 Welcome to the first annual possibly Portland Trails 15 by 15. Tonight we're going to hear from nine people who are doing some great work in Portland related to land conservation, trails, active transportation, and generally increasing the health and sustainability of greater Portland. Here's how it works for these nine brave people. They each have 15 slides that change every 15 seconds. That's just under four minutes for each presenter. Most of them have done nothing like this before. So be a little generous in terms of your face. We'll hear from five of them and then we'll have a 15 minute intermission. Intermission is the time for you to get a drink and discuss what you've just heard and seen with the other attendees. After an intermission we'll hear from the other four presenters. Here's your job during the next piece of the evening. Cheer wildly for each presenter before and after their presentation. Listen attentively during. You can make some appropriate cat calls or noises and stuff during the presentation, but don't interrupt them because they have a certain mojo going and timing to keep on their rhythm. Please discuss these presentations passionately during the intermission afterwards and also in your daily lives afterwards in the next 30 to 40 years of your life. So if you haven't already, please silence or turn off the ringers on your cell phone. They'll be very distracting if we get some Jay-Z ringtones going off during the presentation. So please don't. The presenters are going to ring this bell to start their presentation and then it's going to go on autopilot. So please welcome the first presenter. I'd also want to remind each of the presenters to speak pretty closely into the microphones. These are being recorded for some use afterwards. We get to be determined, but we'll figure that out. Our first brave presenter is Jessica Burton. Jessica is executive director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. She has worked in conservation and nonprofits for many years. In the late 90s, after working for the Chihuahua Foundation, Jess had the good fortune as many of us did to work with Alex Hopkins here at Portland Trails. Jess lives on Peaks Island with her two daughters, husband Ponch and crazy dog Hazelnut. The close community, ease of outdoor adventuring and lack of driving took her to the island and she finds the schlep of island living reminds her of her childhood in New York City. Jess loves museums and books, thus making one of her favorite books of all time the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which is about two kids who hide out and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here is Jess. Thank you for having me. The first thing I want to say is that the slides that you'll be seeing are really representative of our themes, the themes that we represent and work toward achieving. The words I say will not be necessarily tied to each slide. So you'll see slides that represent collaboration, teamwork, nature, farming, land use, recreation, fun, education, future, our vision, efficiency, and gatherings. So the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative was founded at the beginning of last year. We are one year old and we now have seven member organizations. We are a membership based organization that provides services to conservation organizations in New York and Cumberland County. Our members are Portland Trails, Oceanside Conservation Trust of Casco Bay, Shevegan Cumberland Land Trust, Scarborough Land Trust, Sacco Valley Land Trust, Przomskiet Land Trust, and Three Rivers Land Trust. We have two advisory members, Maine Coast Heritage Trust and Maine Island Trail Association. Together we protect over 4,000 acres of farms, trails, forests, shorelines, wetlands, and in over 25 communities. Through collaboration we strive for efficiency. Our governance is provided from our members. We really are a cooperative, each one of our members has a place on our governing body, on our board of directors. We provide opportunity for sharing best practices and networking. And our staff, which is two, myself and Doreen, are dedicated to providing efficient and professional services. Always looking for shared needs and opportunity for joint programming. The community impact of our work is clear that stronger organizations provide better conservation. All of us, all of these organizations, share the goal to protect these lands in perpetuity and as such the organizations need to be here to do so. And we at the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative are committed to sustainability and to working with our member organizations to achieve sustainability through all of their practices, both in their stewardship and conservation work, and administrative and policy work. Teamwork, that's why. Portland Trails is dedicated to connecting communities through trails. It's dedicated to connecting people to the outdoors through trails. And we see the collaborative as a pathway to that sustainability and to a vision for our region for really great and strong conservation that will last forever. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jess. That was outstanding. Great start for the evening. Our next presenter is Jamie Parker. For many of you, he needs not much introduction. Jamie grew up following in the footsteps of his Finnish quarry worker ancestors walking the trails of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Being the rabble rouser that he is or still wants to be, he wrote his first letter to the editor at age 16 protesting the attempted closing of the historic Atlantic path along the shore of Rockport by the new owners of a trophy house on the shore. For his bachelor party on Martha's Vineyard, Jamie and his friends completed an overnight trek using as many modes as transportation as possible. Bicycling, hiking, swimming, kayaking, skateboarding, hitchhiking, and public bus. When not planning or building trails for Portland Trails, Jamie enjoys exploring the rest of Maine with his family. There's usually hiking involved and some other things as well. You have to be named. Give it up for Jamie. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you all for coming. I've compressed my usual monologue about Portland Trails accomplishments for the year and plans for the coming year into the 15 by 15 format. So here's two years worth of work compressed into less than four minutes. 2012 was a very productive year without too many BSPs. In lieu of the big, sexy projects, we did a lot of maintenance improvements and signage, including these four city trail kiosks. Nonetheless, we did create three miles of new trails, including the final leg of the Subego to the Sea Trail. We made major improvements and repairs at the Four River Sanctuary, the Stroudwater River Trail. We continued our partnership with the city, including work at Presumskirt River Preserve shown here, as well as Baxter Woods and Evergreen Cemetery. In our continued attempts to work smarter and not harder, we used our assets as best we could, including our fabulous AmeriCorps intern Leo Mayhew, shown here making good use of our candycom machine, moving a 14 foot bridge along the Presumskirt River. The bridges campaign allowed us to make major upgrades to bridges. We built around 1,000 feet of boardwalks and bridges in 2012, including this one in the Presumskirt River Preserve, shown during the spring flood and then in more stable conditions later. And this one in the Four River Sanctuary, which is our largest land holding and creates some of our biggest maintenance obligations. With numerous bridges, miles of trails, and lots of invasive plants to remove, the sanctuary keeps us busy. Much of that work is done by volunteers. And I want to thank our volunteer coordinator, Charlie Baldwin, who had a very busy year mobilizing the many, many people that came out to help Portland trails. And thank you to the volunteers. Some of you are in this room and some are shown here, there. Thank you all. As I mentioned, we worked a lot on city property, including this project at Baxter Woods. We built new trails and a platform for school children to access the trail during science class, the pond during science class. We also worked with the South Portland Land Trust on several projects, including this bridge and trail that we installed at Trout Brook. Which is pretty exciting, as you can see. And I plan to do some more projects with South Portland this year. Thanks to the School Ground Greening Coalition, we continued our work on school grounds, including Lyseth, Longfellow, Reiki, among others, and we have some new projects lined up for 2013, including Breakwater School, Ocean Ave, and East End Community School. Here is Fort Sumner Park on Monjoy Hill. This is another civic project, which is largely complete and should be greening up just in time for the Friends of Eastern Promenade tour concert series, which has been moved to Fort Sumner for the year. We continued our involvement in urban planning with an emphasis on walkability, placemaking, and complete streets, consulting with the city as stakeholders on civic projects, such as the Spring Street redesign and the Boyd Street trail. And thanks to Bruce Hyman for making Portland the first city in Maine to have a complete streets policy. And of course, we've been planning for 2013, which requires a lot of site visits and a lot of very, very hard work, as you can see here, involving skis. 2013 looks to be swinging back towards a big trail construction year, continuing with our bridges work, both large and small, some major trail extension projects, mostly into Westbrook. In fact, we can call it the Year of Westward Expansion. And we are moving into Westbrook on two fronts, extending both the Stroudwater and the Przemskat River trails. Fortunately, the City of Westbrook is welcoming these incursions and even helping to fund some of these projects, both which are long-awaited priorities for Portland trails. I think I've shown these pictures at every annual meeting for the last five years. And we still do plan to build a bridge to access our land on Brickyard Point. Tom Farmer has been working diligently to get us permission from MDOT for this. And hopefully next year I'll be able to show you some new pictures of a new bridge in this location. And some pictures of some other projects that we'll be involved in, including, and I know I'm past my 15 seconds here about it. Cancow Woods Trail Improvements, Boyd Street Trail Construction, School Ground Greening, Neighborhood Byways, Libbytown Streetscape Implementation, Tukey's Bridge Trail, Franklin Street Phase II, Extension of the Bayside Trail, a pocket park at the Oldport Festival, new trails off of Ledgewood Street and Falmouth, trails to the waterfront at Wayne Fleet Fields, works with the