Thursday, April 3: Host Frank Ferrel recently met Premier of New Brunswick, Shawn Graham, a surprisingly young politician who nonetheless at the age of 39 is the oldest of Maritime Canada’s Premiers. His youthful exuberance belies a firm political foundation deeply rooted in family tradition. Raised in a political family, Graham's father Alan was the longest serving member in the history of the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick. Mr. Graham talks about sharing resources with Maine – resources that include forestry, energy, culture and tourism. He encourages Mainers to consider New Brunswick as a resource for trade and culture and highlights the ways that the two regions can complement each other.

Ron Phillips sees his work as director of Coastal Enterprises, Inc., as his mission. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York, he founded the Maine-based community development corporation in 1977, and has been at the helm ever since, mobilizing more than $1 billion for financing and technical assistance in the development of small, medium, and micro businesses; natural resource industries, community service agencies, and affordable housing, in every corner of the state.

 

Once homeless and destitute, Lucinda Yates took her future in her hands and created what was to become a multi-million dollar business dedicated to providing financial help and awareness to non-profit organizations. One day Lucinda designed a simple pin in the shape of a house. The House Pin she created that day became the perfect fundraiser for a local shelter. It gave the shelter greater visibility, and financial support. Her company, Designs By Lucinda, has since sold millions of wearable, handmade pins and has helped raise tens of millions of dollars for non-profits.  

A talk with Kent Wommack, former executive director of the Nature Conservancy in Maine. The Colby College graduate has been instrumental in preserving thousands of acres of Maine’s wilderness, most notably the purchase in 1998 for $35 million of a 185,000 tract in northern Maine that includes 40 miles along the Upper St. John River. Globally, he’s done the same as Director of Australia’s Nature Conservancy and is currently serving as interim Director of the Nature Conservancy Canada. He is credited with forever changing how land is conserved in Maine and he’s just as passionate about how conservation efforts can transcend borders and continents. 

Appointed to chair both Maine’s Council on Jobs and Innovation and the newly established Competitiveness Council, Venture Capitalist Karen Gordon Mills has Governor Baldacci’s ear when it comes to ideas for Maine’s economic future. Mills shares some of those ideas with Conversations host Frank Ferrel, when they got together at the historic Parker Cleaveland House at Bowdoin College, where her husband, Barry Mills is president.

In the third of the three new episodes that launch the series in February, Frank talks with Ted Ames, the Stonington fisherman and lobsterman who in 2005 became the only resident Mainer in history and was one of only 25 people overall that year to be awarded a “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in his case for his pioneering work studying groundfish populations along the coast. The pair spoke in the picturesque library of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle.