Transcription of Maine Communities, #118
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recording in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Eleanor: If you show up and you have energy and ideas and you’re just willing to work and collaborate with others. I feel like you can get so much done.
Meredith: We are unique here in the sense that our communities are big enough to enjoy but small enough to get our arms around and many of us really do know our neighbors, so it’s a special place.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine. Marcy Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes and Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Show number 118. Maine Community. Airing for the first time on Sunday December 15th. Today’s guests include Eleanor Kinney, Philanthropist with the Maine Community Foundation and Meredith Jones, President and CEO with Maine Community Foundation. Mainers are a giving group. We at the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour have been fortunate to spend time with a wide variety of giving individuals from Marks One of the Pebble Street Resource Center and Billy Shore and John Woods of Share a Strength to Julie Marchese of the Maine Cancer Foundation’s Tri for a Cure.
Our affiliation with Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design and the Kennebunkport Festival has given us a seat at a table with more 70 charitable organizations. Today we speak with Eleanor Kinney and Meredith Jones, two individuals who understand the importance of providing support in Maine Communities. We hope that you are inspired by our conversations during the season of giving. Thank you for joining us.
When I think about health I think about health not only as an important part of an individual’s life but also as part of the life of the community and so I’m really pleased today to have somebody with me who understands the importance of health and wellness in the community. This is Eleanor Kinney who is on the board of the Maine Farmland Trust and is also a member of the Environmental Funders Network and is also a part of the Maine Community Foundation, so thanks for coming in. You really have so many credentials that I could just keep talking and talking and talking and we could go in any number of directions with this but I’m really pleased that you’re here.
Eleanor: Thank you. It’s nice to meet you today.
Lisa: Eleanor, tell me why it is, I know that local food is very important to you. You’re the Cofounder of No Small Potatoes which is an investment club that provides microloans to Maine farmers and food businesses, so why food? Why is food so important to you?
Eleanor: I guess I really believe that we are what we eat and for me food is the integrator for so many of the things that I care about, so whether you care about open space conversation, whether you care about health, whether you’re concerned about hunger and food access and just for economic development. I mean food for me is a lens through which I work on and view all those issues. The way as a country, we have evolved in the last decade. This is not a healthy path in terms of how we grow food, how we distribute it.
The value that goes back to the farmers and then the health that goes to the consumer, so in Maine, in the slow money movement we are very focused on investing in local agriculture and rebuilding that infrastructure and so money is a national movement that Maine has probably the most active chapter in the country and I have loved the intersection with my work in slow money and investing, which is about investing in businesses, for me I’m an investor.
I’m a slow money investor, I call myself. I invest in farms and food businesses. You mentioned No Small Potatoes, that’s a microloan fund that three of us started and we provide small scale loans, but we’re also doing much larger pieces of investment and raising capital for businesses and it’s all about rebuilding a local agricultural system that creates jobs in the States, particularly in depressed rural areas and that is going to feed many people.
Lisa: Let’s back up a little bit. You’ve been talking about slow money. I think some people are familiar with the slow food movement but for people who aren’t familiar with slow food or slow money, can you just give us a little bit of background on that?
Eleanor: Sure. The slow money movement grew out of the slow food movement and the tag line for slow money nationals investing as a food farms and fertility matter and the goals are around redeploying some capital into the local food system. In Maine, the local chapter was started by Bonnie Rukin and our ministering committee and part of the active leadership and we are seeking to both connect people to network, it’s none a non-profit. We are a network of people working together out of common interest and passion for local sustainable agriculture and fisheries.
I don’t want to leave fisheries out. The role I play in the slow money network is both as an investor and as bringing in other investors in helping to aggregate capital. Maine Community Foundation has had a real role in this for me because I started my work in the State more as a Philanthropist rather than an investor, and I have a donor advise fund at Maine Community Foundation, and I’m part of the Environmental Funders Network which we do grant-making in the State.
Focus on the environment and quality of place but for me it’s all been coming together because I work with a group of foundation, many of whom are now getting interest in local food and so it’s been very collaborative where I’m both doing grant-making in the local food movement. I’m bringing another funders to do grant-making and so helping to raise those kinds of funds for these businesses but also helping to actually raise investment money. I do patient loans. I have equity investments. I do loan guarantees, so there’s a whole range of financial tools and Maine Community Foundation is also looking at how to do this kind of impact investing, and that’s something that I’ve gotten very excited about.
