Brooke Brewer

Brooke Brewer will be based on Peaks Island, but focusing upon affordable housing and economic development issues as well as stewardship initiatives affecting all of the Casco Bay islands. Brooke will be directly working with Peaks Island HOMESTART, a nonprofit affordable-housing group on Peaks Island; Cliff Island Corporation for Athletics, Conservation and Education (ACE); Peaks Island Land Preserve; the Fifth Maine Regiment Historical Society; and the Casco Bay Islands Development Association. Brooke will assist with affordable-housing projects that are currently being developed on Peaks Island, and efforts to organize a community project on Cliff. 

Brooke is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a major in biochemistry. Brooke has spent the past two years working with the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, where she started a conservation-grazing project using sheep to develop a historically accurate and sustainable method to manage the island's grassland habitat. Brooke has also worked as a farmer and a counselor at Spring Lake Ranch, a nonprofit psychiatric rehabilitation center in Shrewsbury, VT whose mission is to enable residents to find their place in society by providing meaningful work and a sense of contributing to the community. In addition, Brooke has a strong research background, assisting on research concerning plant-pollinator interactions, taxonomic linkages within strawberry genus, and the evolutionary branching of various species of echinoderms.

Brooke writes: "I am particularly interested in addressing the problems facing island communities. For the last two years, I have been living on the island of Nantucket starting a conservation-grazing project for grassland management through the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. The appeal of this project for me was bringing back a historically accurate and sustainable method to manage the grasslands. Nantucket has a long history of farming and whaling but, in the 1800s, the whaling industry died and the island itself began to flounder. In the later 1800s early 1900s Nantucket successfully reinvented itself as a destination vacation spot. Presently, tourism is its primary industry, and yet the very people who work for that industry are being squeezed out of the island...

It is apparent that a similar problem is beginning to affect the local Maine coastal islands, particularly those in the Casco Bay area. However, unlike Nantucket, on the Maine islands there seems to still be a strong year-round community and a working coastline, as well as a real desire to maintain island traditions. Because of this, there is a need for careful development policy that respects the history of the islands and maintains and supports its traditions and people."

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