Welcome to the latest issue of Waves. It is a very special one as it is devoted to a person, a vision, a passion and a legacy: Alan Furth.
Effective December 31, Alan retired after 20 years of leadership with CCLC and more than 40 years of steadfast effort to improve lives in the Cobscook region through education. After a lifetime of dedication and devotion culminating in his work with CCLC and the vision for which it stands, Alan can look back with pride and a great sense of achievement. He leaves behind a strong organization, serving the Cobscook community and beyond. This is his legacy and we will honor it and build on it.
While he is no longer on staff, Alan will be staying on as an advisor to me. In the short time I have worked with Alan, I have come to respect and admire both him and his work. He is an inspiration and a friend.
Please join me in this celebration of Alan and his legacy. And stay tuned for exciting news about the future, coming soon!
With continuing appreciation and regard for all the friends of CCLC, I wish you a safe, happy and prosperous New Year,
Sebastian Teunissen, Executive Director
Alan Furth, A Lifelong Learning Journey
Parker Palmer, author of Courage to Teach, asserts that education is either life giving or death dealing. As a student and an educator, Alan Furth has experienced and witnessed both.
Alan’s life’s work has been dedicated to creating learning environments and opportunities that feed the living spark of human engagement and spirit. It is a calling informed by personal experience from both sides of Palmer’s knife-edge.
Alan has dedicated his career to experiential education. It is a model founded on the observation that when kids love something, the whole universe opens up from there, and learning follows naturally. If that spark of desire and love is missing, while education might still succeed for some, many will be left behind, disengaged and disempowered.
Alan is dyslexic. He was one of the countless kids who experience themselves as a problem that school couldn’t solve. He “couldn’t learn” the way he was expected to. Spelling and reading were particularly challenging. Teachers didn’t know how to help him and blocked access to the things he loved in order to “inspire” improvements. In 4th grade he wasn’t allowed to join the band with the justification, “he needs to focus on his reading first.” His mother’s parenting was blamed for his failure.
When you live with a learning difference that you don’t understand, that no one around you understands, you experience failure hundreds of times a day – in all the failing grades, in each slash of a red pen, in a word, a nuance, you are reminded that you don’t fit in or measure up.
Alan reflects, “I think we all want to be good at something. By 6th grade, I was discovering that I was skilled at being bad.” Between 1965 and 1970, Alan continued to fail in school and to excel in “extracurricular” digressions. By his junior year, he was tired of the emptiness of it all. “I didn’t have the right tools for life as I knew it. It seemed I didn’t belong in the world. When you can’t crack the learning code, the whole system feels unjust and uncaring. I started to get really tired of everything. And, as I approached adulthood, life out of school was starting to loom large. I had no idea what I was going to do—what I could do.”
The saving grace for Alan came when a good friend and neighbor, Aida Bound, did an intervention. She called a meeting with Alan and his parents and, sitting in the Furth family living room, asserted, “If we don’t get Alan out of here, we’re going to lose him.”
He was ready for a change. His parents agreed and were able to secure the services of an educational consultant who listened closely to Alan. What do you love, she asked. The one thing he could reach for was the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. He proclaimed he wanted to be an oceanographer like Cousteau. The meeting yielded a handful of catalogues for experiential schools—and a new landscape of options for learning opened that finally sparked hope for Alan. He applied for and was accepted into the Trailside Country School, a traveling school entering its third year and which would later blossom into the Audubon Expedition Institute (AEI).
In September 1971, Alan laced up his hiking boots, hoisted his pack to his shoulders, and set off on a learning adventure that changed his life. He joined sixteen other students and three faculty, for a full year of traveling around North America, venturing deep into national parks and wildlands, doing service, meeting and learning from naturalists, park rangers, miners, loggers, folk singers, cultural leaders, activists, and farm workers—and so much more. They cooked all their own food, camped in all weather, and sang around a campfire every night.
“All those school years as a failure, and suddenly I could leave all that behind. I was loving learning. I became a reader. I got a sense of what I could contribute to a learning community – to any community.”
Alan’s experience with Trailside laid the foundation for the career in education that eventually followed. In 1978 he graduated with high honors from the University of Maine, Orono with a degree in child development and a teaching certification. Six years later, he had earned an M.Ed with a focus on experiential education.
In the early ‘70’s, the founders of Trailside moved their base of operations from Vermont to property now owned by CCLC * on Straight Bay in Lubec, Maine and in 1978 expanded to become AEI – the Audubon Expedition Institute. Alan was invited to join AEI’s leadership team and to develop and run expeditions through the Institute. This invitation brought Alan to the Cobscook Bay region, which has been his home ever since. In addition to working with AEI, that year Alan also began his public school career, teaching 5th & 6th grade in Lubec.
Alan was committed to finding a way to bring the kind of impact experienced by learners of all ages and abilities on AEI into practice to serve people in his home region. In 1998, as Alan was leaving AEI after 20 years, an initiative was coalescing in the Cobscook Bay region led by parents and grandparents of young children who wanted “a better school experience” for their kids than what they felt awaited them in the region’s schools. They were determined to keep the lights shining literally and spiritually in their kid’s eyes and hearts, and they asked Alan if he would help them start a school.
The group was comprised of about twenty-four individuals from the many small communities that ring Cobscook Bay including the Passamaquoddy Tribe and Campobello Island, New Brunswick. In January 1999, with Alan facilitating, they launched a weekly education discussion group dedicated to finding some way to bring radical improvements to teaching and learning to serve kids and people of all ages in the Cobscook region. They shared and examined personal stories of experience in education and assessed factors that contributed to turning the lights on or off—giving life or dealing death. They spent six months researching models of education from around the world and across time that had led to substantive and sustained social change.
