Hayden Anderson saw his job, at its core, as bringing Mainers together to share and discuss ideas.

Anderson, 51, has been executive director of the Maine Humanities Council for 10 years. During that time, he and the council’s staff have worked to create opportunities for people from around the state to talk about books, poetry, history and other topics. Anderson says his hope is that through these connections, people might better understand each other, their worlds and their problems.

Anderson, who lives in Scarborough, is stepping down from his post in July. During his tenure, the council has awarded more than $1.7 million in grants to Maine nonprofit groups. The organization, based in an office on Brighton Avenue in Portland and with a full-time staff of 11, has an annual budget of $1.9 million, largely from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but money also comes from private fundraising and foundations, some earned income and the state.

A nationwide search for his successor is being conducted.

In a news release announcing Anderson’s departure, chairperson Mazie Hough said the council’s board was “thankful for Hayden’s leadership” and praised the connections he’s made with cultural organizations and people around the state.

“We are in an excellent position to face the challenges of the future and will offer someone the extraordinary opportunity to build on what Hayden has helped us develop over the last 10 years,” Hough said in the release.

Anderson, a native of Londonderry, New Hampshire, holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He has worked in fundraising, as a capital campaign and development manager for a summer camp in New Hampshire and as development director for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Portland. He was interim executive director of ILAP before getting the job at the Maine Humanities Council.

Anderson said he’s leaving now – without another job lined up – because it feels like “it’s someone else’s turn” to lead the organization.

“When you have the privilege of being in a role like this, it’s not handed to you for you to keep it. It’s for you to do your best while you have it then give the next person their turn, ” Anderson said.

Anderson took some time recently to answer questions about what the Maine Humanities Council does, how it has weathered the pandemic and what its future potential might be. This interview has been edited.

Hayden Anderson, outgoing executive director of the Maine Humanities Council, working in his Portland office. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Q: What is the Maine Humanities Council?

A: We’re the state of Maine affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress Center for the Book. It’s our work to bring the humanities to the people of Maine. We do that through programming and grant-making. I think of us as the bookish older sister of the Maine Arts Commission.

Q: What exactly does it do?

A: Our work, as I see, it is to create opportunities to get Mainers talking with each other about the things that matter. In large part how we do that is in partnership with organizations around the entire state. They might be public libraries, school districts or adult (education) programs. They might be domestic violence agencies. We do a lot of work at sites of the Department of Corrections.

What we do is bring programming where people can get together, often gathering around a book or around a poem. We use that book or that poem or that piece of history to try to understand each other better, to try to listen to each other better, try to unlock some of the problems that are facing us. The wonderful thing about being in a state like Maine is you if get a dozen people together in a town library, talking about a topic that matters, that can make a real difference in a community.

Q: Why is that important, especially now, in a pandemic and at a very divisive time?

A: In this place we’re in now, at least in the national culture, when we’re at our worst we can slip into this place where an exchange of bumper sticker slogans tries to pass itself off for robust civic debate. I think especially here in Maine, people really look out for each other here, people really do care for each other. When you’re helping someone shovel out their car, you’re probably not thinking about who they voted for in the last election. That gives us a lot to build on. Some of what the humanities council is doing is to try to quiet the noise, the noise that I think comes largely from the national scene and from people who are in the business of creating divisiveness.

Q: What are some of the specific Maine Humanities Council programs that you feel accomplished some of these things?

A: Almost 10 years ago, the NEH came to us and asked us to develop a reading and discussion program for military veterans, which is not something we’d ever done before. But we set our minds to it, and we developed a program that has since been replicated across the entire country. It’s a program for veterans from all different eras, all different conflicts, to come together, read literature together and to talk about it. (Early in the program) we used “The Odyssey” by Homer as the primary text. Veterans were able to use texts like Homer’s “Odyssey” as a lens through which to see and understand their own experiences of serving and coming home – it’s the story of warriors coming home. And what we heard from veterans is that made a substantial difference for them.