Lisa: What is your main connection? Why do you care so much about the community here in Maine?
Eleanor: I grew up coming here just in the summer, but for me all roads always led to Maine. I went to Yale and my thesis was about Mount Desert Island where I had gone in the summer and I went to graduate school of Oceanography. My oceanographic research was up on Mount Desert Island and I was always trying to get back here and always hated leaving, so I was leaving in Rhode Island and I had started a family there and I was doing conservation work and I saved the last old growth forest in Rhode Island and I thought I really want to do this work in Maine. For me, it’s always been my sole place and it’s a place that you can have tremendous impact.
I mean, we are a large state with incredible natural resources and a small population and if you show up and you have energy and ideas and you just are willing to work and collaborate with others. I feel like you can get so much done.
Lisa: While talking with you about this, about the ability to have an impact really reminds me of the work that your 12-year-old son is doing with Save the Nautilus. You told me that he’s actually raised $20,000. As a 12-year-old and I guess he started this one when he was ten?
Eleanor: Yeah.
Lisa: Somehow he already had the idea that he could do something that would make a difference.
Eleanor: I feel like if you live your values, your kids are going to pick that up, and my son has been raised in a household where we love animals. I have a diversified organic farm. He’s always had an interest in science and has been exposed to ideas about conservation and so his best friend approached him when he read about the flight of the chambered nautilus which is heavily overfished and was covered in The New York Times. The boys launched this organization called Save the Nautilus and they designed a website and started getting recognized in the media and Rigdely is an artist, my son, so he designed this really cool logo with a nautilus and we’ve been selling it on t-shirts and notecards and just getting …
I mean we’ve had hundreds of letters from kids all over the country. They had an article from Time for kids that generated a lot of interest. There are classrooms of kids that are having bake sales and doing dog walks all to raise money and then they send us checks and all the money that we raised goes to the University of Washington, which is where the lead researcher is. The $20,000 that they’d now raised has gone for underwater cameras largely to help fund documenting the nautilus population. I just love seeing kids caring about things that are bigger than themselves, caring about wild life and conservation and then actually doing something about it.
Lisa: Chambered nautilus, for people who aren’t in to the oceans …?
Eleanor: Is that beautiful spiral shell that you see and the thing that’s so amazing about the nautilus is it’s a 500 million year old animal, way before the dinosaurs and has survived all those mass extinctions that we’ve heard about and now, now that we’ve brought it into the 21th century, it’s seriously threatened because of humans fishing it for its shell.
A lot of this effort is not just about trying to fund the research but increase awareness and that’s what’s been amazing because they’ve been on TV and then the news and done radio podcasts of their own and just trying to spread the word about not buying the jewelry, supporting the conservation, contacting eBay and other places where you can buy a nautilus jewelry and they’re eventually hoping to get it listed so that the trade is restricted.
Lisa: You’ve had your fingers in a lot of different pies. You’ve been involved in the Maine Farmland Trust. You’ve done work with No Small Potatoes and Maine Community Foundation. What keeps you continuing to seek? What keeps you continually interested in understanding the best ways of making an impact in the community?
Eleanor: I think for me, a lot of my focus is around alignment, so my model is living something and then how I live my life and then also how I deploy my resources in ways that benefit community, so part of my love for agriculture has led me to convert my property into a farm. I install all the energy as generated through solar power, and then I help launch young farmers and support new businesses. I care about economic development which is a huge issue on Maine. I’ve been an environmentalist since college and you end up fighting a lot of battles and trying to stop things. I took on a battle in my community to stop Super Wal-Mart from being built in Damariscotta, two of us led that campaign and we were successful. I thought to myself, “that’s the no.”
If we don’t want that kind of strip development in Damariscotta, Maine, what is the yes for Damariscotta, for Aroostook County, for Washington County, for all of these parts of the State? For me, a lot of the yes has been supporting the kinds of businesses that are creating healthy products that are good for people and good for the earth and build their communities. I try to live that in my own life by having a farm and raising my children on the farm and then I try to live that through how I invest my resources. For me I’d much rather, I’m in the process of consciously pulling money out of the stock market and taking it all off Wall Street and investing it into Maine businesses and Maine communities.
Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Tom: I look forward to the mail this time of the year. The holiday cards, birthday cards and notes from family and friends give me pause to appreciate the abundance of love that I have in my life. As this always the case mixed in with the cards or appeals from charitable organizations in Maine, asking me to donate what I can to help them help our community. While I give as much as I can, there is a limit to how far I can stretch my resources, yet as I move forward in my own financial evolution.
I do look forward to the time when there is greater abundance that can be shared with my community right now. Think about it, how much stronger would our Maine community be if we all share the same goal. To get to a healthier financial place personally, so that we could all give just a little bit more. To learn more about Shepherd Financial, like us on Facebook or go to www.shepherdfinancialmaine.com.
Speaker 1: Securities offer through LPL Financial Member Finraw SIBC. Investment advice offered to flagship Harbor Advisers, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisers and Shepherd Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial. There was a time when the apothecary was a place where you could get safe reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals, coupled with care and attention, focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled, you need attention advice and individual care. Visit their website, apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
Lisa: I like that idea of what is the yes as opposed to the no. I think this is something that we bumped up against a lot is the sense that there are so many things that are kind of falling apart in the environment and sometimes I think that’s very discouraging for people who really want to do good things, helpful things, live in a mindful way on the planet and yet it’s just feel like everything, it’s so hard to grasp. When you say what is the yes, it gives you something positive to move toward rather than something negative to move away from.
Eleanor: People relate to that. I mean this is amazing to me. I speak in Maine and I speak out of state and people are really drawn in and it’s not political. That’s one thing I love about food. Everybody can relate to that experience of eating good food. People are really interested in where their food is grown. Now I mean, it’s definitely part of a whole national consciousness and in Maine where we’re just still have those rural landscapes, we still have working farms.
Yes, they are at risk and that’s why I’m on the board of Maine Farmland Trust because we are trying to secure farmland easements so that the land that is in farming stays in farming and that’s so important because without that, I mean, Maine has a real advantage right now, in terms of the rest of the New England. We are the land base for New England in terms of what we still have available for agriculture, but it’s going to take a conscious effort to make sure that we store that and that’s what the conservation piece is about and that’s what’s also making sure that farms and food businesses are economically viable and that’s the investment piece. We need to invest in those businesses because as long as their viable and they can make a living then that land will stay open.
Lisa: This reminds me of a conversation I had with Cecily Pingree about the work that she did, the movie that she created called Betting the Farm, and it really was, it was about Maine’s organic milk farmers. It’s Moo Milk. I laughed at her film and our conversation really revolved around the idea that we’re so in the middle of this, that we don’t have a happy ending yet.
Eleanor: Which is true with so many of our businesses, so I’m one of the early investors in Moo Milk. Cecily is awesome. She also serves on the board of Maine Farmland Trust with me and Moo Milk has been absolute rollercoaster ride and these are startups. These are startups in a really tough commodity-driven, low margin industry. That’s true of Moo Milk and that’s true in invested in Grist Mill in Skowhegan. Somerset Grist Mill. I’m invested in a veggie processing facility in the county called northern girl. I invested in slaughter houses and distribution companies and it’s tough.
It’s not like you get up and going and you’re necessarily going to be successful. We don’t know. Some of these businesses are probably going to fail and that’s a risk as an investor. For me it’s about all working together to ensure that they’re successful as they can be, so we focused not just on investment but providing technical assistance. I mean not all farmers know how to write a business plan. That’s helping bring together the different kinds of resources that can help nurture these companies while recognizing that what they’re doing has value for all of us and so we try to share the risk.
Lisa: More and more it seems, people who invest in something like an organic farm or a Grist Mill are looking for a return on investment that’s bigger than just money. For you, what is that looked like?
Eleanor: For me it looks like, you know we call it whatever, a triple bottom line, right. We’re investing, when I invest in the Grist Mill in Skowhegan I’m investing in a business that’s employing people, that’s buying grain from Aroostook County and so therefore benefit to grain growers. I’m looking at a business that’s involved in the whole food held in Skowhegan that has a year round farmer’s market that people can bring their EBT cards and use them to access fresh food, so there’s a MB subsidies in that way. There’s a match program. Again, the focus is about healthy food for everybody regardless of income level.
