Megan Harrigan hurried around the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor in September, gathering clients and bringing them to the back corner of the church where there was a makeshift clinic of folding tables and metal chairs. Each client was homeless, and most had an opioid addiction. Harrigan knew them all by name.

Between helping patients get referrals for opioid treatment medication, providing care for wounds that can come with opioid use, checking on clients she hadn’t seen in a while, and joking with other staff of the street medicine team, Harrigan talked with a Maine Monitor reporter about a shift she has witnessed in recent years: more older adults are doing harder drugs. 

Harrigan, a mental health and rehabilitation technician, first started helping people with addiction more than 20 years ago. At that time, her older patients primarily struggled with prescription opioids. But regulatory crackdowns on overprescribing meant some of those patients turned to illicit drugs, now largely fentanyl, Harrigan said.

What’s more, she’s now working with more older people, a surprising observation as illicit drug use typically declines after young adulthood.

The opioid epidemic is still primarily a problem among younger people. But as it has worn on, a change has been happening that’s largely gone unnoticed. The Maine Monitor analyzed Medicare claims data to show for the first time that the number of Medicare patients in Maine, ages 65 and older, who received buprenorphine treatment for their addiction to opioids increased about 70 percent between 2019 and 2023.

This increase is large, but it represents a small number of all patients: about 450 more people seeking help at different health care systems and doctors across the state. It means the change might be imperceptible to individual medical practitioners. But some are starting to notice the increase in their every day, and it is worrying to them. They wonder if it is the start of a trend. 

“Eventually they’re going to age, and our drugs are not stopping,” said Harrigan, a liaison with OPTIONS, a state-coordinated initiative that stands for Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety. 

In Maine, some family doctors, addiction treatment providers and public health officials have seen anecdotal increases in older adults struggling with opioid use, pointing to the potential emergence of a growing problem in pockets of the state.

However, other organizations, including MaineHealth Behavioral Health based in Westbrook and the Bangor Area Recovery Network in Brewer, said they have not seen a notable increase in the older patients they serve. 

Meanwhile, total overdoses in the state continue to plummet, and older adults account for a relatively small portion of those overdoses. Mainers 65 and older made up 23 percent of the state population but just 12 percent of nonfatal overdoses last year and 13 percent so far this year, according to the most recent state data.

Those between ages 35 and 44, in comparison, made up 12 percent of the population and 26 percent of nonfatal overdoses last year. It means some experts are hesitant to focus on a segment of the population with less need.

Gordon Smith, the state director of opioid response, said each age group deserves attention, but he has limited resources and a responsibility to focus on the most vulnerable groups. He added that opioid use disorder is an “adolescent onset disease,” and the vast majority of people who struggle with substance use started before they were 18, which is why prevention efforts focus on younger age groups.

“I have to be responsible for all my age cohorts, and where is the biggest struggle? Where is the biggest bang for my buck?” Smith said. “A lot of people want to — and this is not wrong — to put more into the adolescent population and deal with prevention because you have more years of life lost.”

As Maine’s population continues to age, others said the state should start planning for how to address what might become a growing problem.

Kaylie Smith, a licensed clinical professional counselor in the addiction care program at Northern Light Acadia Hospital in Bangor, works as a therapist for older adults receiving methadone or buprenorphine for an opioid addiction. While adults 65 and older make up only about 3 percent of her roughly 400 patients, she said that number has doubled during her decade working there. She thinks the trend will continue.

“It’s almost a special niche group, but I think it’s important to talk about because our population is aging,” Kaylie Smith said. “Maine is one of the oldest states in the nation, and that is impacting how patients are presenting with us.”

‘It’s all fentanyl’

Walt Bresnahan, now 68, first started taking opioids in his 30s after an old injury from playing sports started flaring up. He got a prescription for Percocet and became addicted, he said.

Bresnahan, of Old Orchard Beach, is now sober two years and seven months. He spends his time volunteering at the Portland Recovery Community Center. He hasn’t seen an increase in older adults attending the community center, but he said older people can be particularly hard to reach.

“The older generation right now is the Boomers,” he said. “What is the one thing that comes with those generations that sticks out more than anything? It’s pride.”

It can be harder for older Mainers to disclose they have a problem in part because they may feel more stigma than younger generations, according to those who help people with addiction.

Leon Licata, pastor at the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor, said he’s been stunned to see older people he serves getting involved in street drugs. People over 65 make up a small portion of those using the church’s warming and cooling center — he guessed maybe 5 percent — but anecdotally he has seen their numbers increase significantly in the last couple years.

A woman in her 70s at the shelter who spoke to a reporter insisted she had not used drugs in 30 years. Licata, who knows her, said that wasn’t true, but “they’re not going to tell you.”

Older adults with opioid use disorders may not look like the stereotype, said Dr. Rachel Solotaroff, clinical advisor for substance use disorder services at Penobscot Community Health Care based in Bangor. Most of her older patients smoke, rather than inject, and it’s more often women — usually “very frail women,” she said. She added that her observations are limited to those who are seeking help.

“It’s all fentanyl,” Solotaroff said, referring to the powerful synthetic opioid. “I haven’t seen heroin in a long time, nor prescription opioids.” 

Often her patients started with prescription opioids, but then their use evolved to more illicit substances, Solotaroff said. And sometimes they’ve had long periods of sobriety in between, until they face a crisis such as losing their home.