Parks Commission, including Congress Square Redesign, West End Connections to Commercial Street, Trails and Pays in Park, Havity Woods Trails, Thompson's Point, Martin's Point and Riven and Charlie Park. Wish us luck. I do want to extend our incredible thanks to Charlie and Jamie for the day-to-day work that they do, especially with all the trail stewards. That's a very important program that's ramping up these days in terms of folks adopting a trail and taking ownership for it. And just Charlie and Jamie do incredible work with lots of support from the office staff and Kara. So please echo that with some love. Our next presenter is Sashi Meisner. Sashi works with Portland Trails in their mission to transform school grounds into rich learning spaces. Her favorite childhood memories take place in the acres and acres of woods and fields near her home that she claimed as her own. She explored creeks, climbed trees, scaled barbed wire fences, built fires and was once chased by a farmer's bull. Fortunately for her, the words property line, liability and trespass were not yet quite part of her vocabulary. So let's welcome Sashi. Right, so the work that I do with the Portland Trail School Ground Greening Coalition has really been about introducing a new idea or a new vision for the way school grounds look and the way that they function. Our approach is really based on understanding the child. Children are unique creatures. They are not many adults. They have very specific needs and some of them are drastically different from adults' needs. If you think about a person's lifespan, childhood is this brief window of time where there's just this intense amount of growth and development that takes place and there's no other time in your life where there's this potential for learning. So it makes sense that the environments we provide for children during this very critical period of learning should be rich with experiences. Ones that really support whole child development. What we currently provide for is mostly gross motor skill development, physical fitness needs. While these are important, it's a really narrow vision for the potential for school grounds. When you consider that these school grounds have a captive audience of between four and five hundred kids each day in these spaces, the environments really have the potential to be rich and offer lots of opportunity for learning to support what goes on inside the classroom. Motivation is the driving force behind learning. These spaces really need to be interesting. They need to be dynamic. Children learn through play. If they're outside playing, it's a learning opportunity. We rarely engage children in the ideas about a sense of place. That's a huge opportunity that's missed. Children are very capable of reading a landscape and understanding complex concepts like stormwater, natural processes, the idea of community and ecology. These are all stories that could be represented in the school grounds. We want children to interact and engage with a space on multiple levels. So that as they grow, they're going to be in the space between kindergarten and fifth or sixth grade. So it's a lot of time. We want as they grow that their comprehension grows and increases. And so we want these spaces to continue to engage children on multiple levels as they grow. Instead of giving children fixed equipment, standardized equipment, with little to no unknowns, there's no mystery in standardized equipment, we need to entrust children with the ability to have movable parts to manipulate their play space to create their play experience, to experiment, to build things. You know, these are all just qualities and experiences that children need and the school grounds should be able to support. You know, this space is for our kids and it's also for teachers. So our, for my part of this, their mission has really been to help expand the idea on what a school ground is, what it looks like, what it could be. And if we aren't only looking at kids' physical needs, the ability to run around and expend that energy, you know, it's very short-sighted. School grounds should be rich, they should be diverse, and they should support children's full potential for learning. So I'm very happy to be part of the School Ground Greening Coalition. Thank you. Thank you, Sashi. Our next presenter is Tom Farmer. We won't hold it against him, but Tom was born and raised in New Hampshire by the light about 20 years ago and moved to Maine. Tom has a deep appreciation for all things New England, the seasons, the coast, the mountains, and the recreational opportunities, the seafood, you can find him at Jay's Oyster Bar nine days a week, and the numerous micro-brews that we find here in Portland we're blessed with. Tom lives in Falmouth with his lovely wife Darla, who's here tonight, and their two daughters, Lydia and Abby. Tom is a registered landscape architect with Terrence J. Dewan and Associates that's based in Yarmouth and serves on the Portland Trails Board of Trustees. As a landscape architect, he's been involved with numerous projects that support Portland Trail's mission, including bike and pedestrian design, land conservation, active transportation, placemaking, and community engagement. Let's give a welcome to Tom. I think Bruce said it, but what I'll be presenting tonight is what we as landscape architects do to help support the core mission of Portland Trails. I'll