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This year on Giving Tuesday, in collaboration with our friends at Luke's Lobster, we’re reigniting our series, “A Few of Our Favorite Things,” highlighting the organizations, people, and places that we cherish—both here in Maine and beyond. To kick it off, we’re featuring four Maine nonprofits we admire, whose missions are focused on inclusion, trust, respect, and eliminating barriers to education and support in a variety of ways. Both today and throughout the year, we hope you’ll take some time to learn a bit about each of these wonderful organizations…

I first discovered Jay Fleming back in 2017 shortly after I became the Island Institute’s multimedia storyteller. My research led me to a contemporary counterpart who has been doing similar work for many years in the Chesapeake Bay region where the fisheries...

Whether you live on an island in one of the Great Lakes or off of the coast of Maine, the commute to and from your community is over water. However, ferry, water taxi, and air services provide more than just transportation to and from island communities. They act as emergency medical transportation, provide school and extracurricular transportation, and deliver mail and other essential freight such as groceries and prescriptions.

Throughout our nearly 40-year history, the Island Institute has often played a role to help connect Maine’s island communities to other, similarly situated communities in the U.S. and beyond. By participating in networks, learning exchanges, and even research publications, we’ve seen the value in helping Mainers expand their networks and even build their confidence as leaders by providing an avenue for them to share the stories of their hard work.

We work collaboratively with communities to tackle challenges and build resiliency. While this often means spending time in the places where we live and work, it also means focusing on what’s happening further inland at the State House. This “long” session of the Maine Legislature lived up to its name this year as significant legislative work happened well into mid-July. The policy landscape shifted dramatically during this session, with more than $300 million available to support economic and climate resilience work.

For the next feature in our ongoing series of Archipelago artist profiles, the Island Institute’s Lisa Millette introduces us to Maine jewelry maker, Gail Miller, whose upcycled scrap metal jewelry has been featured in Archipelago since it opened in 2000.

Today, we’re celebrating a delicious bivalve that grows in Maine’s cold, clean waters—the oyster. Oyster farming, and other types of shellfish and seaweed aquaculture, offer an array of benefits for our ocean and Maine’s island and coastal working communities. We asked three Maine oyster farmers 10 questions about their work on the water and what it means for our coast.

Since 2013, the Island Institute has been able to offer Geiger Scholarships to island students to help them pursue off-island enrichment experiences like summer camp or a semester abroad. Islesboro sophomore Dylan Frank, a Geiger scholar who also received a Compass Workforce Grant, recently spent his Spring semester aboard a schooner with Sailing Ships Maine and gained skills to help him pursue a career on the water.

The workforce shortage in Maine is nothing new, but it has become even more acute and highly visible as we emerge from the pandemic. In our work supporting Maine’s island and coastal communities, we've heard a lot about the workforce issues they are facing, and it is a top area of concern for the partners we work with. In response, we are broadening our education work to better focus on this critical issue.

For the next feature in our ongoing series of Archipelago artist profiles, the Island Institute’s Lisa Millette introduces us to encaustic painter, Helene Farrar, whose nature-inspired pieces create a profound connection to Maine and the world around us.