Maine has made a significant effort to improve access to life-saving medications for opioid use disorder and harm reduction services such as safe syringe exchanges, Solotaroff said. But she believes the state needs to take more of a population-health approach to helping older adults, which would entail creating interventions designed specifically for this group.

“You also need an intentional focus by policymakers, by people who design these systems, on this population as distinct from a group of folks in their 40s or a group of folks in their 20s,” Solotaroff said.

Gordon Smith said his office looks at demographic data about overdoses every week. He pointed to initiatives such as youth recovery coaches as evidence of age-targeted programs.

“We have all kinds of strategies that look at particular populations, and we’re talking every day about whether it’s middle-aged people or older people,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you are 13 or 83, we’re going to have as many options available to people as possible.”

‘Maine is no exception’

Multiple health officials said older Mainers are likely to feel most comfortable talking to their primary care doctors. Solotaroff and two primary care doctors told The Monitor they are seeing increases in older patients struggling with opioid use disorder, although most hadn’t tracked it with data.

The nation as a whole is seeing a marked increase of older adults with an addiction to opioids. A recent study found a 9,000 percent increase in overdose deaths of older adults from fentanyl mixed with stimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamines, over the past eight years. 

Between 2014 and 2023, the number of overdose deaths from any opioid among people 55 and older increased threefold nationally and fivefold in Maine, according to a KFF analysis. Nationally, adults 65 and up experienced the largest increase in drug overdose rates of any age group from 2022 to 2023.

“I think the trend is clearly an issue, and Maine is no exception,” said Dr. Noah Nesin, a family care doctor and medical director of research and innovation at Community Care Partnership of Maine.

Nesin estimated that “overwhelmingly” people over 65 with opioid use disorder largely still use prescription opioids, but some people on the younger end might also have started using illicit opioids.

“It used to be earlier in my career that you would never see somebody in rural Maine, which is where I practiced, who had an opioid use disorder to anything other than prescription,” Nesin said. “Now we do see in , and in others where opioid use disorders are treated, people over 65 who have used illicit drugs like heroin and fentanyl.”

While Mainers 65-plus make up a small percentage of overdoses in the state, Nesin said he’d expect most of those overdoses to be fentanyl, not prescription opioids. It should raise alarms, he said. (The state does not publicize data showing the number of overdoses by age in each county.)

“We have to be alert to the possibility that a population of people for whom we previously didn’t have to consider illicit drug use as part of their addiction, that has to be considered and explicitly evaluated,” he said.

Doctors are prescribing far fewer opioids now, while prescriptions for buprenorphine, which treats opioid use disorder, have jumped. It was the top prescribed controlled medication in Maine last year, according to the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program.

While more people are seeking help, they may not always find it valuable. Nationally, fewer than 40 percent of Medicare beneficiaries with opioid use disorder received treatment that met quality metrics, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs.

Recognizing and treating opioid use among older adults comes with a unique set of challenges, said Dr. Erik Steele, a family physician at Martin’s Point primary care in Brunswick, who has been a doctor for 30 years. Opioid use can have cognitive effects that mimic aging issues, such as memory loss, ability to function and fall risks. An older patient may have more health conditions and prescribed medications that interact with opioids in different ways, and they may have chronic pain with few non-opioid treatment alternatives, he said. 

Primary care doctors sometimes struggle to start conversations with older patients about opioid use because they don’t want to offend people in their care. When he does random drug testing and pill counts on older patients who have been on opioids for more than a decade, Steele said they often are surprised and insulted. He said he suspected family physicians might be less likely to do random drug screens on a 75-year-old who has been on opioids for 10 years than a 40-year-old who has been on them for five years.

“There’s no question that asking somebody, in common parlance, ‘Are you addicted to your medication?’ is a challenging conversation and is potentially a barrier to asking it,” Steele said. “As you do more and more of this work, you do get more comfortable asking the question.”

With older patients, Steele said, it’s especially important to figure out if they are physiologically dependent on the opioids, meaning they would experience withdrawal symptoms, or if they are pathologically dependent, meaning they are using opioids to treat an underlying issue such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety or depression — in an escalating manner to the point where it becomes an illness. There isn’t good data currently about how many older patients are pathologically addicted to opioids, he said.

‘It reflects broader shifts’

A growing number of Medicare recipients in Maine are getting buprenorphine to medically treat opioid use disorder.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of Medicare recipients in Maine receiving buprenorphine, who were 65 and older, increased from 638 to 1,087, according to a Maine Monitor analysis of Medicare claims data. That’s a 70 percent increase, while the overall population of Mainers 65 and older grew 12 percent during that time. 

The numbers are likely an undercount because The Monitor did not include totals for categories of buprenorphine that were suppressed because they were too small for Medicare to publish. The numbers also do not include how many people took other drugs, such as naltrexone and methadone, to treat opioid use disorder. 

Christy Daggett, CEO of Aroostook Mental Health Services, said any increase in older adults seeking treatment is a hopeful sign that they feel more comfortable reaching out for help. The facility’s total number of Aroostook County patients in treatment for opioid use decreased 12 percent between fiscal years in 2020 and 2025, but clients who were 65 and older increased slightly from 14 to 21.