start with the Bayside Trail, our beloved Bayside Trail. What you see in these images is the frosting on the cake, but it's the cake itself that required months of planning and design. Contaminated soils from the old industry and railroad was used as landscape forms and cap for protection, permeable surfaces that flow to bioengineered rain gardens, and thanks to the support of Portland Trails and volunteers to help plant the dogwoods and trees. Another example of what we do is cross sections to help portray, wear trails and sidewalks and ped and cyclist experience within the roadway corridor. We also use a software program called Photoshop where photos in 3D can be projected. These are extremely helpful and informative at the public and community presentations, and that's a photo simulation of what the North Boyd Street connection to the Bayside Trail will look like once constructed, and we just got word this morning that that's funded for construction. West Commercial Street we worked with Woodin and Curran on a feasibility study to extend the multi-use trail from the Casco Bay Bridge west to the Four River Parkway, a critical link in the Portland Trail system. This is currently waiting for funding and this is a photo simulation of what it might look like along the star building complex and I can take a little break now because the photo sims help shared use path bikeways amenities, pedestrians and this is, a lot of people don't know here but it's an old arched granite railroad tunnel. Unfortunately the bridge put abutments right in front of it but this is a potential connection for the shared use pathway. Hopefully that's underneath the connection coming off of West Commercial Street. Oh, a little out of order. Jamie wasn't able to show a picture of the bridge but I can and this is Brickyard Point coming from Tidewater Farms in Falmouth over to our land locked land and and this is, he said that we're working with DOT so we're waiting for permission from DOT to access their land with the touchdown of the bridge and the trail to get to Brickyard Point which is an amazing piece of land. Longfellow School in Portland we work with Laura Newman as a school yard greening coordinator and the fifth grade students of Longfellow to transform a really worn out barren space into an outdoor classroom including the shade structure and trees, vegetable garden the habitat pond that you saw et cetera. On the other side of the school we worked with Portland Trails and Jamie had a photo of this as well and that's him and Charlie down there in the lower left to create this outdoor amphitheater salve, salvage granite curbing from the city stockpile and last but not least the last two slides are our friends in south Portland a big part of our work involves design of parks and open space elements that include passive recreation preservation of scenic views playgrounds gardens botanical parks and last but not least trails. Thank you Tom, I've had the privilege of working with Tom on multiple projects and and say he's got that unique combination of vision, practicality, let's do it and let's get something built that is invaluable in many, many projects and I know he's been a great addition to the Portland Trails Board and a go-getter for the organization. Our fifth presenter that will close out this portion of the 15 by 15 is Samantha Hadrick. Samantha is an educator and freelance designer based in Portland. Currently she is an assistant professor of graphic design at Maine College of Art where she teaches courses in professional practice, visual identity systems, information design and independent publishing. Her work focuses on connecting students with the local community and her classes have partnered with Maine Audubon, the Portland Pirates and Portland Trails. She also serves on the board of AIGA, Maine as director of education. Samantha holds an MFA, master of fine arts and graphic design from the Yale School of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Communication Design from the Carnegie Mellon University. Let's welcome Samantha to the podium. Being as nimble as I am, we are going to leap ahead to Peter Monroe. Did you know this Peter? I'm so good. Okay, good, okay. I've also had the privilege of knowing Peter for many, many, for a couple of decades almost. Peter is designed, built and overseen construction of walkways and cities, towns and natural areas for master plans, residences, cemeteries and parks during his 25 year career as a landscape architect. He first wrote about walking in a 1993 article entitled Paths and Their Design while president of the board of Portland Trails. He blogs at designforwalking.com and I would encourage you to go to that site. It's a very, very enriching and you can just feel the passion that oozes out of Peter for this topic and I'm sure he'll ooze for us up here as well. Thanks very much. Oozing mood, all right. Yeah, Portland Trails used to be all lawyers. It looks like it's now all landscape architects. This is great. Now that more than half of all humans live in cities and now that we know that livable cities are walkable cities, to design for global impact, we should design for walking in cities. And we should wait for the next slide. We should also increase walking to mute the global climate change. Any distance you walk saves 99% of the energy and pollution you would have used driving. To reduce your carbon footprint, increase your real footprints. Being on foot generates place-based community as we know here. Face to face means foot to foot. Portland Trails, First Friday, Farmers Market, all of them create social democracy and economic development and vibrant cities. Paz are so important now that New York City has spent $100 million a mile to convert the old elevated railroad into the High Line in Lower Manhattan. It's proved it's worth by generating $2 billion in new development and $4 billion in four million visitors a year. Last spring I spent my entire spring in Luca, Italy, Tuscany, a poster child for walkable cities. You can walk on top of these walls which surround the downtown for four kilometers. The streets are almost all shared, true complete streets. If you wanna see what it looks like, here's what it looks like. And because the cars and everybody have to travel at people's speed, there are almost no accidents. The plazas in Luca used to be car parks, but now they have been car-free for 20 years and children can play in them all day long and they do. The city has also designed the areas outside its walls. Those used to be parking lots, gravel parking lots as well, and for the last 20 years, they've been a green belt around the downtown. Here's a triathlon being held above and below the walls. It's an incredible experience to be in a city that's designed for pedestrians. Of course, some local folks here in Portland have done the same sort of thing, converting a car space to a people space, guess who? Complete with Wi-Fi last September, just for a day. But the same kind of conversion can be done permanently as here on the Champs-Élysées where Paris has put a service road underground, parked the cars down there, and this is one of the most attractive promenades in the world now because it was devoted to people. Part of Times Square in New York City has converted to car-free areas, put out tables with food vendors, music, sun. Thousands of people go there every day. This was in October. London is still busy downtown but quiet because they've got congestion fees for cars and they put out 8,000 rentable bikes at 500 docking stations. It's incredible to look to the left but look out for bikes. It's really, it's quite an experience. The other Portland in Oregon has converted streets and car lanes to pedestrian ways, rain gardens, bike racks because they have great transit downtown that's very cheap or free, had been free. And the future too is foot-based. Here's a plan to link Stockholm, Sweden to cities to the north through a green artery in the center of a new campus with transit and everybody else on foot, gardeners, walkers, cyclists. It's a resilient people-friendly green future. To learn more about the growing global conversation about walkable places and a livable planet, do go to my website. Read, enjoy, and please comment. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. That was indeed, it was delicious. Thanks. Let's again please give a round of applause for our first five presenters before our intermission. All right, well, we have a spectacular next presentation and this is one of my favorite families in Portland of all time. We have Sarah Cushman, Rob Levin, and Cedar. Rob, Sarah, and Cedar are Manjoy Hillites who pedaled out of their driveway on May 1st of last year in 2012 and biked a grand loop across Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Quebec, and back into Maine. And we have to just go, I'm just tired thinking about it. It's wonderful. Rob is a non-profit attorney who serves on the Portland Trails Board. Sarah is a transportation planner and consultant working with the Bicycle Coalition of Maine who's now based and has their main office in Portland. So please visit them on Preble Street. It's a great location and we're really excited to have Sarah and the BCM have their home base in Portland and she also works with the Maine Department of Transportation. Cedar, who was five and two-thirds years old approximately when the trip started, is currently unemployed, we're working on that. But she spends her time in kindergarten at the Friends School of Portland. Let's give a great welcome to this wonderful family. Cedar said we had to wear our vest and our helmet. Flashing parts the whole time. But, okay, we won't put this on the, I'll go first actually. Okay, so it wouldn't be Portland Trails without starting with a map and some statistics. So 2001 human-powered miles, 25 miles a day, three months and three weeks, one state, four provinces, and most important, 147 playgrounds. How did you carry Cedar? Everyone asks. It's called a wee-hoo, good for peddling, sleeping, coloring, snacking, reading, laughing and listening to dad's stories. Up flies and hills stay away. No sunrise on this day. Canna map, we're coming your way. Some of the trails we cycled, Andrewsgog and River Bike Path, Downey Sunrise Trail, St. John Harbor Passage, Saltmarsh Trail, Sheerwater Flyer Trail, Kaylee Coastal Trail, The Root Verde, Carabasset Valley Nargage Path, and last but not least, Eastern Prompt. So much fluorescence in sprawling earth tones. Americans head north. Our friend John did some haiku for us. Nanaimo Bar, so tasty, it smiles back at me. Red leaf on cheeks, maple flavored patriotism. 