Grace Morey, a freshmen at Deer Isle Stonington High School, inspects a GoPro camera attached to a rig, after pulling it up from the bottom of the ocean floor in Northeast Harbor. Footage from the camera will help her group determine the level of pollution across various points in the marina. Photo Thalassa Raasch

Two programs supported by MaineCF connect students to their communities and help pave paths toward ocean or forestry careers

Students and faculty at five Maine high schools have a big question on their minds: How can we use forests to positively impact local communities?

It’s also a timely question as Maine moves past the sight of shuttered paper mills to shape a future for prized natural resources and build a workforce that can sustain its economy.

The teens and teachers are partners in the Maine Forest Collaborative, a new initiative from a MaineCF grantee. Its goal: to help students bridge the world where they learn to the world where they live.

“We really felt like this was a time to start engaging young people in the possibilities and potential of careers in their forest-placed communities in the future – to sort of turn the light around from dismal to bright,” said Korah Soll, founding director of the Rural Aspirations Project in Bar Harbor.

The new program was launched in classrooms this year at Greenville, Jackman, Piscataquis, Buckfield, and Telstar high schools. The Maine Forest Collaborative builds on the success of a similar effort that helps students explore their connections to the ocean. Now in its sixth year, the Eastern Maine Skippers Program has expanded to include nine high schools and more than 80 students from 52 communities. (See related story.)

“What we found from the Skippers program is that students are just wildly innovative,” says Soll. “They have these ideas about what their communities could potentially be in the future, and often those are ideas that adults haven’t thought of or they’re not considering.”

The Forest Collaborative curriculum connects students with entrepreneurs, industry, civic, and business leaders. It also teaches them to explore multiple pathways – from science and research to policy, grassroots organizing, or maybe conflict resolution – while they work toward solutions.

This semester, as they seek to answer their question, students will define their local regions by creating interactive maps and investigating how their communities historically used surrounding forests. They’ll interview local folks about what’s happening now and supplement their findings with oral histories they will present in May.

Some of the students are fourth-generation loggers and others have grown up in forestry families with parents who worked in wood products industries or mills. Others have no direct connection to the forest industry.

“Some families were hesitant about having their sons and daughters go into that field, not knowing what the forecast was,” says Soll. “Teachers were saying, ‘We’ve been steering our kids in the wrong direction because we didn’t know there were these opportunities for students.’”

Soll says the programs inspire students “to become the leaders that we need them to be. It’s not only empowering for the students, but it’s also empowering for the community and practitioners because they start to see that there is all this excitement in youth. And we don’t often connect those dots.”

She has high hopes the program will guide students to develop a sense of place for themselves and “see there is a future for themselves here and make a great living and have a great life here in rural Maine.”

And those students who do go away, Soll adds, will know and understand there’s still a place for them.