Reflections is written by Island Institute Fellows, recent grads of college and master’s programs who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.
Island Time goes by in a strange way. Since moving to Chebeague Island with my husband last September, I’ve felt both slowed down and catapulted forward. Reflecting on that temporal strangeness has been helpful, but measuring success and finding space to reflect has been more challenging. How can I quantify how well I’ve settled into the community, where I’ll be living and supporting climate resilience efforts for the next two years?
When you move onto a small island in Maine to do community-based work, you are ardently greeted with many sayings. “Islanders wear many hats.” “The boat waits for no one.” “Everyone knows and/or is related to everyone.” “If you’re buying one of something, you might as well get two.”
Let’s return to the many hats of islanders. There is a neighbor who installs your internet, someone who has likely fixed your plumbing, that one woman who organizes recreational pickleball games. There’s the person who has started multiple nonprofits and community organizations on the island, and another who volunteers their time curating a community website for folks to submit activities, births, deaths, and other announcements. Sometimes these people are just one person—like Beverly Johnson, or Bev.
I’ve seen Bev wear a few hats myself. I play pickleball with her up to five nights a week. She installed my internet, is my fellowship supervisor Vika’s mom, and is also the aunt of our first landlord on the island, Mandy. It’s uncanny watching all these quirky island sayings ring true in my life, but it’s equally a measure of how much I’ve settled in.
I’ve come to consider my growing understanding of these island-specific dynamics as what someone in a different role might call KPIs, or key performance indicators.
In my fellowship work, the concept of KPIs is a hard one to pin down. Fellows operate as new, enthusiastic entrants into an island ecosystem. We’ve all heard from the start of our fellowships that it will be hard to know exactly what we’re doing. Much like the passage of time, measuring success will be a nebulous process requiring a metric that may not have been invented yet. No project management software can tell us whether we’ve grounded ourselves in community, or are meaningfully approaching impossible conversations around raising wharves and fishery closures.
Meeting KPIs as a fellow means measuring from a cellular level, a knowing that can only come from a place of warmth in your cheeks when someone waves at you and mentions they’re excited for your event at the library where there will be pizza, storytelling, and reflections on the two years that have somehow passed since the January storms, as well as how the community is preparing for more like them.
Other island KPIs I’ve met include being the first to notice the pipes were frozen at the town office, adding odd jobs to our repertoire (me dog sitting, my husband tech support), forgetting my mainland car keys on the island and only noticing once I was at halfway across Casco Bay, befriending my woodstove, developing an opinion about the “right way” to say Chebeague, knowing the best place to watch the rise and fall of the sun and moon, finding our first friend with a boat, and knowing all our neighbors’ names and inviting them to dinner.
Both a lot and a little has happened since I began my fellowship in September. Quarter two brings the depths of winter, where goals may shift slightly to the cozy continuum—the new crafts I might learn, the bread I may bake, and the neighbors I will collude with to stay warm and have fun.
Lorren Ruscetta is supporting the Town of Chebeague’s Climate Action Team and surveying public access to its waterfront. Following that, she will support community engagement as the town completes its comprehensive plan.