Even as more older adults are seeking treatment, it can be difficult for them to continue taking opioid treatment medications when they need higher levels of care for other health problems. Multiple providers told The Monitor that nursing homes and assisted living facilities are not equipped to handle people with opioid addictions.

Kaylie Smith, from Northern Light Acadia Hospital, said treatment should be more available in all health care settings. Sometimes her patients have a hard time going to rehabilitation facilities because they can’t get their methadone, which is often dispensed at regulated clinics.

“For them to go without their medicine, it’s just not realistic because that would totally destabilize them in different ways,” Smith said. “It’s like you’re choosing which way you want to be destabilized.”

In 2022, Amelia Hersey tried to change that. As a physician’s assistant specializing in geriatric substance use, she spent a year working with a dozen nursing homes across the state to establish and expand their policies to better serve residents with addiction.

“We made very little gains, unfortunately,” she said, and “met a lot of resistance.” 

The only nursing homes that ultimately updated their practices were the two where she was already employed. There was near constant turnover in nursing homes, forcing her to retrain new people and get buy-in from new administrators, she said. In addition, staff are overworked with limited capacity for more tasks.

The Maine Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and assisted living facilities, said these facilities are already caring for more residents with substance use disorders. 

“This isn’t uncommon anymore,” said Angela Cole Westhoff, president and CEO of the industry group. “It reflects broader shifts in both the population and the challenges people are living with as they age.”

Maine Monitor reporter Taylor Nichols contributed data reporting to this story.

This story was made possible in part by a workshop on reporting on aging, convened by the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Residents of Greenville will decide whether to borrow $1 million to help build a recreational building that would support child care and preschool in a referendum this November.

The project could boost employment and growth in the four-season vacation town with just under 1,500 residents on Moosehead Lake, but some have questioned whether taxes should pay for the building slated for the site of the town’s defunct elementary school.

The question on the November ballot shows an isolated part of Maine grappling with a child care crisis that is hitting all parts of the state. There are just 16 registered providers in Piscataquis County, which is one of the most rural areas in Maine. Two are in Greenville, but none of them had open slots for kids as of May.

“People understand we need child care,” Town Manager Michael Roy said. “It’s tough for young families to come in without jobs, local jobs, and so people are having to commute in to work from other towns.”

A local nonprofit partnered with the town more than three years ago in an attempt to build a municipal building that would be partially leased to a child care provider. It was granted federal funding with support from U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, but inflation during a slow planning process has driven up costs and pushed the town to seek more money.

The Moosehead Caring for Kids Foundation, the town, and Greenville’s school district are pushing for the building, which would include space for up to 40 children ages 0-5 while expanding the town’s preschool program and including a fitness center aimed at adults.

The lack of child care space has caused problems for Greenville before. Officials said limited child care for workers helped derail a redevelopment of a local ski area in 2022. Roy added that some in the town have expressed “heartburn” over the fact that out-of-town children will likely use the new child care facility as well.

Between the federal allocation and other grants and donations, millions are already slated for the project, which is expected to cost a total of $4.8 million. If the bond passes, taxpayers would have to cover the $1 million cost plus interest over the coming years.

If voters reject the plan to pursue a bond, it’s not clear what will happen with the money already set aside for the project. Roy said officials will have time to consider how to move forward, and officials are optimistic that voters will support the plan.

“I think the people that are in desperate need of child care may come out and vote,” said Jennifer Clark, the treasurer of The Moosehead Caring for Kids Foundation.

Over the summer, the state of Maine applied herbicide to part of Sokokis Lake in Limerick in the hopes of snuffing out a pesky invasive plant. Early signs show it might be working. 

If the efforts prove successful long-term, it would mark a significant win against what the Lakes Environmental Association describes as “arguably the most difficult invasive plant to control in Maine.”

Brittle naiad, an aquatic plant native to Europe and originally introduced in the United States as a food source for waterfowl, can spread quickly and choke out native plant species.

The invasive plant was first found in Sokokis, also known as Holland Pond, in 2022 in the lake’s southern basin. Attempts to control it manually with trained volunteers pulling the plants by hand proved to be an uphill battle. 

Eradicating invasive aquatic plants is no easy task. What makes brittle naiad particularly problematic is that it is small and resembles a native species of naiad, making it difficult to identify. The invasive species reproduces by fragmentation and the dispersal of tiny seeds, which can hitchhike on boats and be consumed and transported by waterfowl. If even a tiny piece of a plant makes its way to a different location, it can start a new population. 

John McPhedran, an invasive aquatic species biologist at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, said several factors led to the decision to use herbicide: the infestation was still relatively isolated; the plant continued to bounce back after attempts to manually remove it; and there was a risk that it would spread throughout the lake or to nearby water bodies.  

“You think, well, maybe we should try and nip this in the bud and use herbicide now,” McPhedran told The Maine Monitor. 

The DEP held a public information meeting in June and later got approval under its general herbicide application permit to apply the herbicide AquaStrike. On July 31, a state contractor submerged a perforated hose to spray the herbicide on the plant in three locations on the south end of Sokokis, treating about four acres of the 192-acre lake. 

There are early signs that the treatment worked. Last month, staff from Lake Stewards of Maine, the DEP, and the York County Soil and Water Conservation District, along with volunteers from Sokokis Lake Association and Patrollers of Arrowhead’s Littoral Zone, conducted a post-treatment survey and did not find any living brittle naiad.

