St. George Community Development Corporation
St. George CDC aims to make the five villages of St. George livable for all residents by supporting local efforts in housing, healthcare, education, economic development, and food security.
St. George, Maine
St. George, Maine
Facing the compounding impacts of COVID-19, a surging opioid crisis, rising housing costs, and a contracting local economy that pushed young people out of their community, school district leaders in St. George, Maine concluded a new vision for their schools was essential.
Through listening to the community, along with focussed data analytics, they found that expanding career and technical education increased student engagement and improved attendance, giving students a visible “why” for their schooling. And so the district collaborated with regional employers to identify skills students would need in the workforce and built the Grace Innovation Center — a makerspace where students, PreK-12, could learn those skills.
When the Grace Innovation Center opened in St. George in the summer of 2025, residents came out in full force. For a small coastal community that had spent years watching young people leave town for other opportunities, the ribbon-cutting felt like something fundamental had finally changed.
This kind of direct community impact on the Center is a large part of what Finding Common Purpose looks for when scouting for organizations to partner with and invest in.
District leadership looked at all the factors working against the long-term success of their community and concluded the answer was a different vision of what school was for.
They partnered with climate-resilient, thriving-wage employers across the region to understand what skills students needed to be an asset in these fields. They dug into student data, community health data, and housing costs to find the gaps they could leverage into positive change. They found that when they expanded career and technical education in schools, student engagement increased, attendance improved, and the “why” of school for the students of St. George became visible.
The momentum gained from listening to the needs of the community built the Grace Innovation Center; and the Grace Innovation Center, in turn, began building something larger: a thriving community driven by St. George’s own St. George Community Development Corporation.
The corporation was founded to make St. George livable for all residents through supporting innovative local efforts — connecting practical education with workforce development and housing affordability across sectors. In 2026, St. George CDC joined Finding Common Purpose’s inaugural starter dashboard cohort which is helping establish a collective vision for outcomes. and to develop specific and strategic indicators across its core partners to help achieve this vision .
The dashboard shares measures of education, workforce readiness, and affordability — the three areas the community identified as essential to keeping St. George livable for the people there now and for those who will grow up there.
The Grace Innovation Center was the beginning. Maintaining the energy and momentum from that project to create lasting change in the community is the current and future work. The dashboard built with FCP is helping drive critical questions around what success should look like in the future, how best to measure that, and what work will be needed to create change. What the community ends up measuring will shape what they do, build alignment, and ensure progress towards creating a community where all can thrive.
“The best is yet to come. Together, we'll transform public education, fuel workforce development, and provide a model for rural economic development. And we'll have a whole lot of fun along the way.”
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