Museum Receives MPSJ Grant

For over three decades, RoAnn Costin has been working in the financial services and investments industries. Leading Wilderness Point Investments as managing director, RoAnn Costin splits her time between her professional and volunteer responsibilities on nonprofit boards. She serves on the board of trustees for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, one of four inaugural recipients of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program.

In September 2021, four grants from the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program marked the beginning of its Museum Partnerships for Social Justice initiative (MPSJ). This initiative assists and expands a group of organizations dedicated to anti-racist practices in art-centered projects. To this end, it supports art museums as they explore and develop anti-racist project models that function across the field.

Alongside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an organization sharing the beauty of the arts and promoting the pursuit of knowledge, MPSJ awarded grants to the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro, the Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Memphis-Brooks Museum of Art. For 18 months, pairs of grantee museums plan on working closely in the development of anti-racist projects. The Weatherspoon Art Museum and Mississippi Museum of Art are partners, while the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum partners with the Memphis-Brooks Museum of Art.

Mobile Vision Clinics

The managing director of Wilderness Point Investments in Massachusetts, RoAnn Costin invests in early and expansion-stage non-durable product and retail companies, such as Sarah Flint. Possessing upwards of 45 years of leadership experience, RoAnn Costin shares her expertise with several corporations as a board of directors member. This includes 2020 On-Site.

2020 On-Site is a mobile eye clinic offering telehealth and neighborhood visits to companies and schools. It also provides an online shopping and virtual styling consultation services. All mobile vision clinics held by the company are state-of-the-art clinics capable of full optometric operations. According to the Boston-based business, mobile vision clinics can provide the same autorefraction, subjective refraction, and keratometry measurements as in-office optometrists. Investigators collected this data over the course of a month and released it in August 2021.

The company evaluated eye examination information from 20 individuals between 18 and 60 years of age. Each of these subjects received both an office and mobile vision clinic exam lasting for 30 minutes. Patients all received subjective refraction, autorefraction, and keratometry testing during their visits, thus granting investigators the data they needed for comparing the two testing environments.