Sarah Curran, the Island Fellow on Peaks Island, has studied in India, lived on the island of Maui, and spent time during many summers as a teenager working on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Bridger, South Dakota.

Curran received her undergraduate degree in anthropology from Skidmore College, and last year earned a Master’s degree in community planning and development from the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service. For Curran, becoming an Island Fellow was a natural outgrowth of her interest in healthy communities — an interest that was first sparked during summers spent on the reservation in South Dakota.

“My Aunt Madeline was a minister in South Dakota. When I was around 14, she and another minister started a work camp in Bridger — the town to which survivors of Wounded Knee had fled — where young people from white and native communities would come together to work on community projects.”

Among the important lessons from this experience “was that I got to know this very small community on a personal level. All of the expectations and preconceptions that you have just don’t hold up when you’re involved in this way.”

Fast forward to 2005, when Curran, a student just about to complete her graduate degree at the Muskie School, got together for a cup of coffee and a chat with Dana Leath, the community outreach coordinator for the Island Institute. Leath’s sister-in-law, Curran’s boss during her graduate assistantship at USM, had encouraged the meeting, and the two talked of their mutual interest in the dynamics of small communities. “I loved what Dana had to say about the Fellows program,” says Curran. “She was as interested in community development as I was.”

Following graduation, Curran was selected by the Island Institute to receive the Willoughby Stuart Fellowship Award. In September of 2005, she went to live on Peaks Island, where she has immersed herself in a host of activities and projects, guided by a team of enthusiastic island community advisers.

Her first assignment was to work with the Peaks Island Land Preserve, which owns and is charged with protecting approximately 120 of the island’s 720 acres. “The Land Preserve has acquired a lot of properties, and now the focus is on stewardship,” Curran said. “One goal is to develop land management policies that are based on what is really special about these places.”

Her work with the land preserve has also created opportunities for collaborations with the Peaks Island School, a K-5 school of 50 students.

Recently, the students have spent time on the Ballfield Woods property owned by the land preserve, helping the volunteer land stewards care for the property and learning about the trees there to complement their classroom studies. Curran hopes that the project “will help connect the kids to their island. That’s how you nurture a sense of stewardship that hopefully will last as they grow older.”

“The commitment of the people I’m working with has been incredibly encouraging,” she says. Her advisers, including land preserve president Lynne Richard, board member Don Stein and Art Astarita of the Peaks Island Information Exchange, “always have time to get together with me to talk about an idea or help me with a project,” Curran notes.

Curran’s latest project is to put together an “island indicators” report, a collection of data about the economic, social and environmental conditions on all of Maine’s 15 year-round islands. Working with Machias-based Island Fellow Jeremy Gabrielson, Curran hopes the report, due out early in 2007, will help shine a light on both the successes and challenges facing island communities in Maine. The goal of the project is to collect baseline information that can then be updated by the Island Institute every two years.

Curran said her time on Peaks has been “an incredible opportunity,” both personally and professionally.

Kathy Westra is the Island Institute’s director of communications.