Christa Thorpe stands in the yard of her Bremen home on Thursday, May 23. Thorpe is a community development officer for Island Institute and a Bremen School Committee member who has worked in education and connecting communities all over the world. (Johnathan Riley photo)
To connect with others is a deeply human experience, and in her roles as a teacher, a community development coordinator at Island Institute in Rockland, Bremen School Committee member, and former Bremen Broadband Committee chair, Christa Thorpe has been fostering that kind connection between and within communities her whole life.
Thorpe, of Bremen, has a deep family history here in Lincoln County, which she said started as far back as the late 1820s.
In 1829, Thorpe’s father’s side of the family arrived to the area in Christmas Cove and they’ve more or less been on the peninsula ever since.
“I feel very rooted here,” Thorpe said. “Although, I didn’t always.”
After being born at the now-defunct Bath Memorial Hospital, Thorpe spent the first eight years of her life in the South Asian country of Bangladesh, a nation situated east of India along the Bay of Bengal, where her parents were serving in ministry organization working on different educational projects related to art and music.
“Growing up, I felt fairly bicultural,” she said. “I felt fairly at ease in Asia, and I ended up going back later in life for a couple of different reasons. Coming home to Maine was just as much home as the very busy streets of Dhaka.”
Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh and one of the most populous cities in the world, is set beside the Buriganga River.
When Thorpe’s family returned to Lincoln County, she attended Great Salt Bay Community School in Damariscotta and graduated from Lincoln Academy in Newcastle in 2005.
After Thorpe left high school, she attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., where she intended to further her studies in music: a lifelong passion she’s had particularly for playing the flute. Thorpe said she started playing the flute with GSB’s band longtime band teacher Anne-Marie D’Amico, but had grown up in a musical house. Her father was a band teacher, so there were always instruments around.
When Thorpe arrived to the Midwest she said experienced culture shock for the first time, despite having lived in another country before.
“Losing the ocean and the sense of east was disorienting,” she said. “The lake helped, it looked like the ocean but didn’t smell like the ocean.”
On top of the feelings of disorientation, Thorpe wasn’t thrilled with the classical approach to her course of study, so she switched focus and graduated with a degree in anthropology with a minor in music.
Thorpe said that despite missing the ocean and Maine, she was able to stay a little longer at the school to earn a master’s degree in intercultural studies and teaching English as a second language, as a way to make her anthropology degree result in a job.
The job she got was back in Bangladesh, where she taught English as a second language and directed curriculum at Asian University for Women in Chittagong.
“The goal was to raise up female leaders across Asia,” Thorpe said. “They inspired me so much.”
After three years in her position teaching overseas, Thorpe started applying to doctoral programs to “climb the academic ladder,” and while she waited to hear back from programs she returned to Maine.
However, during a weeklong trip out to Chicago for a friend’s wedding, she experienced homesickness for Maine so intense it altered the direction of her life. After meeting with one of her professors, Thorpe realized that going down an academic path meant that she may not be able to choose where she lived.
“You go where the jobs are,” she said. “And that was a defining moment: I wanted to choose where I lived. So I came back.”
Thorpe canceled her doctoral pursuits and began working at Lincoln Academy in 2013 teaching English as a second language and helping the school develop its curriculum for new international boarding students.
“I felt honored to become colleagues with the people who had been my beloved teachers,” Thorpe said.
By 2016, Thorpe felt the need to switch gears and get out of teaching in order to create more space to engage with the community outside of her job as an educator.
One of those communities was the blossoming agricultural community in and around Lincoln County.
At the time, her partner and future husband, Bennett Collins, was leasing farmland in Bremen and running a wood-fired catering business, Harvest Moon Pizza.
“I had the opportunity to plug in and support some formative years of that small business, but get my hands in the soil and help learn about gardening and raising animals,” she said. “I got to just be free for a few years and figure out my next step.”
In 2017, Thorpe joined the Bremen School Committee because she wanted to continue to be involved in education even outside of the classroom.
“As soon as I stopped teaching, it was like, how do I remain involved in supporting education in this community, which I care deeply about?” Thorpe said.
Thorpe continues to be involved with the committee, currently serving her third, three-year term.
She also joined the Bremen Conservation Committee, a committee focused on the conservation and well-being of Bremen’s flora and fauna, from 2014 until 2019.
Thorpe began her position at Island Institute in 2019 as a community development officer. According to Island Institute’s website, the organization’s mission is to build community sustainability in island and coastal communities and share solutions for addressing our coast’s most critical issues.
Her departure from the conservation committee was to focus on the Bremen Broadband Committee after she saw the town’s need for a high-speed internet infrastructure.
Thorpe’s sense of obligation to work with and in the community is one she suspects is in her DNA, but it’s also something in the DNA of being a teacher.
“Anyone who is drawn to teaching cares about the community, but specifically the future of their community,” she said.
This notion is what may have drawn her to help set up broadband infrastructure in the town. A project that wasn’t just about connecting Bremen to the world, but the world to Bremen.
“Peggy Schaefer, the former director of ConnectMaine, said download is how the world talks to Maine and upload is how Maine talks to the world,” she said. “That’s a big part of what drew me to the mission of Island Institute, is that piece of being able to empower communities to drive solutions and then share those out.”
Outside of her work town committee’s and at the Island Institute, Thorpe continues to play music with the Seacoast Community Orchestra in Damariscotta, and enjoys spending time with her partner and children in Bremen and working with the land they steward.
One of her favorite crops to grow is the Abenaki flint corn, which is a variety of corn grown by Abenaki people throughout New England.
Thorpe loves the plant because of its “deep roots” in New England and the story is its resilience and connection.
Abenaki flint corn was the only crop that survived 1817, a year where there was a frost every month in the year because of a cloud of volcanic ash spewing from Europe.
For Thorpe, the plants story a cautionary tale about how everything is interconnected.
“People say ‘let’s keep Maine the best kept secret’ but we can’t, we are so interconnected, a volcano somewhere else caused a frost every month of the year,” she said. “We are not isolated.”
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