Building environmental awareness, accountability, and action in Maine since 1982

Our Vision

MEEA envisions a Maine where interconnectedness with the natural world is the root of environmental and social responsibility of all individuals, institutions, and communities.

Apply for Environmental Justice for New England Grant Program

First round of rolling applications due February 14, 2025

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Making Change

We build environmental awareness, accountability, and action through five impact areas. Click on the plus (+) sign next to each impact area to learn more.

  • MEEA works with youth and early career professionals to create leadership opportunities that empower their drive for social and climate justice. This support includes tools, resources, and stipends for their time and expertise. Community building is essential to fostering youth leadership. Therefore, we connect youth to network peers, community partners, mentors, and coaches. We recognize our youth’s work through award nominations.

  • Educators are critical change agents. We aim to support their work through peer connections, convenings, professional development, and financial and non-financial resources. We elevate storytelling and celebrate educator successes to share these achievements with our state and national network.

  • Research and evaluation are crucial in highlighting the needs of our community. MEEA works to identify statewide trends, patterns, and needs and utilizes this information to support programmatic evaluation, assess progress toward systems change, and disseminate local case studies of innovation. We also seek to communicate best practices from the national level.

  • Multiscale change is essential to MEEA’s work. We build organizational infrastructures to cultivate values-aligned procedures, emergent strategies, transparency with failure and process, and authentic relationships. We share the lessons learned with our state and national networks through modeling, teaching, and ensuring accountability for others working towards these culture shifts.

  • MEEA strives to advance research-informed, transformational policy solutions that will have systemic impact across the sector, the state, and beyond. Our approach focuses on engaging with grassroots movements, collaborating with coalition partners, and building relationships with state and federal decision-makers.

Environmental education is for everyone.

FOR EVERYONE | Culturally competent environmental education learning opportunities for ALL Maine people are essential to building healthy, just, and sustainable Maine communities. Historically, safe access to the outdoors and environmental learning has excluded communities of color, low-income families and people with disabilities. At the same time, the field of environmental education is an overwhelmingly white workforce. We recognize, name and actively work to change these dynamics to advance equity in environmental education.

LIFELONG LEARNERS | Learners of all ages, from infancy through adulthood, can benefit from the connection to and understanding of our environments that comes from environmental education. Implementing EE into every school day can build the foundation for lifelong engagement.

EVERY DAY, EVERY CLASS | Environmental education is core to a well-rounded education and can be integrated into and elevate understanding of all subjects, from math to science, from literature to the arts.

“I have been involved with the Maine environmental world for over a decade, and I've never been part of a group that has such equal representation from so many different identities. This is a rare opportunity for youth to teach and to learn, for adult allies to share and to grow.” -Program Participant