still impacting people in remarkable ways, in the same way that students come off of a long-form voyage and, and are impacted. It’s just we’re doing it differently. But the people are still excited about it.

MS: The Perry is a big, impressive vessel, and she’s also a complex vessel — probably the most complex in the American sail-training fleet. How did you find it, keeping up with maintenance and so forth, during the pandemic?

JK: I would push back on the complexity statement. Her systems are not overly complex. Her rig is sophisticated in that it’s a full-rigged ship, roughly modeled after the early 19th century. But within that, there’s not a tremendous amount of sophistication. Compared to some of the yachts that I used to manage that were donated to King’s Point, those were far more sophisticated vessels in terms of engineering systems. True, there’s volume that we have to deal with on the Perry. But the sophistication is not necessarily so advanced.

That being said, there are real challenges and, and keeping up on periodic maintenance has been a challenge throughout COVID. We’ve done as much as we can. And we continue to plug away. We’re headed to the yard shortly here for our first haulout in a couple years. I’m sure we’ll find stuff that we have to do, but it’s just sort of keeping on keeping on pushing right? I mean, what other choice do we have?

MS: Were you able to keep a crew on the vessel during COVID, or did you finally send people home?

JK: We never sent people home, because we never got to our full operational crew levels — we really haven’t been fully operational in the last few years. We had a skeleton crew that were ship-keeping and working with programming aboard, but we didn’t have our traditional 12 crew that would operate the ship if we were fully manned, which we’re looking to get back to shortly.

MS: How challenging is THAT? Everyone is really struggling to fill positions.

JK: As I said to a mutual friend of ours, if I had a dollar for every person that called me looking for crew, I could afford everything I wanted to do on my ship.

As you well know, I’ve spent a lot of time on the crew cultivation piece of this for our community. And this is a real challenge in the broader maritime industry. I think [our industry has] done some stuff that was shortsighted, and I think we’re also a victim of the broader challenges, which together have created this crisis.

MS: Let’s say there was a young person in Rhode Island who wanted to get on the Perry, who was interested in a maritime career, was interested in your workforce training programs. Where would they start?

JK: They can reach out to us directly at info@ohpri.org. They are welcome to send us a message on Facebook or Instagram. They can also go to the Rhode Island Department of Education’s website https://enrollri.org/acn and search our programming there. And that is the entry point for free programming directed at high school students in Rhode Island.

MS: And let’s say there was someone already launched in their maritime career who was looking for work?

JK: We are happy to talk with everybody at every level of their career, be it deck, or engine, and we are very committed to professional development, credentialing and licensure for our crew. So if you have a 100-ton and want a 200-ton, give me a call. If you have a 200-ton and want a 500-ton, give me a call. If you’re looking for leadership experience, or command time, not necessarily on the Perry, but through our partnership network of local operators who keep calling me, there’s lots of opportunities here in Rhode Island and through OHP. ❂

For more info on the full-rigged ship Oliver Hazard Perry, the largest civilian Sailing School Vessel in the United States, and her programs, visit OHPRI.org.