Western Maine Mountains

The Western Maine Mountains Communities for Children (WWMC4C), a Community of Promise as Maine School Administrative District #58, is sponsored by the Pathway Partners Program. This initiative serves the twelve towns and unorganized territories in western Maine that make up the school district, especially Livermore Falls, SAD#58, Northern Franklin County, and Farmington. At the state level, this C4C represents school-based mentoring on the Maine Mentoring Partnership Board of Directors.

WWMC4C uses mentoring as the gateway to the Five Promises. Its 40 partners include health agencies, community volunteer organizations, the University of Maine at Farmington, school districts, businesses and other nonprofits.

Pathway Partners began in the mid-1990s with grant funding from the International Paper Company Foundation for a school-wide redesign project called Pathway Partners – on the Road to Success. All students in the regional high school were provided with Career Planning Portfolios designed by students, teachers, parents, business and community members. Although portfolios were provided to every student, participation was voluntary. The Portfolio program is run by students out of a "Career Center" that began in space that had been used as a storage closet. Over 90% of the students chose to participate. High School students became so enthusiastic about their accomplishments that they asked to bring the program to their former middle schools. The high school students put on demonstrations and workshops for teachers and students at the four regional middle schools. As a result, the Portfolios now begin in grade 6. Maine Education Services ranked the Mt. Abrams student portfolios as "the best in the state." The school valued the program enough to carve out a 2-room, centrally located, office for the project out of its limited space.

To link what was being accomplished in the school to the community, the Pathway Partners mentoring program was launched in October 1997. The program recruited community members and matched them as mentors to students. The communities responded enthusiastically with over 100 people applying to be mentors in the first year. Mt. Abram Regional High School, in the Unorganized Territory of Salem, Maine, was rarely visited by community members because of its isolated location. After the mentoring program began, adults from across the district regularly visit their mentees, some traveling over an hour each way just to get to the school. Students share their portfolios with their mentors as they plan the future together. The initial success of the project resulted in requests for Pathway Partners to do presentations and assist others throughout Maine and in other states.

In the class of 2000, 31% of the graduates had mentors. Of those with mentors, 98% went on to post-secondary education and 2% went into the military or workforce. For the class as a whole, 53% went on to higher education, 12% into the military and most of the rest into the workforce. In the years before the mentoring program began the percent of the graduating class that went on to school was often as low as 45%.

In 1999 Pathway Partners received a Corporation for National Service AmeriCorps Promise Fellow (volunteer) whose objectives included expanding the mentoring program (to 150 mentor/mentee pairs); improving and standardizing the mentoring expectations and procedures; establishing 2 additional mentoring programs in two communities with at least 40 new relationships; developing 5 community service projects for 100 mentors and mentees; strengthening six existing partnerships and establishing six new partnerships with area businesses, civic organizations, chambers, schools, and foundations; and linking Pathway Partners related initiatives at the state and national levels. The Promise Fellow who served was raised and educated in the community, had gone away to school, and had returned to "make a critical difference in our effort," in the words of the Executive Director of Pathway Partners. She met all of the above objectives in the first six months of her service and moved on to additional activities.

One of the service projects organized by the Promise Fellow was a community housing rehabilitation project, carried out in partnership with a national faith-based organization. 100 local youth and 300 youth from elsewhere in the nation lived in the high school for a week during the summer and renovated 67 low-income housing sites.

Pathway Partners has achieved national recognition for some of its efforts. "Far to the north in rural western Maine, Sugarloaf/USA resort gives ski lessons to students in the first through eighth grades of nearby Stratton K-8 Public School. For Stratton’s middle school, the resort offers golf lessons and environmental field trips and provides opportunities for job shadowing and work-study. . . Sugarloaf encourages its employees to mentor, on company time, teenagers at Mt. Abram High School. . .As the biggest business in the area, Sugarloaf has a stake in the students. Many are the children of staff members and all are potential customers or employees." ("Joining Forces" by Megan Rutherford, Time, September 4, 2000)

The rural communities in the area are developing youth centers and programs like "The Zone," which serves Phillips, Avon and Madrid. Pathway Partners submits a regular column, "Pathway Partners – Keeping America’s Promise," to the local newspaper. Kirsten Brown, the program’s Promise Fellow wrote, designed and published, with photographs by program mentor Tiffany Teske, Neighbors Helping Neighbors – A Community Changed by Youth in Service. The book documents the summer housing rehabilitation project.

United Way of the Tri-Valley Area recently provided funding and Pathway Partners expects to become a member agency. Other businesses donate brochure printing and a web site as well as mentors.

The message Pathway Partners seeks to convey to children and youth is that "a career is HOW you want to be rather than WHAT you want to be, and that a career is the work of a lifetime that begins in kindergarten."

Contact Western Maine Mountains C4C: