When the darkness deepens in the winter on islands, the transition from fleeting sun to bleak and cold can come quickly, especially if you have not been born to island living. During the past seven years, the Island Institute has placed 45 island fellows in 19 different island and working waterfront communities for one to two year assignments. The assignments vary, but community members structure and supervise the projects on which the resident fellows work. Five island fellows are spending their first winter “on island,” while another seven are veterans who have returned for a second winter.
Fellows come from all parts of the country and are recent college graduates with an undergraduate or master’s degree in an area of expertise for which community leaders who apply for a fellow’s placement have a demonstrated need. Fellows generally are placed to start new programs at schools, town offices, libraries or other community nonprofits, programs that in our experience have for the most part continued after the typical two-year fellowship ends. In a small town, a dedicated corps of volunteers always seems to have good ideas for addressing issues or responding to new challenges; but the smaller the community, the more over-extended everyone is. Fellows fill the gaps, bring new energy and experience to a community. Often serving as informal role models to young people, they’re especially welcome during the short days and long evenings of winter along this cold coast.
This year’s cohort of fellows is scattered Downeast between Machias, the Cranberry Isles, Swans and Frenchboro. In the Midcoast, fellows are serving on Islesboro, North Haven, Vinalhaven and Deer Isle-Stonington. In Casco Bay there are fellows on Chebeague, Long and Peaks. Our most far-flung fellow is on Fisher’s Island in Long Island Sound, an island community that faces many of the same challenges as Maine islands.
This year’s group of fellows began their service year in September. Over half of them are working to develop school or town technology programs, more often than not teaching town officials, residents or school students how to use Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping technology. We often say that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth ten thousand.
Island fellows, serving with local volunteers, including school children, have mapped town moorings, located and named roads for emergency planning purposes, identified wetlands and buffers for planning boards, specified important wildlife habitats and inventoried historic public rights of way and working waterfront access points. Maps make it possible to see the relationship between developable areas and places that should be conserved; they help towns and harbor committees track how much working waterfront access remains; how much has been converted to other uses.
Jeff Killian of Deer Isle-Stonington, for instance, worked with lobstermen to map important lobster habitat in the waters surrounding the island for a computer game he and high school teacher Tom Duym won a grant for, to teach ecology and economics to the island’s school children. On Vinalhaven, Sean Gambrel trained electric co-op linemen in advanced use of GPS to enable them to locate and repair power outages more efficiently. Sean has also mapped all island cemeteries and conducted an extensive well survey that he will map for the town.
Other fellows are utilizing technology as well. On Swan’s and Frenchboro, Siobahn Ryan, who grew up on the populous island of Martha’s Vineyard, is using new software to catalog and connect the collections between the school and town libraries on Swan’s as well as the library and historical society at Frenchboro. Anna Rubin on Long Island is computerizing the new library’s collection. On Chebeague, Carly Knight is helping to catalog the extensive historical society collection. On Peaks Island, Sarah Hennessey is helping to build a community website that will have a common calendar for community events and link key island organizations. And Ally Day at the Vinalhaven school is heading up a digital radio technology program that will link sea-voyaging students with their classmates back home.
Two of the most complex tasks second-year island fellows have undertaken include an inter-island affordable housing study and symposium that Alyson Mayo on Islesboro has been coordinating with a large number of island volunteers through the Island Coalition. On the Cranberry isles, Cyrus Moulton has helped coordinate the logistically complex task of helping collect, analyze and distribute the pieces of a comprehensive plan for an island town that consists of two very different island villages on Islesford and Great Cranberry, the summer community of Sutton Island and a new mainland town landing in Southwest Harbor.
One of the ways we get a sense of community “buy-in” for a particular fellowship is to ask island fellows to keep track of how many volunteer hours community members contribute to a particular project. The comparisons are apples to oranges in some cases — building an educational computer game is perhaps an inherently focused task — but a total of almost 2,000 volunteer hours have been catalogued for these programs during the past three months. Volunteers have contributed approximately 500 hours with the Cranberry Isles fellowship, 387 volunteer hours between Swan’s and Frenchboro’s library and historical society projects, 288 volunteer hours on Long Island’s town mapping and library projects, and 180 hours on the affordable housing program. These figures are a testament to the strength and vitality of these community programs.
One of the issues that determine how successful an island fellow will be is how, as a newcomer, he or she fits into a traditional, insular community. As a strategy, we encourage them to get involved with as many community activities as possible, beyond the scope of their work. Fellow Jeremy Gabrielson in Machias, for example, is serving as the entertainment coordinator for the 2006 Blueberry Festival. Jeff Killian runs the climbing wall program at the Deer Isle-Stonington School. Meredith Harr has started a Cub Scout pack. Stacy Gambrel helped lead a weeklong field trip on the Appalachian Trail. Cyrus Moulton is a music teacher at the Islesford School. Carly Knight has become an ice hockey coach on Chebeague, and Sarah Hennessey has joined the book club and a weight-lifting class and become a reading mentor on Peaks.
Winter is a make-or-break time when island fellows must integrate into the heart of their communities. As they communicate with us back in Rockland, we support them, help them strategize, make suggestions and problem-solve. They support each other during and after two-day fellows’ retreats. One of them recently wrote that when she feels isolated because of the solitary nature of her work, she has learned to allow herself “trips into the community — going to the store for a cup of coffee or swinging by to see the kids at the Rec Center” to deal with her seclusion. But Fellows are ultimately on their own, of course, and as another wrote, the best solution to her problems might just be to “stop griping and send up my suffering in prayer and to the souls in purgatory.” Welcome into the heart(s) of island winter.