“That’s encouraging news,” McPhedran said. “But the visibility can be difficult in Sokokis — kind of murky and cloudy — so just because we didn’t find any in the fall doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods.”

As part of the ongoing response, the DEP and its partners will continue monitoring Sokokis and will return in late spring or early summer to see how much, if any, of the plant escaped the herbicide. If the invasive plant can’t be eliminated altogether, it will likely have to be managed long into the future, McPhedran said.

Brett Willard, the aquatic invasive species program director at Lake Stewards of Maine, which led the recent post-treatment survey, said the Sokokis infestation highlights the importance of early detection and rapid response. The plant was first found by a trained volunteer who was paddling the lake and actively looking for invasive species. 

“There’s a really great group of volunteers that we have statewide, but particularly in York County, which is a high population center, but also there’s a number of infestations,” Willard said.

The DEP fielded a number of concerns ahead of applying the herbicide in July, including from a local beekeeper and dog owners worried about their pets drinking from the lake, McPhedran said. A notice that went out to lakefront property owners told them not to drink, swim in or use lake water for irrigation in the days after the treatment. 

The DEP collected and analyzed water samples to monitor the levels of endothall and Diquat dibromide, the active ingredients in AquaStrike, following treatment. The water samples it tested two weeks after applying the herbicide showed no detectable levels of the chemicals, according to the DEP. It said it found “limited to no” harm to native vegetation.

McPhedran said the state would prefer not to use herbicides when managing aquatic invasives. But in doing so at Sokokis, the DEP is hoping to avoid a similar situation at Milton and Northwest ponds on the Maine-New Hampshire border, where the state and several partners have been fighting a brittle naiad infestation since 2015. 

“Obviously, if it’s a new plant and we have a chance at eradication, we need to move quickly,” he said.

Amid the Trump administration’s cuts to federal climate change research, a New England remote sensing company released a new high-definition map of Maine’s coastline that its founder hopes will help local officials plan for climate resilience.

The online platform, from New Hampshire-based company Nearview, plots the best opportunities to fortify dunes and beaches along Maine’s 3,500-mile coastline to protect against sea-level rise. The map also marks where wild underwater forests lurk off the coast, which could inform seaweed harvesters and regulators. 

The Coastal Ecosystem Map Application Platform, or CEMAP, was in the works for years before Nearview released it this August, said Stefan Claesson, Nearview’s founder and a specialist in geographic information systems. 

Claesson hopes CEMAP will provide data that municipal officials, regulators, researchers and seaweed harvesters can use to manage Maine’s coastline and plan for climate change. 

The first phases of CEMAP were funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many of Claesson’s remote sensing projects are supported by federal grants, and, while this project didn’t lose any funding, Claesson said his other projects have experienced sudden funding cuts. 

“We’ve had a number of grant projects that we were part of that have been completely closed down,” Claesson said. “The funding level certainly isn’t where it used to be, but we’re happy to provide this data now. Maybe it’s timely.”

The platform has five different maps, and each plot a unique mosaic of data lines and points. One shows which stretches of Maine coast are best suited for dune stabilization or other climate resilience projects. Others detail the location and density of aquatic vegetation such as wild seaweed.

Each data point is the result of meticulous fieldwork and analysis. Claesson flew drones up and down the Maine coast, using multispectral cameras to peer beneath the water’s surface and capture images of aquatic vegetation.

Collaborators at the Maine Maritime Academy, Schoodic Institute, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and the University of Vermont then helped estimate the mass of seaweed by taking field samples and analyzing satellite imagery, which Nearview plugged into a complex algorithm that plotted the size of the seaweed forests. 

The platform can be used in two ways, Claesson said, by creating a “treasure map” of concentrated seaweed for the harvesting industry and estimating total vegetation biomass, which regulators could use to establish limits for a sustainable harvest.

Seaweed farmers also see potential applications of Nearview’s map, said Timothy Ehle, who runs an organic winged kelp farm with his cousin Isaac Lash in Friendship.

Establishing a productive farm depends on intricate environmental factors such as tidal flows and wind exposure. It also helps to have more general indicators such as whether wild seaweed is flourishing nearby, Ehle said. 

“If it’s going to grow there wild, it’s definitely going to grow there cultured,” Ehle said.

For help with the coastal resilience map, Nearview turned to Jacob Aman, stewardship director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve and a resilience planning expert. 

Aman and the Wells Reserve were developing their own climate resilience map at the time and partnered with Nearview, combining Aman’s knowledge of sea-level-rise and coastal habitat with Claesson’s detailed imagery.

The collaboration resulted in a map from each contributor identifying segments of Maine shoreline that could provide communities the most protection from storms fueled by climate change and sea-level rise. 

The map from Wells Reserve, however, goes a step further to suit its intended audience of York and Cumberland counties. It maps the shoreline from South Berwick to Cape Elizabeth with variables that measure both how suitable a site along the coast is for restoration and how difficult it would be for a local government to execute such a project.

Projects could include nourishing a beach with more sand or stabilizing dunes with native plants, Aman said. His main objective for the map is to empower local leaders to decide for themselves.

For both Aman and Claesson, the next steps of their mapping projects involve getting them into the hands of potential users, whether local officials or seaweed businesses. 

“Maps are powerful that way. They change people’s perspective,” Claesson said. “You get to see the coastal environment in a way that you haven’t seen before.”

Sowing Resilience: Rural communities across the country are grappling with food insecurity. Schoolchildren, seniors, grocers and even farmers face a food crisis compounded by government cuts and soaring costs. The nine stories in this project reveal how communities are navigating — and reimagining — the systems that have left them hungry.

Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report. This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved: The Beacon, Capital B, Enlace Latino NC, Investigate Midwest, The Jefferson County Beacon, KOSU, Louisville Public Media, The Maine Monitor and MinnPost. The Rural News Network is funded by Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation, among others.

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Phylis Allen spends her days looking for things. She searches for potatoes at Sam’s Club, cheap beets and ginger at Walmart and a local grocery store. She studies the weekly inventory from Good Shepherd, Maine’s only food bank, for good deals on butter and cheese. 

Every Monday morning, she shops at three different stores, keeping lists of prices in her head and remembering what particular clients want. On a recent trip to Sam’s Club, she was searching for affordable eggs. 

The diminutive 78-year-old food pantry director found them in a huge cooler. Stretching, she pulled two huge boxes off the top shelf — seven dozen eggs each, $21 a box. “$2.82 a dozen,” she said. “That’s a good price for eggs.” 

The eggs were destined for Neighbor’s Cupboard, the food pantry in Winterport, Maine, that Allen has helped run for the last 17 years. Every Wednesday, she and a tight-knit group of volunteers provide 25 to 30 families with heaping bags of food.

Maine has long been one of the most food insecure states in New England. Directors of food pantries say the task of making sure people are fed is getting harder because of diminishing food supplies, increasing demand and an overwhelming reliance on volunteers, many of whom are retirees with ages up into their 80s.

About 1 in 7 people in rural Waldo County, where Neighbor’s Cupboard is, were food insecure in 2023, a rate that was similar to the state and national average, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October, saying on Sept. 20 that the numbers had become “overly politicized.” 

Federal cuts are hurting food banks

In March, the Trump administration cut more than $1 billion from two U.S. Department of Agriculture programs — the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides free food to food banks nationwide, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provides funds to state, territorial and tribal governments to purchase food from local farmers for distribution to hunger relief organizations. 

“I can watch the availability of federal food going down every month,” Allen said. 

Charitable food networks are also bracing for $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal low-income nutrition program better known as food stamps. In turn, Feeding America predicts that food pantries will see more demand. 

Complicating matters is the infrastructure through which the United States distributes most food to those who need help. In Maine, the nearly 600 hunger relief agencies that get free and low-cost food from Good Shepherd Food Bank rely on volunteers. This includes 250 food pantries as well as soup kitchens, senior centers, shelters, schools and youth programs.

More than 75% of these organizations rely completely on volunteers, with no paid staff, according to Good Shepherd. 

Anna Korsen, who co-chairs the Ending Hunger in Maine advisory committee, said food pantries alone aren’t the answer to food insecurity.  

“If our goal is to end hunger in Maine, which is a lofty goal, then we’re not going to do that through a charitable food network that’s run by volunteers, right?” she said. “That’s supposed to be for crisis situations … but what has happened is that it is just a part of the food system now. It shouldn’t be.”

Neighbor’s Cupboard hummed with activity on a recent Wednesday morning, cans stacked in piles six feet high and children’s collages taped to a cooler. 

Keith Ritchie was greeting clients — and keeping a gentle eye out to make sure no one took more than their fair share of limited foods. At 89, he is the pantry’s oldest worker, although Betty Williams, 88, teases him about who’s older.

In more than 17 years of service, Ritchie said, “I’ve only missed twice.” He drives 20 miles each way to dole out groceries and fill bags with “surprises” – donated items like Girl Scout cookies.

“You see a lot of people you know,” he said. “I don’t know anybody’s name, but I don’t need a name. I just look at their faces.” 

An aging volunteer workforce

Younger volunteers can be harder to come by than affordable eggs. About 35% of Mainers volunteer — the third-highest rate in the nation, according to a 2024 report on the state of Maine’s civic health. But just 20% of millennials volunteer in Maine, half the rate of Gen Xers and baby boomers, the same report said.

It’s not a lack of desire to serve, but obstacles in the way, said researcher Quixada Moore-Vissing, an author of the report.

“I would categorize it as being an overwhelmed and overworked society,” Moore-Vissing said. “The rising costs of everything, and in particular the cost of housing, means that people have to work more.”

Younger volunteers are increasingly seeking out what the Minnesota Alliance of Nonprofit Advancement calls “event-based” volunteering — one-time efforts with no commitment to future shifts. About 20% of all volunteers contribute through a mix of online and in-person work, according to a 2023 Americorps survey. 

The decline in volunteer numbers and the move toward one-time engagements can cause serious problems. 

Second Harvest Heartland in Minnesota had to turn away thousands of pounds of food in early September because the country’s second-largest food bank didn’t have enough people to sort and package it, volunteer engagement director Julie Greene said. As a result, food pantries in Minnesota and western Wisconsin had less food to give out. 

Greene is struggling to bridge the mismatch between a need for in-person volunteer labor, like produce packers, and the increasing desire for occasional service. 