113 days on the road. 113 ice cream stop. Ice cream for breakfast, ice cream at night, ice cream on the left, ice cream on the right, cones, sundaes, floats and shakes. There's another dairy bar, time to hit the brakes. Our Cabot Trail motto, there's no shame in walking. Attention bicyclists, the mass of hill you are now climbing is a warmup. The mountains begin in five kilometers. Newfoundland, like Maine, but more so. Newfoundland, the way life used to should have been. Newfoundland, the black flies are nothing here compared to Labrador. Family of three, three arches, one sea. Okay, choppy aqua seas, a boatload of green stomachs to reach blue ice. And there's a story there, a messy, messy story you don't wanna hear about. One of the questions we fielded before the trip, other questions, but won't Cedar get bored? Sitting on a bike all day? Will you stop and let her out once in a while? Quebec, where art and agriculture share a field and French flavored cycling in Labelle Provence, croissants, poutine, pâté, le hot dog, and of course creme glacé. Then came lunch. It takes the day to day love of close family, lifelong friends, and complete strangers to make a trip as rich as this one. Thank you so much. We're blessed next to have Cara Waldrick who's the executive director of Portland Trails. Cara's gonna be sharing 15 slides with us, keeping with the format. Cara grew up in a much warmer place where life happened outside. At age seven years of age, her favorite hobbies were climbing trees and having picnics with her dog in the backyard. Things have not changed much in 30 years. Riding bikes, kayaking, trail running, cross country skiing, they are all vehicles to experience the natural world firsthand. For years, Cara refused to get a newspaper subscription or watch the news on TV because most news was sensationalized version of one societal tragedy after another. Here's the type of news that she likes to learn about. Cara? I can't believe I'm the one that put the program together and I put myself after that one. They've all been fabulous, so thank you. Ready? What if we made the intentional choice to share good news and inspire each other? At Portland Trails, we work with amazing and generous people. They serve not only as volunteers, project partners, advisors, members, donors, but also as our inspiration every day. Here's what inspires us. Grunt matches. Grunt matches are fun, competitive events that channel athletic energy into productive labor and accomplish real good in the world. Trail work makes for a fun grunt match and grunt match makes for a quick trail work. Every Wednesday, May through August, the main running company holds a 5K race on the Back Cove Trail for 250 people. These events provide an opportunity for all types of runners and walkers to get outside for health and fitness and all proceeds support trail maintenance. 11 local schools are supported by the Schoolground Greening Coalition to create school yards that are healthy for students, families, neighborhoods, and the natural world. Your long support results in incredible projects like you saw in Sashi's presentation. 1500 volunteers contributed approximately 5,000 hours of service towards Portland trails in 2012. What an honor to work in this community. One year ago, 12.75 acres of forest and wetlands along Canco Road went up for sale. Neighbors, many of whom purchased their homes in the area because of the access to green space for their families, immediately took action. They sought out local expertise and partners and created a nonprofit. In only 10 months, they had raised the $200,000 to purchase and protect the land forever. If ever there was an example of Margaret Mead's quote, the Friends of Canco Woods is it. Portland trails volunteers and the Friends of Canco Woods are truly an inspiration and they're an extraordinary group of people but all of us can be that inspiration. We just have to shift the way we think about things. What if each one of us commuted by bike, bus, or feet to work, school, or at least just to run errands? One of our members bike commutes daily from East Bayside to his job at paths on Allen Avenue. 90% of his daily commute is on trail. What if neighbors work together to create healthy wildlife habitat with native plantings? Portland trails is removing invasive species from our four river sanctuary. Having adjacent landowners create healthy habitat in their yards would essentially expand the sanctuary. Have you seen all the walkers on Baxter Boulevard since they closed it a couple weeks ago? What if we did that every single Sunday so that families could bike and skate and reclaim the public space for human recreation? If Cambridge, Massachusetts can do it, so can Portland, Maine. What if Portland, Maine had a bike share program where visitors and residents alike could zip around town on bikes that they pick up and drop off at various kiosks? What if Portland was connected to Falmouth and Westbrook and South Portland by trail? And what if tourists explored our community on running and bike tours so they could experience how truly awesome it is to live here? In 2013, Portland trails will be working on all of these projects and more. What if you joined us as a member or a volunteer or a supporter? Together, let's make the intentional choice to inspire each other daily to connect people, neighborhoods, schools, and ecosystems. Thank you, Kara. That was a great supplement to what Jamie talked about in terms of what Portland trails has accomplished and is working on in the next year, five years, 10 years to accomplish. Our next