This group set out the original guiding vision for Cobscook Community Learning Center and, during a weekend retreat in October of that year, collectively committed to do everything they could to bring the CCLC to life—to establish the center as a new feature on the community landscape that would support and nurture people from near and far for generations to come. In 2001, Alan was selected to serve as CCLC’s first executive director, a position he held for twenty years.
The boy who didn’t understand why he couldn’t crack the learning code became a man who, for over four decades, has inspired and encouraged so many people, including many kids with learning differences like his own. And, for his contributions to innovation in education, in 2011, Alan was recognized with UMaine’s prestigious Alumni Career Award.
“Given the right conditions, there is a resilience we all have. The gift of right relationship, working together—we’re able to grow. Trees grow around things that impact them and in the adaptation, become unique—beautiful. I had to grow around a lot of things. Anyone with learning differences has to. The daily experience of failing in school crippled me in many real ways, but I don’t feel encumbered by that now. I feel strong and good and grateful to be able to work in settings where what I can bring makes a real and measurable difference. To have loved the career I’ve had: what a gift! I’m so proud of what the learning center has become. And I am so grateful for the incredible good company I have enjoyed throughout the journey and the broad support that’s been extended over the years.
“I see the CCLC as being like a good song. It’s deep and resonant. It’s beautiful. You want to come back and experience it again and again. You want to learn it, play it, make it your own, ply your version together with others. And as that happens, to the degree that that happens, CCLC lives on, fresh and as alive today as it ever has been.”
*CCLC Board Member Frank Trocco joined the faculty and leadership of Trailside in 1972. In 2012, he initiated the process of giving his Straight Bay property to CCLC so that the property would continue to be blessed with the educational vitality realized during the years that Trailside and AEI groups visited the land. Through his initiative, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the Butler Conservation Fund, Trudy Vandell, and others combined resources to protect CCLC’s 50-acre Straight Bay property for outdoor education, traditional fishing access, and educational purposes in perpetuity.
Cobscook Experiential Program
“I choose to be at [Cobscook] because it is a place where I can learn and prepare for adulthood and be myself. There are many great opportunities that I have here that many do not.” –Cobscook Experiential Program student
Cobscook’s model is largely based on the Audubon Expedition Institute, a program that Alan joined in high school and where he began to chart his course for an impressive future. Students are back from holiday break and the campus is buzzing once again with their great energy. The second semester starts on January 21st and there’s still time to enroll in our transformative high school program for the spring semester! Contact Kara McCrimmon, Head Teacher, ASAP for more information: 733-2233 or kara@thecclc.org.
A group from the Island Institute took advantage of our large indoor spaces and audio-visual technology.
Testimonials from Recent Campus Guests
“The environment, simple, beautiful, inviting, eco-conscious. Welcoming staff - great facilities for a large group, ability to borrow a guitar - lovely fire ring!”
“I enjoyed the setting, the classrooms, the light, the smells, the coziness of the library and the consideration for our every need from you, our hosts. It was nice to have the place to ourselves and we formed a very tight bond because of it.”
“Incredible facilities. Great people.”
Contact Daphne Loring, Assistant Manager, to book or learn more about using our campus for your event, meeting, or retreat: daphne@thecclc.org or (207) 733-2233.
Recent Groups on Campus Included:
Sunrise County Economic Council Summit: 100 people gathered to learn about economic trends in Washington County.
University of New England: launched their new international professional science Master’s program in Ocean Food Systems
Island Institute: Over 50 students, staff, and family chaperones from Maine’s outer islands converged for three days of activities based from our campus.
Jonesport 1st-graders on their fall Forest Friday field trip. Photo courtesy of Maine Outdoor School.
TREE "Forest Fridays" with Maine Outdoor School
On a chilly day in early December, Jonesport 5th and 1st graders, their teachers, and a couple parents bundled up and joined Cobscook TREE partner Maine Outdoor School (MOS) for an end of fall field trip to a local park. These students and their teachers have been enjoying over an hour per week of “Forest Fridays” with MOS this fall thanks to this local partnership.
Students hiked with a buddy from a different grade and compared the forest at the park to the forest they explore weekly during Forest Fridays at school.
When reflecting on the best parts of Forest Fridays this fall, a 5th-grader said, “I love being able to go outside to learn every week—I like “outdoor school” as a concept.” A 1st-grader shared that “making stuff in the woods with friends is way more fun than playing video games inside.”
Stay tuned for a big announcement on January 15th!
Alan is dyslexic. He was one of the countless kids who experience themselves as a problem that school couldn’t solve. He “couldn’t learn” the way he was expected to. Spelling and reading were particularly challenging. Teachers didn’t know how to help him and blocked access to the things he loved in order to “inspire” improvements. In 4th grade he wasn’t allowed to join the band with the justification, “he needs to focus on his reading first.” His mother’s parenting was blamed for his failure. 
The group was comprised of about twenty-four individuals from the many small communities that ring Cobscook Bay including the Passamaquoddy Tribe and Campobello Island, New Brunswick. In January 1999, with Alan facilitating, they launched a weekly education discussion group dedicated to finding some way to bring radical improvements to teaching and learning to serve kids and people of all ages in the Cobscook region. They shared and examined personal stories of experience in education and assessed factors that contributed to turning the lights on or off—giving life or dealing death. They spent six months researching models of education from around the world and across time that had led to substantive and sustained social change. 
This group set out the original guiding vision for Cobscook Community Learning Center and, during a weekend retreat in October of that year, collectively committed to do everything they could to bring the CCLC to life—to establish the center as a new feature on the community landscape that would support and nurture people from near and far for generations to come. In 2001, Alan was selected to serve as CCLC’s first executive director, a position he held for twenty years.
