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WHERE?

Located on the tip of Deer Isle in Maine, Penobscot East Resource Center is embedded in the community we serve. Our office at 13 Atlantic Avenue is on a dock on the working waterfront in the heart of downtown Stonington, a stone’s throw from Main Street. Our mission is to secure a future for the fishing communities of eastern Maine, and since 2003 we have been committed to building marine stewardship at a local, community level.

WHEN?

The organization was established in 2003 as a 501 c (3) non-profit, “to energize and facilitate responsible community-based fisheries management, collaborative marine science, and sustainable economic development to benefit the fishermen and communities of Penobscot Bay and the eastern Gulf of Maine.”  It is founded on a conviction that the community-based approach to resource management is the only way these fishing communities can survive. 

HOW?

To that end, our first goal is that fishermen become a voice for the diversity of fisheries and conservation of the eastern Gulf of Maine ecosystem and take responsibility for sustaining its resources.  Fisherman stewardship will result in more fish and more opportunity for local small-scale fishing businesses.

Eastern Maine is one of the places in the United States where this approach can succeed  because of the area’s fishing dependence, the stewardship in the lobster fishery, and the unavoidable and obvious fact that so many of the fisheries in the area are depleted. 

WHY?

Fishing, for lobster and for groundfish, is a tremendous part of the heritage of eastern Maine. In a fishing community it is not just the fishermen, their families and suppliers who depend upon fishing.  Hairdressers, grocery stores, schools and churches are entwined with the vagaries of market, fish stocks, season and weather. The area from the islands of Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border is unique not just in Maine but in the mainland US. It is a 150-mile stretch of coastal fishing communities that includes the most fishery-dependent counties on the east coast and 50 different fishing communities. 

These communities have few alternatives. Fishing is their history, their culture -- and can be their future.  We work in one of the few remaining community based fisheries in the USA, where the traditional culture is still virtually intact and children can expect to grow up and fish the way their great grand-fathers did- in small owner-operated boats going out in the early hours every day, six days a week.

WHAT?

Penobscot East’s work combines hope and practical grassroots action.  Hope is essential to counter despair and apathy.  Grassroots action provides tangible results.  This type of cultural change is a long term process, creating the safe space where fishermen themselves grapple with changing to live within the bounds of the ecosystem they use.  Our role is to provide a long term presence, contributing tools, skills and resources as needed for fishermen and fishing community members to do this.