Four or five years ago, we offered this statewide initiative – and this is super nerdy – but it was inspired by the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment is the place in the Constitution that talks about citizenship (for African Americans after the Civil War), equal protection of the law and ensuring due process to all citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson, the (U.S. Supreme Court) case that established “separate but equal” as a piece of law for the United States – it in essence created the Jim Crow South – was a 14th Amendment case. Flash forward 50 years, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed that kind of segregation (by declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional) is a 14th Amendment case.

Getting groups together around the state, reading novels and looking at some history, we were really trying to trace the contours of how our American understanding of freedom changed over the course of a 150 years. What the nation’s understanding of due process is, of what equal protection is, has been a changing idea over time.

Hayden Anderson, outgoing executive director of the Maine Humanities Council, says the job was never his to keep. He is seen at the council’s Portland office.  Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Q: Where do you get people to participate in humanities council programs?

A: In large part, one of the very core partner networks for us are public libraries across the state. In any given year, we work with more than 100 different public libraries. In lots of towns in Maine, the library is the major institution in the town and the major gathering place in the town. Working with public libraries on that project on the 14th Amendment was big for us.

Q: How has the pandemic effected the work the Maine Humanities Council does?

A: Pre-pandemic, the Maine Humanities was totally committed to gathering together warm bodies in a room. But as it played out for the (council’s Maine Bicentennial programming in 2020) were were able to have speakers of all different kinds available. In another time, they’d be driving around to libraries to give those talks, but during the pandemic they were giving those talks online.

The staff here is amazing, and it was a matter of weeks before the Maine Humanities Council went from never having contemplated online programming before to getting as expert at it as they possibly could. Whenever post-pandemic arrives, whatever that even means anymore, I can guarantee that the humanities council is not going back to our old way of doing things.

We can’t wait to be able to gather people together in rooms again and be able to feel the energy that’s generated by people being in the same physical space, but from now on, there’s always going to be a place for virtual programming.

Q: What are some things you can do more effectively with a virtual program?

A: If you go to a Maine Humanities Council book group nowadays (online), chances are really good you’re going to see someone from the St. John Valley, up in Aroostook County, and you’re going to see someone from Wells or someplace in York County. Pre-pandemic, when we would think about connections, we’d think about the connections that get made when people are in the same room together. During the pandemic, we’ve learned that we can create something like those connections with people in far-flung places. That ability to connect people at a distance has been really important and just eye-opening. It’s something that we really want to hold on to.

For me, there is something that can be so intimate about a small online gathering, when it’s facilitated well. The connections can be so deep. I don’t know if it’s because everyone is looking over each other’s shoulders into their living rooms or if it’s because we all feel a little uninhibited. I’m in my house, and if anything goes wrong, I can just click a button and close my laptop.

The other big thing for us, we granted out since the start of the pandemic right around $1 million in federal funding to Maine nonprofit organizations who do cultural work. There are tiny little museums and historical societies in Maine, who have budgets of less than $50,000. They got by because they’d have their one fundraiser in the spring, which allowed them to make enough to pay their insurance and their oil bill for the year. Then COVID comes along, and they can’t do that annual fundraiser.

Q: What is your hope for the Maine Humanities Council going forward?

A: The current initiative is just getting underway, there’s actually a big program tonight. It’s an initiative we’re calling “What If?” We intend it as a way for Mainers to come together and be creative and try to envision what might be next, what we want to build and what kind of society and state we want to live in.

We’re trying to do that in a way that breaks out of some constraints. We want this to be thinking that is entirely free. The tool we’re using is afrofuturist literature, authors like Octavia Butler, Black authors who write speculative fiction, whether it’s science fiction, re-envisioning versions of the past or re-envisioning versions of the present day. These authors pose questions for us: What if all Black people received their 40 acres and a mule? What if we were to envision a future that includes everyone? We really want Mainers to have this opportunity to think as creatively and as expansively as possible.