presenter is Erica Beck Spencer. And when we asked for bios, Erica wrote a great little piece for us and I'm gonna read her, read what she wrote. Erica writes, during my childhood summers, my family camped all summer long. Our property was set back from Pawtuckoway Lake in New Hampshire and after climbing out of our tents in the morning, we'd spend the entire day swimming, daydreaming, playing in the sand, picking blueberries and eventually learning to boat. I hoped to one day buy some land and give my two children the gift my parents unknowingly gave to me as a child growing up outside. Between the ages of 16 and 26, I taught sailing lessons to children every summer. Now I race J24 and Etchwell sailboats here in Maine and hope to do some frostbiting on the new J22s at Sail Maine. I'm a former teacher and currently a science curriculum specialist. My favorite beer is anything handed to me after finishing a few sailboat races. I've never met Erica, but I like her already. Please welcome Erica to the podium. Thanks very much. I have to say, I don't have a second to spare in here so you can't applaud. Until the end, especially to my mother-in-law who's here who is one of my biggest fans. Okay, I will. Hi everyone, I'm honored to be here tonight to share a bit about my blog, everydayoutside.com and the 365 Everyday Outside Challenge. I'm a full-time working mother of two incredible children and when my kids were little, we'd get outside often. A lot during the summer, not as often in the winter. Here they are posing for me for a work picture with cardboard clipboards. I'm an outdoor educator and a curriculum specialist and hyper-aware of the fact that kids don't go outside the way we probably all went outside as children. My work is largely around inspiring educators to get outside with the ultimate goal of connecting children to the natural world. I live near Evergreen Cemetery in Baxter Woods and when my kids were little, it was so rare and such a special treat for me to go on a walk in the woods alone. On many, many walks, I'd think, why don't I do this more often? I'd wonder, if I'm so committed to getting children outside, why am I not getting outside every day? On January 1st, I was staying at, on 2012, I was staying at a house near the ocean and I heard screams of delight outside and I knew people were taking a polar bear swim and I looked at my husband and we both knew it was time. So I threw on my most bathing suit-like underwear, went to the beach and took the plunge into the freezing cold water and I also took the plunge into my challenge of going outside every day for at least 30 minutes for the entire year. No matter what the weather, no matter the temperature or how I was feeling, at least 30 minutes and I was gonna blog about it. I set some rules for my outings for myself. I could miss 12 days per year about once a month. Everything outside counted, except walking to and from my car. I also didn't count work time since I do work outside. Going on walks, watching my kids outside, gardening, running on trails, skiing on trails, walking on trails, ice skating, eating meals outside and even sitting outside, drinking wine at night with my husband counted. Most days, getting outside was easy. Who wouldn't wanna be outside during the summer in Maine? Other times, a day would get away from me and I'd have to walk at 11 p.m. under the streetlights. The hardest days to get out were on long travel days or when family came to visit. Now, my extended family just comes with me outside. Most times when I was sick, I figured out a way to get outside anyway. I went outside for all but eight days for the entire year of 2012. Most of my outings were on walks on our very own Portland trails. For two of the eight days, I just forgot to go outside. On December 31st, I ended a year of getting outside with another swim at the East End Beach with the Natural Resource Council of Maine. It was so freaking fun and such a great way to end the year of getting outside. And now in 2013, I've opened up the challenge for others to take. There are between 20 and 40 people, young and old, from Portland, Maine to the other Portland who have told me they're taking the challenge and there are few, even, who have committed to the challenge in this room. So far, I've gone outside every day this year and it's so much easier than in 2012. Now, it's just what I do. Thank you, Portland trails for making it so easy for me to find nature so close to my Portland home. I hope you'll follow along on my blog. But more importantly, I hope to see you on the trails. Thank you. This is gonna be one of those pregnant pauses here in the proceedings. So let's take this opportunity. I was gonna, I've got a long list of thank yous at the end to go through, but I would like to just have us before everybody departs to give a very rousing thank you to all the fantastic work that the Portland Trail staff does throughout the year to make all of this wonderful work happen. So please, please give it up for the Portland Trail staff. Okay, I guess I don't have to improvise anymore. We're ready to go. I previously had introduced Samantha. And I, what, say again? Okay, then Peter showed it. Well, it worked out pretty well. So Samantha Hadrick, she still is an educator and freelance designer. She's still an assistant professor of graphic design at Maine College of Art. It hasn't changed yet. Okay, hasn't changed in the