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Community Development Officer - Future of Fishing
Island Institute
Marketing & Communications, Customer Service
Rockland, ME, USA
Posted on Oct 9, 2025
The Community Development Officer – Future of Fishing will support the implementation of work in Island Institute’s Center for Marine Economy aimed at helping Maine’s island and coastal communities to build economic resilience through expanding business skills and supporting diversification in areas heavily reliant on lobstering for employment. This role requires strong communication, organization, and community engagement skills and the ability to regularly travel throughout the Maine coast to attend and host meetings and events. The ideal candidate will have excellent written communication skills to engage a variety of audiences from funders to fishermen, and digital skills to conduct hybrid and virtual meetings and document programmatic work in Island Institute’s constituent relationship management (CRM) database. Additionally, the position requires an interest in relationship building and supporting meaningful community engagement with Maine’s lobster industry and fishing families, including through administration of targeted grant programs.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in sustainability, community development, planning, communication, or a related field.
- 1+ years of professional work experience with demonstrated content expertise related to economic or community development work. Experience in and knowledge of Maine’s marine economy and specifically the lobster industry preferred.
- Excellent written communication skills for a variety of audiences and purposes including grant writing and community engagement.
- Digital skills: ability and willingness to navigate multiple digital platforms, conduct virtual and hybrid meetings, organize and translate data, especially related to grants and performance metrics.
- Experience engaging diverse groups of stakeholders through various forms of outreach.
- Proficiency in CRM software (e.g. Salesforce) and ability to generate targeted contact lists for outreach and organize data to report on performance metrics.
Essential Functions:
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Project implementation: Collaborates with Island Institute colleagues and external stakeholders to implement projects and develop resources that support existing fishing businesses and build new skills for business diversification. -
Data management and reporting: Assists with managing data, budgets, and grant reporting. -
Stakeholder engagement and outreach: Engages project stakeholders, including through providing regular written project updates, and attending and recording meetings with project partners and communities, including municipal outreach in priority fishing communities. -
Planning and executing events: Supports planning and execution of convenings and events aimed at engaging and supporting fishing families and marine businesses. -
Grant administration: Supports the recruitment, application review process, communications, and other administration of grants or other funding support for business diversification. - Other: Seeks and participates in professional development opportunities to build essential skills needed for a career in community development.
Physical Demands and Work Environment:
The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
- Physical demands: the employee is required to sit, enter data using computer keyboard and mouse, stand, walk, bend over occasionally and move about the office space as well as between building floors. There is no requirement to lift and/or move weights of more than 15 pounds. The employee will be expected to travel on occasion by boat and ferry to various island and remote coastal locations. There will be times when working long hours on evenings and weekends will be required
- Travel: Must be comfortable traveling for extended periods of time by any mode of transportation in cross cultural contexts
- Work environment: The noise level in the work environment is usually minimal.