Welcome to the fall edition of Cobscook Currents! In challenging times like these, we all rely on safe harbors—those calm places that provide the opportunity to reflect and reassess our navigation forward. As the Board Chair since this past summer, I have been facilitating our team process of bringing Cobscook Institute back into the safe harbor of collective, community-based work—to realign the organization for these times and around our core values of peace, honesty, respect, and empowerment— and invite the next generation into our work.

While Cobscook Center has been closed to the public for community programming since COVID-19 came to Maine in March 2020, we have continued our commitment to community programming via virtual formats for the past several months. A big thanks goes out to the Maine Arts Commission and Maine Community Foundation’s Belvedere Traditional Handcrafts Fund for helping make so much of our community programming accessible.

Now into its second decade of programming, the Cobscook Experiential Program for High School Students is enjoying steady enrollment. When I arrived at the beautiful Cobscook Institute campus on a recent foggy autumn morning to talk with students, they were preparing for their first canoe trip of the school year.

With a background in pottery, Michelle was pleased to learn of our pottery studio when she returned to the area in 2016. In exchange for studio time, she began making mugs for Cobscook Institute, which helped raise scholarship funds for community programs. She also has taught many pottery classes here.

Our March edition of Cobscook Currents is usually where we thank all the many donors that made our work possible in the previous year, so please enjoy reading and celebrating their names here. Thank you. Together, you keep all our programs and activities going.

This work only happens with you.

In our August 2020 edition of Cobscook Waves, we announced the exciting development of transferring TREE to the capable oversight of a collaborative research partnership between the University of Maine and Colby College, known as the Rural Vitality Lab. TREE’s branches are now able to reach even farther under the continued leadership and teamwork of Director Brittany Ray and Trauma Responsive Educational Specialists Laura Thomas and Ashley Cirone.

Around the world, we are seeing dramatic inequities and injustice resulting from human influence on the many systems of which we are all a part: increasing storm intensities, sea level rise, human migration— and a global pandemic...the list goes on. In order to change these systems, we need to better see the systems we exist within. This is where the new Transformations Systems Mapping & Analysis Working Group comes in.

Jennifer Kane, Founder and CEO of Empower Philanthropy, has been a strategic partner of Cobscook Institute for the past four years. Her practice at Empower Philanthropy emphasizes connecting donors to leading social entrepreneurs working on the causes they care about, and vice versa.

Thanks to each and every one of you who have contributed financially to help create the safe harbor impacts within our communities, and within Cobscook Institute itself, that are reflected upon in this edition of Cobscook Currents. Cobscook Institute’s ongoing legacy of creating responsive educational opportunities that strengthen personal, community, and global well-being is only possible with your generous support. To you, our continued supporters, we need you now more than ever. If you are new to Cobscook Institute and find these storylines inspirational, please become a member of our absolutely essential circle of support.