Our Mission and Vision
Our mission is to create responsive educational opportunities that strengthen personal, community, and global well-being.
Our vision is of a community that respects people and the planet, and inspires, supports, and sustains people to achieve their greatest potential.
Cobscook Institute is a 25-year-long experiment in folk education
Cobscook leverages the tools, skills, and resources present in our local community to solve local and regional problems. As an arts- and education-focused community development organization, we have a history of fostering, launching, and completing major projects with substantial community impact. These include:
Starting a 4-year public, experiential high school option, Cobscook Experiential Programs, now in its 15th year;
Conducting a multi-year educational partnership with local schools to test methods that substantially improved academic outcomes for rural children experiencing a history of trauma;
Creating and maintaining a robust slate of community education programs and activities for people of all ages for over 20 years
Our campus hosts and creates educational and civic offerings, all of which contribute to community well-being and sustainability by fostering deep human relationships and empowerment. Community sustainability goals are central to our current strategic plan, among which community resilience, ecology, and relational ways of being are the most critical.
Our Values
Cobscook Institute’s founders created this image and imagined a learning center guided by the values of Peace, Honesty, Respect, and Empowerment with Love intentionally at the core of the work. Cobscook is committed to building bridges, to being accessible to the people of the Cobscook Bay region, and to social, economic, cultural, ecological, personal, and familial empowerment. It is operated in the spirit of love, respect, humor, and creative, bold adventure.