That’s really important. Their business is growing in Skowhegan that are pasta businesses and someone who makes wood fire ovens for bread baking. There’s a whole artisan bread movement. Skowhegan was the bread basket for the New England in the Civil War. I mean, that’s where the Civil War soldiers were at. That’s where the wheat came from that made the bread that they ate, so it has this history. We’re also connecting back to that past but also bringing it into the future in a way that’s really going to help grow those communities that have, I mean Skowhegan’s pretty down and out.
Lisa: When I asked you to come on the show, you noticed that one of the guests we were taping the same day that you were taping was Glenn Cummings, who was with the Good Will Hinckley School Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. He discusses in the interview that aired in November the work that is being done with the food hub in the Skowhegan and he mentioned your name actually. He talked about the Grist Mill and the wheat in Maine. It’s interesting to me that there are sort of links everywhere, that’s there’s a link to the person who is involved in education. There’s a link to the farmer. How is that feel to be in a state where there’s just so many connections?
Eleanor: That’s kind of going back to what I was saying earlier about Maine being in some ways are very small state where then you can have really big impacts. When you’re working on issues, it does cuts across many different areas and we’re a tight-knit community. We get to know each other. I mean I know in the food movement there are so many different people that have a relationship to it one way or another. Whether it’s through education and raising the next generation of kids who were interested in agriculture or it’s around the investment side or it’s around the conservation side.
People at the great work that Good Shepherd Food Bank is trying to do, so Good Shepherd Food Bank is now putting significant money into paying farmers to grow local food for them, so again, not just getting all the cans of commodity food but having healthy, fresh food to feed low income people. It’s just, we do, we build this community of getting to know each other and that’s what the slow money meetings that we have. There are people, they are from banks and from non-profits and there are the farmers that came down from Aroostook and there are a lot of people in the room from diverse background but what brings them together is caring about Maine and caring about a food system that feeds us all.
Lisa: Usually when I have people on the show, I ask them to tell us how listeners can find out more about what they’re doing but I don’t think there’s one specific website that people are going to be able to go to, to find out about all the different things you’re doing. I would encourage people to find out more about the Maine Farmland Trust, The Maine Community Foundation, No Small Potatoes, Slow Money Maine, The Environment Funders Network, really spend some time looking at these websites and learning more about the opportunities that you are currently making available to the people in the community in the State of Maine.
I really appreciate you’re taking the time to come in and talk to us about the work that you’re doing, Eleanor. I think that this is … Sometimes as we’ve said we can get caught up on what we can’t do but if we can find that yes. That we can work towards. I think it makes us all healthier as individuals and healthier as a community, so I appreciate you’re coming in.
Eleanor: Thank you. There’s a role for everybody. That’s what I tell people. I mean I know I get focused sometimes on the investment side but for me, we can eat local, we can buy local, we have a big role to play as consumers as well. Find your farmer’s market. Get to know your farmers and the people that are catching your fish. Develop those relationships that then reconnect us to each other and to our world and our resource base.
Lisa: I think you’ve said it well. I hope people who are listening, go out and do just that.
Eleanor: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely in Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: I feel very fortunate to be a business owner in Maine. Unlike any other place I can think of, Maine is truly a community of connected people and businesses who really want to see each other succeed. If my company can play even the smallest part in creating success for my clients, I am very grateful. That’s what gets us excited at Booth. Helping people see their vision become a reality.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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Lisa: Health and wellness are important parts of our community and there’s no one that can speak better about the idea of community or at least as it relates to the work she does with the Maine Community Foundation then Meredith Jones, who is the President and CEO of the Maine Community Foundation right here in Maine, so we’re very privilege to have her with us today.
Meredith: I’m delighted to be here, Lisa. Thanks for the invitation.
Lisa: Thank you. You have so many things that you’ve done in your life. You actually have an honorary doctorate of letters that you got from the University of Maine in 2013. Your family has been here for more than 200 years in Washington County. What was it about Maine that caused you to not only be brought up here but to kind of come back here and do the work that you do?
