After four years as the first executive director of the Provincetown Commons, Jill Stauffer is retiring, set to leave the organization in late February.
“She is so hard-working,” says Rebecca Orchant, the chair of the Commons board. “She’ll clean the bathrooms and we’ll say, ‘Please, Jill, hire a hire cleaning service,’ and she’ll say, ‘I’ll just do it. It’s easy.’ She did whatever it took to get this place started.”
Stauffer has been with the Commons since 2018, serving first as a consultant when the community arts center was just the seed of an idea: to take the derelict building at 46 Bradford St. and renovate it into spaces for art studios, coworking, exhibitions, and meetings in a town where space is increasingly hard to come by.
“It was really simple,” says Dave LaFrance, director of operations at the Commons. “We were just giving people what they had been asking for.”
When Stauffer decided to devote herself to the Commons full-time and applied to be executive director in early 2019, the choice was obvious. “She was overqualified in the best way,” says board member Terrence Meck, president of the Palette Fund, the grantmaking organization that gave the Commons its first $150,000 in June 2017.
Stauffer had worked for over two decades in corporate America, including for the preceding 11 years as Comcast’s vice president of customer care. “She wasn’t looking for a full-time career, but she wasn’t looking to retire either,” says Meck. “She was the perfect person to get this place up and running.”
“She has a lot of organizational prowess at a very, very high level,” says Orchant. “My favorite thing about Jill is that you see her and you’re like, ‘This is a real adult, professional lady.’ But then you spend 10 minutes with her, and she’s cracking jokes, making you feel so welcomed and comfortable. Plus, her hair always looks amazing.”
Stauffer oversaw the complete renovation of the Commons building, once the site of the Governor Bradford School. “When Jill and I first went into the building, it was so moldy and disgusting,” says board president Pete Hocking. “Nothing had been done with it in close to a decade. We both joked that we wanted to turn on our heels, but it was so compelling, the idea of bringing this building back.”
Then, just after the renovation was complete, the pandemic hit. “We opened our doors in January 2020,” says Meck. “Then we had to shut them just as quickly.” But Stauffer kept everyone’s spirits up, leading virtual meetings for members and artists.
“She just naturally pulls community around her,” says Hocking. “Every step of the way, Jill took a deep breath and went on to the next task.”
Stauffer laid every building block for the Commons. “She figured out what our basic system as a nonprofit would be,” says Hocking. “She got all that done while also always finding time to engage everyone who walked through the building.”
“I’ve never met someone who’s so joyfully willing to learn every single thing and every single person’s name and their partner’s name and their dog’s name and what job they do,” says Orchant. “She has an encyclopedic mind for people. You can’t teach that.”
Stauffer, who grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., first landed in Provincetown as a 22-year-old in 1985, the summer after graduating from Arizona State University. “I needed to be in a welcoming space for LGBTQ people,” says Stauffer.
“I came with just $200 in my pocket,” she says. “I was all by myself. But people took care of me right away.” It was that first summer in Provincetown that led Stauffer to apply for the executive director job at the Commons 30 years later: “I wanted to give people the same welcome I had once gotten.”
She came back the following two summers, working at Gabriel’s, the Lobster Pot, and the now-closed Snug Harbor. In 1987, she moved to Boston for a job at UPS. “I started out as a package car driver, and by the end of my 10 years there I was in management,” she says. “I was in the closet for many years at UPS, which is a crack-up because I was driving this big, huge truck. I mean, come on, it was so obvious.”
In 1999, she went to work at Comcast, and in 2007 was promoted to vice president, overseeing 500 employees serving over 2 million customers. While at Comcast she also volunteered on the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign.
She and her wife, Cydney Berry, bought their house in Provincetown in 2004 and moved here full-time in 2019. Describing the transition from a corporate environment to a nonprofit, Stauffer says, “It was heaven.”
“I still kept my work ethic,” she adds. “I certainly wasn’t taking it easy. But I could see that I was helping people, giving them resources they had long been asking for, and that felt amazing.”
“Jill has brought us to a very good space,” LaFrance says. “The ship is in the water, and we’re sailing.”
Meck says that the timing of Stauffer’s retirement coincides with the Commons launching the Urvashi Vaid Changemakers Fund, named for the late LGBTQ activist who was instrumental in creating the Commons. The fund will provide gathering space and seed grants to initiatives “that foster community engagement and tackle the most pressing challenges faced by Provincetown,” according to the Commons website. Stauffer raised the $350,000 that will launch the fund. “Whoever steps into the director role next will decide how that money supports activism,” says Meck.
“Operationally and financially, I was good at launching the Commons,” says Stauffer. “But I think it would be great for the next director to have lots of know-how in programming and the arts.”
Stauffer says she isn’t going anywhere. “Jill can’t sit still for more than two minutes,” says LaFrance. “She’s right around the corner, and she’ll still be connected with the Commons in some way or another.”
“I’ll be doing the usual retirement stuff,” says Stauffer, “cycling, improving my golf game. But I have a beehive in the back yard of the Commons, so I’ll be around to keep the bees.”
