from the sea up A history worth celebrating

Island Institute’s 40th prompts look ahead

BY KIM F. HAMILTON

WHEN I JOINED Island Institute as president a little over three months ago, we were preparing for our 40th birthday as an organization serving Maine’s islands and coastal communities.

We were founded in 1983—the year the English rock band, The Police, topped Billboard’s year-end “hot singles” with “Every Breath You Take” and the year that 10-year-old Samantha Smith from Manchester began a Cold War peace mission through her correspondence with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.

Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi took best picture at the Academy Awards, Michael Jackson’s international sensation Thriller was released, and the grip of a global recession was finally loosening around the U.S.

It was a curious time for an organization focused on Maine’s islands to come into this world. The challenges and cultural references of the early 1980s seem so very global.

From today’s perspective, the founding of Island Institute was prescient. Had we known then that the Gulf of Maine would become one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world, that access to affordable housing stood to become one of the defining challenges facing coastal communities and islands across the country, and that a simple demographic truism (more deaths than births over time can lead to severe labor shortages) would threaten our economic growth, we would have wondered what took us so long.

As a relative newcomer to Island Institute, my read of its history suggests that we have always been ahead of major trends.

Already in 1985, the Institute had launched our island schools program to ensure that even the smallest schools remained at the heart of community. We partnered with the state in 1988 to turn uninhabited islands into destinations for recreational use, eventually incubating the Maine Island Trail Association as its own organization.

Our advocacy in the mid-1990s led the U.S. postal service to reverse its decision to close post offices on several islands, thus guaranteeing access to this service that is even more critical today.

This foreshadowed our pioneering work to bring world class broadband to rural communities, including those at the end of the most distant peninsulas or on islands. We’re proud to have worked alongside more than 85 municipalities