last 45 minutes. And Samantha is going to bless us with her presentation. She's done lots of collaborative work with Portland-based organizations, Maine Audubon, Portland Trails, Portland Pirates, and I won't read her biography again. Please welcome Samantha. I shouldn't admit that here though. There we go. All right, so every fall, Maine College of Art offers classes for incoming students that are called FYN. They complement the studio classes and are centered around a component of public engagement with a local community organization. So last semester, I taught an FYN class called Portland Walking Library. The idea for the class was inspired by an interview that I read with Jamie. He had talked about his role at Portland Trails and their vision for a more walkable and connected city and community. The main goals of this class were for students, one, to get outside, which is a real challenge, to observe and to start to see the city as connected to their studio experience, and two, to document our walks through the art of zines. This is from Thomas Clark's poem in Praise of Walking. The word zines derived from magazine. They're printed publications made using inexpensive production methods and in small editions from as little as 10 copies to maybe as many as 1,000. So a student used this trails map to trace walks we took as a class and some walks that students took on their own for projects. During the semester, we took six walks together on the trails, and for the most part, this was all new territory for the students. We started the semester by making instant books, which is a very simple technique. When you make a book using one piece of paper, fold it and cut down, the students experimented with using different types of papers, writing short narratives and illustrating stories of different walks that they took. We then learned how to make zines with both the computer and the photocopier. These images are from a workshop with Anthony Smersky, who is the co-founder of a zine called MegaWords based in Philadelphia. We made a few group zines where each student contributed one spread. They made by hand and we photocopied it. During the semester, Jamie visited the class. He led us on a walk through the Eastern prom, pointed out his favorite spots, talked about the history of the city and the process of building and maintaining trails. We also walked the West End and Jamie showed us the site of future trails. The prompts I gave my students were to look in all directions, to visit and to revisit places, to pay attention to the smallest details and the passage of time, the weather, to consider the natural environment, the built environment and the confluence of the two. I think that the structure of a publication has a natural relationship to the structure of a walk. It has a beginning and an end. The narrative has a pace and a rhythm. Or as Rebecca Solnit writes, stories are travels and travels are stories. At the end of the semester, we were part of an exhibit of all FYN classes and we were lucky enough to have the Zan Gallery, which faces Free Street. We installed the library of zines and each student made 10 copies, which were all free for the taking. Here you can see the display case up close, which contained a sample of the student's handmade books along with some objects collected during our walks. Some of these things like the netting and shells students experimented with photocopying and including in their zines. Outside the gallery space in the hall, students assembled a collage of photographs, illustrations and graphics that were pulled from individual zines. The display itself created a kind of trail of experiences from throughout the semester. All in all, the library grew to about 60 different zines authored by 19 different students. My hope is that the library may continue to grow in the future and that I can continue to find ways for students to document the city in which they live and work. I am grateful for Portland Trails. Whoops. I'm grateful for Portland Trails for partnering with Maine College of Art and wanna especially thank Jamie for taking the time to be our guide to the city. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha. Great example of how Portland Trails connects people with places. Well, that's our nine fabulous presenters tonight. We'd like to give them a round of applause, please. We'd like to also thank you all for coming tonight and sharing your time and taking part in some of the experiences that we were very pleased to share with you tonight as well. We wanna thank the Space Gallery for hosting us this evening. There are a few ways, thank you. There are a few ways that you can get involved in projects that you've learned about tonight. Check out the fabulous Portland Trails website, www.trails.org. Join us for one of the great discovery treks so you can learn about some of the trails and green spaces that you've made not explored yet. You can go to the events page on the website. We're having the great, great, great bash that happens the last Friday in April, April 26th. The Happy Trails, Big Bash and Silent Auction, a great time. The 10K Trail to Ale is September 22nd. And as I mentioned before when I wave the envelope, please become a member of Portland Trails if you aren't and stay in touch. You can visit the back table to get more information. And thank you again very much for coming tonight and it was a great night.