Category: Blog

The Island Fellows Program is one of the signature programs of the Island Institute. Since 1999, the Island Fellows Program has placed college and master’s degree graduates in Maine’s coastal and year-round island communities for one to two years. Fellowships provide a unique opportunity for recent graduates to apply their skills and experience to help build sustainability within communities whose way of life and identity face many challenges. 

It’s “Industry Day” for our aquaculture business development group, and the plan is simple: bring together a group of twenty prospective aquaculturists from up and down the coast for a single day to tour as many aquaculture farms and meet as many industry members as possible.

The Island Institute’s Economic Development staff welcome you to this series of blog posts, a resource for island and coastal small businesses. To easily find future posts, go to the blog home page and select “economic development” from the drop down menu to filter blog posts by this topic, or go to islandinstitute.org/blog/economic.

Maddey Gates is the eldercare Island Fellow. She has lived and worked on eldercare initatives on Chebeague, North Haven, Swan’s Island, and now Vinalhaven during her fellowship. 
 
Close your eyes.  When I say “eldercare,” what comes to your mind?  What do you see, smell, and feel when I say “seniors,” “elders,” “nursing home,” or “residential care”? 

The Island Institute is partnering with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and Ocean Approved, the country’s first company to grow kelp for food, on an exciting new project with potentially big implications. As it grows, the kelp on Ocean Approved’s rafts in Casco Bay may capture enough CO2 to reduce the acidity of surrounding water and make shellfish grow better. The instruments measuring ocean chemistry were put in and outside of the farm a couple of weeks ago, and the first reading of CO2 levels is very promising.

2012 was a big moment in the Maine lobster industry, with an overabundance of lobster and a price crash in response. We started filming in 2013 and, at that point, we noticed that there was a lot more communication starting to happen between fishermen and scientists about changes they were seeing out on the water. The idea was to start capturing some of that, using the Climate of Change Workshop that the Island Institute hosted that summer as a jumping off point.