Friends Of Baxter State Park

Education and Outreach: We offered the 2024 Maine Youth Wilderness Leadership Program which enabled ten Maine high school students to experience a nine-day leadership training program in spectacular wilderness. Participants in this program learned from specialists in botany, geology, environmental advocacy, art, storytelling, history, and recreation. The goal of this program is to inspire and cultivate the next generation of Maine's environmental leaders. We published five issues of our Forever Wild newsletter with a circulation of 2,100 (1,500 print, 600 digital) per issue. We published the 2025 Baxter State Park calendar in partnership with Baxter State Park and a local company. We produced and distributed nine podcast episodes containing over eight hours of content focused on Baxter State Park. We hosted a forestry tour of the Austin Cary Forest in September 2024 that was attended by 35 people. We hosted four showings of the film Lost on a Mountain in Maine at The Grand in Ellsworth that were attended by more than 1,200 people.

Advocacy for the Park: We attended five meetings of the Baxter State Park Authority, three meetings of the Katahdin Collaborative and related groups, three meetings of the BSP - AT Task Force, and one meeting with Wabanaki leaders. We also monitored several ongoing policy challenges and opportunities facing Baxter State Park.