Meredith: Here’s the story behind the story because I actually was in Washington D. C. speaking to a group of Mainers, who now live in D. C. and indeed I did comment to the group about how the Jones family roots go back in Washington County for about 200 years and after I spoke an individual from Calais, Maine where my dad was born, came up to me and said, “What street did you grow up on?” The truth of the matter is I was raised outside of Pittsburgh and certainly summered in Maine and it is true that my father was born in Maine as was his father and his father and his father.
However, I was not born in Maine. A raised children in Windtrup so I’ve been here for about 33 years but a more direct response to your question about why here, why anywhere? I think my story is a good one in that I did choose to live, chose to raise children here. My husband at that time and I came from New Hampshire and have always felt, perhaps because of my youth spending time on the banks of the St. Croix River, that this really is home.
There are so much that is appealing about it and in the work that I do today, talking to individuals who might live here part time, almost to a person what they will talk about is the sense of community that exist here that has been lost or never had been achieved in the part of United States where they live right now. We are unique here in the sense that our communities are big enough to enjoy but small enough to get our arms around and many of us really do know our neighbors, so it’s a special place.
Lisa: Describe to the people who are listening what the Maine Community Foundation is? What it is that you’re actually doing?
Meredith: We are celebrating our 30th anniversary. We were founded obviously 30 years ago by an individual who spent most of his year in New York, had a relationship with our counterpart in New York and felt that Maine needed a community foundation. What is a community foundation? Just like the name says, we are about community. We are a grant-making institution, so we are making grants and we’re all about Maine. We have about $330 million in assets and interestingly enough, it started off 30 years ago with a $10 gift from this man, whose name was Bob Blum, and that $10 has grown to $330 million.
The reason it has is because there are a number of people in Maine who want to be philanthropic, who may not have what they would consider to be sufficient dollars to create a private foundation and so they would use … what they will use a community foundation for their philanthropy. Many of the assets that we have under management were given to us by individuals, who have established a fund, a named fund that money is accounted for separately and what those donors do is make grants from that fund, so they have the joy of being a philanthropist and we do all of the heavy lifting and that’s one of the pieces of work that we do.
We also do a variety of other things. It’s 18 different competitive grant programs where a non-profits are applying to us for grant support and on an annual basis we are giving away about $18 million a year, so we do that plus we also are involved in other activities that really do come under the umbrella of building Maine community. We can talk a little bit if you want about a survey that we were part of, a number of years ago that really did assessed the level of civic engagement and the level of what Bob Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone calls social capital, and it relates very directly I think to a community’s health and well-being.
Lisa: Let’s talk about that. What is social capital?
Meredith: Bob Putnam uses polysyllabic words to describe it but it’s actually the reciprocity that occurs in a community. It is an individual’s connection to that community. Whether that individual is connected by knowing his or her neighbor, connected because they’re doing volunteer work or connected in some other way. We learned a lot. We actually did a survey of Lewiston-Auburn; this was at the turn of the decade. I think this was in the year 2000, so it’s been a number of years and it was prior to the arrival or the influx of the wonderful diversity that Lewiston-Auburn now have and are very proud of.
What we were trying to determine is what makes Lewiston-Auburn tick and we were generalizing from Lewiston-Auburn to the larger Maine community about what makes Maine community’s tick. Here’s what we discovered that we are a very trusting State. That we are by enlarged connected to our neighbors. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a long way to go. We do very well in educating people at the high school level. I think our graduation rates are about 85%. We do far less well in post-secondary educational attainment and the reason I mentioned that is because that there is a strong connection or correlation between educational attainment level, citizen involvement, economic status, health status and crime.
At the community foundation, once we had all of these data, we as an organization decided that one way to support community vitality is really focusing on higher educational attainment. For the last several years that is where we have been focused. There are a lot of things that are all tied together and the survey data really did help us understand that in so many areas named us really well in terms of community vibrancy but we’ve got a long way to go.
Lisa: How do you build on what Maine does well all simultaneously trying to boost the long way to go? People don’t like to be criticized so there is this sense that maybe if you were to come in and say, ”Well, we don’t think you do this as well that perhaps you might get some resistance.”
Meredith: Yeah. I don’t know that we would ever walk into a community and say, “Maybe you don’t do this so well.” Our whole philosophy is really think about what’s going well in a community and how do we make it better as opposed to, “Oh my gosh, look at the problems this community is having, and how can we fix them.” I think at the end of the day, the community foundation is not in a position to fix any community. What we are in a position to do is help a community identify those elements that they want to work on and providing them with the support.
Whether it’s grant-making support or just standing behind the good name and reputation of the community foundation, to support those local people to do what they really want to do. Is their vision necessarily what my vision might be? Maybe not, maybe it is, but I think communities know best what their future can be. As I’m talking I’m thinking about the whole concept of leadership and where leadership fits in. I think one of the challenges Maine faces is the fact that we don’t believe in ourselves as much as we should. We have tremendous potential as a state.
The individuals in the State are everybody is capable and smart as people outside the State, but when you look at the economic data there’s a disconnect and I think Angus King probably was the best person we have had in recent times in trying to provide the encouragement and support to help people believe in themselves. That’s really a fundamental part of leadership, so the extent to which the community foundation can help communities and individuals in those communities believe in themselves. I think we all have done an incredible job in supporting the long term success of communities in Maine.
Lisa: What are some ways in which you help people believe in themselves? What are some very concrete things that you’re doing as part of the main community foundation?
Meredith: We make about 3,000 grants in the course of a year and some of those grants are going to individuals as in the form of scholarship support. One of our scholarships is available to support non-traditional students and so after a period of grant-making with these scholarships, we’ve invited these non-traditional students to come in and talk to us about the difference the scholarship has made. The challenges and struggles their facing as non-traditional students. Talk about inspiration, I mean the stories around the table will only brought the students about the student where our financial support provided transportation, so that this individual could get to college, get to the campus to take classes.
One of the stories I will remember forever was an individual who was in her 40’s when she went back to school. She had finished high school and gone into the workforce but her children were now reaching an age when they were in high school and she had always wanted to be an engineer, always wanted to be an engineer but life got in the way and that was not going to be possibility for her until the scholarship support. The story she told was taking classes as a non-traditional 40-something-year-old student in engineering, watching her children watch her, but the coolest thing was having her dad watch her and her dad ended up going back to school because she was such an inspiration.
I mean talk about believing in yourself and what our role was saying we believe in you. Here are some financial supports to help you realize what it is you want to do in the future and “wah lah” she did it. She graduated and as I said, her dad has going back to school and I am sure her two boys will be going to college.
Lisa: Do you think that part of the reason that’s important for the community foundation to support people financially? Is that the donors themselves in many cases have had to work very hard in their lives to actually create the abundance of wealth, that they’re able to give to the community foundation? Do you think that there is the sense of sort of paying it forward?
Meredith: Absolutely, yes, and it always has struck me that … I’m generalizing here, but the profile of the individual who have established funds at the community foundation are individuals who obviously have made money or inherited wealth. There is seems to be a relationship between the source of the wealth and the level of anonymity that donors require some of our quietest most anonymous individuals are those with the greatest capacity. They want no attribution. They don’t want anybody to know who they are but they do definitely want to pay it forward.
You might ask if the part time residence, “Why are they doing their philanthropy in Maine?” The answer I get will be, “We live in Maine communities in the summer.” Our ability to continue to live here depends on community vitality, so we want to give back to that community where we think the need is greatest and the opportunity is greatest and they will say, “Maine is such a wonderful place to give,” because a little go such a long way. In fact we have a donor couple that lives most of the year or most of the month in Los Altos Hills, California.
They grew up in the Philadelphia area. They have a residence in Maine and their philanthropy started as they would say in California and in Philadelphia and a little bit in Maine and having worked here in Maine now for about 13 years, all of their philanthropy is in Maine because they just love it. They work with school, teachers K-12 elementary, public school teachers and their grants are small and their grants are designed to support just creative projects that teachers want to do with their kids that they have no money to do. It’s a great example of a donor couple that said, “Wait a minute. You know, Maine has tremendous need. Maine has tremendous opportunity.” Our little grants go a long way. We want to focus our grant-making in Maine.
Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter inspired landscapes, is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: In 2009 I had just come out of moving through the great recession I guess you might say. Most of us were sort of getting our bearings after the debacle on Wall Street and the economic collapse. I remember I started that spring, my business went down by 40% in one year and so I was scrambling and I put this exhibit together for the rock port show in Maine Home Design Magazine and I pretty much did it solo by myself and I found it very healing and it was all working with the sacred feminine and it was very introspective in nature. One of the things I realize when I work with the elemental forces is that metal does not bend.
It’s stiff, it’s unyielding, it snaps, it cracks. Wood tends to be more supple. It bends, it moves, it expands and contracts, even the wood in your house expands in the wet season and contracts during the dry cold season. These are things to remember in life that try to be supple, try to move with the energy, try to move with the flow. Don’t become too rigid. Rigidity is good but it needs to be balanced with the supple flow of the wood energy. I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast understands the importance of the health of the body, mind and spirit. Here to talk about the health of the body is Jim Greatorex of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical.
Jim: Let’s talk about the can do attitude for a moment, stories about triumph. For some it’s about getting out of bed every morning, for others it’s about taking on the challenges of daily living with the disability or other medical condition. What we all take for granted each day can be someone else’s entire world. At Black Bear Medical, we empower people to be independent and take on their daily challenges. Our home medical equipment, medical supplies and other product not only help get people out of bed but help them live productive and active lives.
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Lisa: In addition to the grant-making that you do, you also provide some help with modeling and setting up programs in some ways, is that right?
Meredith: Yup, we do. There are community foundations in every state in the United States and not all of us look alike, but more and more community foundations acknowledge that they have an important role in the whole area of community leadership in tackling issues that might be long term that other groups really are not focusing on. One of them that we are working on here in Maine is a program that focuses on what I call older adults. Other people call them baby boomers but Maine is a graying state, very much like other states in New England. I think we are per capita, one of the oldest, if not the oldest, state in the nation.
Here to far, historically we have thought about older adults in a need based way. The frail elderly, they need medical support, they need social service support. We were approached by a global funder who said, “You know, I think we need to turn this issue upside down,” because there is a growing group of individuals and many of them are retiring here, who are very healthy. They are older but they’re healthy. They are well-educated. They might not need a day job because they’re retired but they want to give back and they probably don’t want to stuff envelopes.
They want to give back in a meaningful way. We in partnership with University of Maine Center on Aging, created a program called the Encore Leadership Core and what we did was recruit baby boomers to learn about how to run a meeting, a group facilitation, how to organize locally, and what we have trained them to do is to go back into their communities and create community based projects under this umbrella called Smart Growth.
They’re creating hiking trails. They are supporting recycling efforts. They are building playgrounds. They are looking at other local economic development issues, so they’re doing things, it’s not that stuffing envelopes isn’t important, but shame on us if we don’t capitalized on these very smart, well-educated people and put them to work because may needs them. If you read Charlie Corgan, you know that in migration of young people is not happening at a rapid enough phase that we need to sustain this economy, so we have to deploy the people we have here.
Lisa: Speaking of young people, you raised your children you said. What kind of an impact has the work that you’ve been doing over the course of your life had on your children and what they have chosen to do with their own lives?
Meredith: I write a blog and I like to say that 12 people read it and most of those 12 people are related to me but once a year, the blog that seems to attract most attention is one about the family philanthropy game and what I have done with my family is impulse upon them. The whole notion that we, who are grateful for what we have need to give back and we’ve made it into the form of a game where it includes the two grand kids who are now seven and ten.
It includes my two children who are raised in [Windtrup 00:49:10] their spouses, and my spouse and we gathered in the season of giving at Christmas time and we sit down and I give them each $50 and say, “Okay, your job is to have the most impact with this $50 by giving it away. Tell me what you have done. I will post what you’ve done on the website and we’ll let the blog readers vote on what the best idea is.” The first year it was okay. The second year was better.
The third they got really competitive and earlier this summer, my grandson started talking to me about where he’s going to give his money and how he’s going to win this game. He is just going to win this game because he’s going to make the most impact with the $50. In spite of what I’ve said earlier about never imposing one’s values or doing two communities, I actually did to my family and they have come along. They’ve been very gracious and it’s now I think part of the culture and it is the best blog I write every year.
Lisa: What are some of their choices?
Meredith: Since some of them live in Massachusetts, some of the choices were … Actually one of the best gifts was my daughter-in-law, Isabel. Isabel is from Rio and what she decided to do with her $50 was buy a pair of Tom’s shoes. She loves shoes and what she was doing with the Tom shoes is that she was going to give her pair to good will and Tom shoes, if you know them at all, for every pair of shoes you buy, Toms is giving a pair of shoes to somebody in a developing country who might not otherwise have shoes. She says, “$50, I’m giving great shoes to somebody,” who shops good will and somebody in a developing country.