“How can we provide more of these one-and-done volunteer opportunities, so folks are engaging with us,” she said, “and continue to do what we need to do to get the work done?”

At Neighbor’s Cupboard, Allen said funding cuts aren’t the most challenging part of her work. It’s keeping volunteers, she said, especially, “as they get older and they have health concerns or their families have health concerns.”

Distributing food requires muscle — dependable, strong volunteers who can drive long distances in snow and ice to pick up or deliver heavy boxes of food. 

A year ago, Allen told her colleagues, “Find me a hunk with a truck.” They had lost a 78-year-old volunteer when his wife got sick. Without a replacement, they would have no way to pick up hundreds of pounds of food each week. 

Through word of mouth, Allen found one: 67-year-old Bryan MacLaren. But just months after he’d started, he needed knee surgery. Staff once again had to search for a replacement.

Since March, Maine’s pantries have seen their food from Good Shepherd cut by half or more. So far, Neighbor’s Cupboard has enough to go around, in part because local residents donated 5,000 pounds of food during a May drive. But changes are coming. 

In late August, Allen received an email from Good Shepherd. Because demand is rising, the food bank said, pantries running low on supplies are now allowed to turn away visitors who don’t live nearby — a reversal of Good Shepherd’s long-standing philosophy of food for all.

Allen wasn’t having it. 

“We will keep serving everyone,” she wrote in an email to The Maine Monitor. 

Selma, an asylum seeker from Angola, moved to Texas at the start of the pandemic and then to Maine in January 2022. She fears persecution if she returns because of a family member’s involvement in a human rights group.

“As a Christian, I was praying, and then God just gave me direction, which was Maine,” she said.

She joined a nondenominational Christian church in Portland right away, and she and her two children have been regular attendees ever since. After President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, her 12-year-old daughter asked if it was still safe to go to school. 

As immigration enforcement efforts have increased dramatically this year, many migrants have also reckoned with whether it’s safe to go to places of worship, whether they’re congregants or faith leaders like one Westbrook pastor detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.

In one of his first acts in office, Trump rescinded a policy that essentially barred ICE agents from making arrests at sensitive locations like churches, hospitals and schools. A coalition sued the Department of Homeland Security over the policy in February, arguing it violated religious freedom. A judge declined to block the policy, citing a lack of evidence that churches were “singled out as special targets” for immigration enforcement. 

Faith leaders are preparing for the possibility of enforcement regardless, and several other lawsuits have been filed on similar grounds, including one in late July with a New England plaintiff.

Michel Tshimankinda, a Westbrook man who founded a church in South Portland, has been in ICE detention in New Hampshire since Aug. 14, according to the Portland Press Herald. He wasn’t arrested on church property, but his detention has shaken his family and congregation.

Tshimankinda was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and first came to the U.S. from Botswana in 2016 on a temporary visa, according to ICE. In a statement to The Monitor, an ICE official said that Tshimankinda “showed a disregard for U.S. immigration laws” after overstaying his visa by nine years, and was apprehended during “targeted enforcement operations” in Portland.

The Department of Homeland Security has said officers would need secondary supervisor approval before carrying out enforcement at sensitive locations like churches. In a statement to the Religious News Service in late July, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin wrote that the agency expected such enforcement to be “extremely rare.”

There have been at least 10 instances of federal agents carrying out immigration enforcement activity “on or immediately near church grounds” this year, the Religion News Service reported in early August. 

Selma, whom The Monitor is identifying by her first name because of safety concerns, said the fear among Maine’s immigrant communities is widespread. But she has requested asylum and has a work permit and a Real I.D., so she has decided to keep attending church services. 

“My living in fear is not going to solve nothing,” she said. “Every morning, I pray that God protect me and protect all of us, because we can do nothing about it.”

Whether there is anything to be done is a pressing question for Maine churches and other places of worship. A number of churches have reported declining attendance due to fears of ICE agents showing up, and have seen congregants turn to online services instead.

In this climate, faith leaders are working to set up protocols for interacting with federal agents and ensuring immigrants know their rights. Some are also participating in an initiative to create a hotline and document ICE activity across the state, set to launch this fall.

A climate of fear

ICE made 142 arrests in Maine through July 28 this year, an increase from 102 over the same time period last year, according to the Deportation Data Project.

Several faith leaders that cater to immigrant-heavy congregations declined to speak to The Monitor about how they’re dealing with the threat of immigration enforcement, citing concerns for their parishioners’ safety. 

The ACLU of Maine has a checklist for interacting with ICE at a place of worship that offers several recommendations, including establishing a response team and training staff to deescalate the situation and get the agents’ identifying information. They recommend requesting to see a warrant, and then verifying that it was signed by a judge and that it specifies the names of people under arrest and areas to be searched.

The group also instructs faith leaders to designate public and private areas of the building and to deny access to private areas, “politely but firmly,” unless a warrant specifically permits entry. According to Luminus, an immigrant advocacy group, sanctuaries are generally considered public spaces, while areas that require keys or a staff member to enter are considered private areas.

Bishop Nathan Pipho of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) said ministers from across the 160 churches in the synod, including 15 in Maine, have reported declining attendance among immigrants following Trump’s inauguration. Many of the ELCA churches have made new immigrants a focus of their ministry, and the sharp drop in immigration this year has impacted their work. 

The New England Synod is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security aimed at stopping the administration from carrying out immigration enforcement at houses of worship.

The lawsuit argues that such enforcement impedes religious freedom by creating an atmosphere of fear among worshippers. Pipho said the threat of enforcement has not only impacted religious services but also the number of immigrants seeking social services such as food pantries that operate out of churches.

“We support comprehensive immigration reform; we support thoughtful dialogue on immigration,” Pipho said. “Immigration is a complex issue which is not served by scapegoating and striking fear into immigrant communities.”

Even churches without large immigrant congregations are feeling the impacts. First Parish Congregational Church of Gorham has run a transitional housing program for asylum seekers since 2023, converting second-floor space into rooms for four families.

Lead minister Christine Dyke says the program has made immigration a more personal issue for church members. “They listen to particular things in the news. They’re listening because they’re doing the same kind of thing I am,” she said. “‘Is this gonna affect our people?’ That’s what they call them — these are our people now.”

Since November 2023, the church has hosted more than 25 families, mostly from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Initially, most people stayed for an average of three months, but as the housing market in Maine has tightened the stays have increased to six months or longer.

Dyke said she and other church leaders have created a plan in case federal immigration officers show up on church property. Congregation members know how to respond, Dyke said, and the goal is to keep residents safe while following the law.

Everyone in the transitional housing has claimed asylum and is known by ICE, but Dyke said they still fear that legal status may be ignored or revoked on short notice. The Trump administration has already stripped the legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants who were previously approved for humanitarian parole and instructed them to “self-deport,” and recently revoked more than 6,000 student visas.

ICE Watch

Jake Fahey, faith-in-action coordinator for First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Portland, is one of more than 40 faith leaders across the state working with the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (MIRC) on rapid response to immigrants’ needs. He estimates that roughly ten faith leaders are also helping MIRC to develop an initiative to track ICE enforcement across the state, with a particular emphasis on quelling rumors and verifying real activity.

The group plans to launch a hotline this fall, where immigrants can fact-check information and get connected with resources, said Hunter Cropsey, MIRC’s senior program and community engagement manager. The program will initially focus on southern Maine, with plans to expand later.

Several statewide denominations including the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalists, Reform Jewish congregations and the Baha’i community plan to support the ICE Watch initiative once it’s more developed, Fahey said.

One key element will be to send out “verifiers,” trained volunteers who will go to communities to document ICE agents’ actions when called. Verifiers in similar neighborhood programs nationally confirm officers’ identities during enforcement actions before sharing information with residents in the area, sometimes by going door to door.

The goal is to combat rumors and ensure people understand their rights if approached by federal agents. Verifiers will not disrupt ICE operations, Cropsey said.

“There’s a lot of really deep enthusiasm among faith-based groups and other folks from a volunteer perspective, and a deep enthusiasm for immigrant community members and leaders for this type of service,” Cropsey said. The hotline will rely on multilingual volunteers to manage the phones, and MIRC hopes to offer post-detention support for community members, as well.

Fahey is helping to build out a network of volunteers for the initiative, including through churches. Churches are uniquely positioned to mobilize around social issues, Fahey said, because people are already gathering to develop their views on morality and justice.

“The level of hate and injustice that not only this administration but the general powers-that-be have demonstrated through the tactic of deportation and fear and harassment, it just strikes deeply for many people, but particularly those of faith,” Fahey said. “They have an access to community engagement that I think is declining in this country, which is like a place to really go and wrestle with and invite action.”

Cropsey described faith-based organizations as engaged supporters of MIRC’s mission. The organization lists nine faith groups as members of the coalition, including the Maine Council of Churches, the Congregation Bet Ha’am Tikkun Olam Council and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, including its Hispanic Ministry. Churches have been especially helpful in providing volunteers and monetary support for immigrants, Cropsey said.

For church leaders like Rev. Reba Delzell, pastor at Williston-Immanuel United Church in Portland, supporting immigrants is a Biblical imperative. Her church hosts two congregations of Congolese and Sudanese immigrants, and she said at least the Congolese congregation has had a drop in attendance since January.

“I read scripture, the message over and over again is you welcome the stranger,” Delzell said. “You take care of those who have needs greater than your own. You walk with people. You give what you have to help others, and for me, that’s the commandment … when we welcome the stranger who is in the form of an immigrant, we are carrying out that commandment.”

Nearly 60 percent of Lisbon voters rejected a $21.3 million school budget in Tuesday’s election, marking the escalation of a taxpayer revolt in the Androscoggin County town.

It was the second rejection for the school budget this year. Turnout increased during the second election, with nearly 21 percent of voters coming out on Tuesday. The margin tightened relative to the 70 percent of voters who rejected the budget in June.

Nearly two-thirds of voters said Tuesday that the budget was too high. That came after the school board and town council had put forward a near-identical budget back in June. 

Residents have been protesting against a roughly 20 percent increase in Lisbon’s tax levy, caused by years of heavy spending by the town council and a multimillion-dollar clerical error.

Officials considered the June vote to be a message to the town council over its budget — which residents cannot vote on — so they returned the budget to voters nearly unchanged.

The town council has since passed a municipal budget and acquiesced to petitioners demands of change in the town charter. Lisbon will vote in November on whether to create a commission tasked with handling charter revisions.

Councillors had hoped these measures would quell discontent. Those hopes were dashed Tuesday night in an outcome that will likely force the school board to reexamine the budget and make cuts.

Councilor Nicholas Craig said the outcome was what he expected, but not what he’d hoped for.

“I just hope that we can move forward in a way that we can still support the school and make sure the kids aren’t affected or suffering because of the dissatisfaction of the citizenry with the municipal budget side,” he said Tuesday night.

With the school year starting soon, the district will continue to operate under the prior year’s budget until residents vote through a new funding scheme.

It would be hard to argue that Maine’s solar incentive program hasn’t been successful in spurring the development of small-scale solar projects. Since it was established in 2019, the program, formally called Net Energy Billing, has helped bring hundreds of arrays and more than 1 gigawatt of solar power onto the grid — far exceeding the program’s 750 megawatt goal. 

Where community support for the program wanes is on the issue of costs, with critics arguing that NEB has become a raw deal for Maine ratepayers who have subsidized solar development to the tune of more than $200 million annually.

Enter L.D. 1777, a bill that the Maine Legislature passed with bipartisan support last month and that Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed into law on June 27. The administration and other proponents of the measure, including lead sponsor Rep. Sophia Warren (D-Scarborough), say overhauling the NEB program is necessary to better protect ratepayers amid rising energy prices. 

“We can’t afford to let soaring electricity bills undermine public support for renewable energy,” Maine Public Advocate Heather Sanborn said in a statement applauding Mills for signing the bill. “This new law is a responsible, forward-looking reform that ensures we can continue growing clean energy while protecting Mainers from rising electricity bills.” 

But solar energy advocates and developers warn that the law, which retroactively impacts projects that have already been built or are already under construction, threatens to put Maine’s growing renewable energy sector on ice. 

Eliza Donoghue, executive director of the Maine Renewable Energy Association, a local trade association, called the law “penny wise and pound foolish” and “incredibly bad news” for Maine’s solar industry.

“The cost of electricity, the numbers on folks’ utility bills, we need to take those incredibly seriously and look for the many ways that those costs can be lowered,” she told The Maine Monitor.

“But one of the primary ways that can happen is by having more renewable energy on the grid in Maine and I’m very concerned that by creating an atmosphere in Maine where the Maine legislature has conveyed that renewable energy investment is not welcome here, or can not be relied on here, we have set ourselves up to not enjoy the incredible stabilizing effect that renewable energy has on energy costs. That’s incredibly disappointing.” 

Among other things, the law tasks the Public Utility Commission with establishing a new credit payment structure for non-residential customers in NEB’s tariff rate program. Instead of the current structure, where rates are tied to standard utility electricity rates, they would be capped and increase at 2.25 percent annually. 

When Warren introduced her bill in May, she said having the tariff rate tied to volatile natural gas and fossil fuel markets ultimately led to “unexpectedly high returns” for renewable energy developers.

“In many cases, these rates now exceed what is required for project viability and are placing an unnecessary burden on nonparticipating ratepayers,” she wrote in written testimony to her colleagues in the House.

The law also makes changes to the NEB credit program, imposing new monthly per-kilowatt fees on community solar projects ranging in size from 1 to 5 megawatts beginning next year, with larger arrays paying more to local utilities. A 1 megawatt array would pay $2,800 per month, while a 5 megawatt project would pay $30,000. The new fees do not impact projects smaller than 1 megawatt, such as household rooftop arrays.

The changes are expected to slash overall payments to existing community solar farms by approximately 20 percent and save Maine ratepayers approximately $61 million annually over the next 16 years, according to the state’s Office of the Public Advocate. 

Across the board, members of MREA in the solar development space have voiced to Donoghue that L.D. 1777 will significantly impact their current projects in Maine and their future relationship with the state. 

“They are likely or have already directly communicated to me that they are no longer going to look to build projects in Maine because they perceive it as too risky from a regulatory perspective,” she said. 

Nexamp, a member of MREA that has dozens of community solar projects across Maine, called the law’s retroactive policy changes “a breach of economic trust” that will “permanently damage Maine’s reputation as a climate leader.” 

The adoption of L.D. 1777 came as Republicans in Congress were putting the final touches on President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful” budget bill, which includes numerous provisions meant to stymie the nation’s buildout of renewable energy.

The federal act, which Trump signed into law days after L.D. 1777 received Mill’s signature, rapidly phases out Biden administration-era tax credits for wind and solar projects and terminates tax credits for home energy efficiency upgrades, including rooftop solar, electric heat pumps and insulation, at the end of 2025. 

Together, the federal act and the new state law leave Maine’s clean energy sector in a precarious place, according to Donoghue and Kate Daniel, Northeast regional director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a national trade group. 

“I do find that it’s been a little frustrating to hear state policymakers in Maine criticizing these federal actions when they really don’t need the help of DC to kill solar programs in the state of Maine,” Daniel said, stressing that uncertainty in the Maine market will drive clean energy investors to do business elsewhere.

As for Maine’s new, more aggressive target of achieving 100 percent clean electricity by 2040, Donoghue worries that the state now finds itself with limited options to get there. 

“We’re going to be exceptionally challenged to meet those goals,” she said, adding that the combination of L.D. 1777 and Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” Act adds “insult to injury.”