She was pretty pumped about that. That was a good gift. The one that my grandson did to the Jimmy fund I think most blog readers that voted for that, it wasn’t because it was the Jimmy fund that was to try to get support for this now very competitive at that time seven-year-old, who wanted to prove that he too could be a part of this game. They have been interesting gifts, $50 isn’t a lot but it’s more the idea behind it that has spawned a lot of creativity.
Lisa: $50 isn’t a lot but it is a lot. I mean, it can really, if you’re someone who, say you’re listening to the show and you have $50 to give out of your Christmas budget, you can do something with it.
Meredith: You can do a lot. You can do a lot and it can leverage a whole host of other cascading things that are all very positive. In fact, earlier this summer I was in Oxford County at an event and this woman I do not know, came up to me and said, “I’ve heard I need to read your blog about the family giving challenge because I want to do something with my grandchildren,” and it has, to your point about the $50, the $50 … The actual project has spawned other people who have others that they want to encourage to give. It has inspired others to create their own little grant-making program with family members, so you’re right.
Lisa: It’s also important to know that the community foundation does have a way of paying attention to the impact that the grants are making. I think in the past, maybe when there was more money to be given out, people weren’t quite as concerned with the outcomes and it seems as though, this is become more important, more important that if you’re going to invest dollars in something, you’d like to see that there is something positive happens with those dollars.
Meredith: I think to that point, Lisa. I think more and more donors as the younger generation becomes philanthropic. These are individuals in their 30’s and 40’s for whom outcomes and data are increasingly important. How do I know that this grant or these grants are going to make a difference? Show me the data, so increasingly, we are employing tools and consulting support to try to better answer that question. At one level, you can look at a smiling face or well-fed kid can say that grant made a difference but more fundamentally, show us the number, show us the data, show us in a quantitative way that this grant will make a difference.
Lisa: What are some suggestions you could offer to people who are now in the holiday season and thinking about how they might want to share their abundance with other people?
Meredith: Let’s start with where you started which was $50 can make a difference. The amount doesn’t matter. There are so many groups for whom $50 means a great deal and for individuals who are eager to give back, there are so many ways of doing it. Part of it is with money. Part of it is with time. There are so many groups out there desperate for volunteers to help at a staff level, volunteers at the board level to help these non-profits build a capacity in the scale they need to continue doing their good work. If it’s less clear about what specific organization I want to give to.
One way to think about it is, “What are my passions? What do I care about most? Is it food security? Is it economic development?” Then, sort of sorting through, one of the groups locally that I know were doing that kind of work, one of the groups statewide that are doing that kind of work. They certainly can always call them in community foundation for support in helping identify groups in their local communities that they might want to think about based on what their passions are. Start with the passions. Start with what means most, what do you care about most and let your heart lead you along with your head.
Lisa: You said that people could call the Maine Community Foundation. How do people find the number for the Maine Community Foundation or other information?
Meredith: They can go to our website, but let me start with a number. It’s toll-free 877-700-6800. It is a toll-free number that puts you in touched with somebody who actually answers the phone and we will direct you to the specific staff person because we are organized in a way that we have staff who pay attention to the different parts of the State.
We do have a very active presence on our website which is mainecf.org. Go to my blog and respond. It comes out every other week and I’m talking about things that I think about as they relate to both community, community health, the main economy, leadership, higher education and I would love to have people comment on that and just to offer their own ideas. We have a Facebook presence also. I don’t think we’re doing Twitter, though, so sorry about that.
Lisa: Sometime in the future perhaps. We’ve been speaking with Meredith Jones, who was the President and CEO of the Maine Community Foundation. We’re very pleased to know that you’re out there in the world sort of throwing pebbles in the pond and to seeing where the ripples are all going in helping other people pay it forward, so thank you for doing that and for spending time with us tonight.
Meredith: Thank you for the opportunity. Great to be here.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Show number 118 Maine Community. Our guests have included Eleanor Kinney and Meredith Jones. For more information on our guest and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our E Newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and Pinterest and read my take on health and well-being on the bountiful blog. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour.
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