Incubating Aspirations Across Maine

Across Maine, young people in rural areas are facing critical challenges that present significant barriers to achieving postsecondary success: higher-than-urban rates of childhood poverty, elevated levels of Adverse Childhood Experiences, and significant geographic isolation that can leave students feeling disconnected and unable to see a future for themselves in their home communities. With limited resources and scope, the public school system is unable to meet all of the needs of the whole child, which, in turn, is left to families, local institutions, and community-focused organizations.

Community-based organizations, however, frequently lack capacity, resources, or longitudinal data to improve programming for youth. Thus, the Rural Youth Institute was born, which seeks to empower youth-serving organizations and equip youth-development professionals with high quality training and support to enhance strategies that promote rural youth aspiration building and thriving. At the core of their support for organizations is implementing an intentional focus on mentorship and relationships, which founder Don Carpenter describes as essential: “When youth programs move beyond short-term interventions and focus on sustainable, transformational relationships, they unlock new possibilities for young people– especially those in rural and under-resourced communities.”

The focus on mentorship came from identifying one of the key inflection points that rural Maine students face as they transition from middle school to high school. During this time, the number of close relationships that students make with adults during their early adolescence begin to erode when they need it the most. Don describes this phenomenon as aspirational foreclosure, or a moment when a young person’s belief in a positive and optimistic future begins to fade: More than half of Maine’s school-aged children grow up in rural communities, where their early years are shaped by small, close-knit K-8 schools. In these settings, students are deeply known, their strengths recognized, and their sparks nurtured by a web of caring adults. But as they transition to larger regional middle and high schools outside their community, that sense of connection begins to fade. Student-teacher ratios grow, social pressures mount, and the vital relationships that once fueled their aspirations become harder to access.

Thus, the Rural Youth Institute centers its work on supporting youth-serving organizations to innovate their program designs to better address the 8-9 transition and help reduce relational loss during these formative years. Meg describes how the Aspirations Incubator, the core project of the Rural Youth Institute, works, “by investing in long-term, relationship-center program models, and equipping youth development professionals with high-quality training, while advocating for the resources rural communities deserve, we can ensure that every young person– no matter where they grow up—has the opportunity to thrive.” This led the Aspirations Incubator to cultivate partnerships with eight rural, youth organizations across Maine to implement their long-term mentorship-focused model, with the intention to integrate learnings from the pilot into future expansion opportunities.

The Rural Youth Institute provides professional development, enabling youth-serving organizations to move beyond short-term interventions and focus on sustainable, transformational relationships. Meg shared that “by equipping practitioners with the knowledge, skills, and resources to strengthen relationship-based mentoring, trauma-informed practices, and culturally responsive engagement, we help organizations create environments where youth feel seen, supported, and inspired to dream bigger. We empower youth professionals to build long-term, developmental relationships that evolve alongside young people—ensuring that support doesn’t end after a single program year but grows with them over time.”

To properly scale and grow this model, understanding impact through data became essential. With the eight pilot organizations, the Aspirations Incubator launched a rigorous six-year longitudinal study in partnership with the Data Innovation Project at the University of Southern Maine. The study tracked students throughout their participation in the Aspirations Incubator model, recently concluding with a robust final report. Don shared that “without a full six-year study, we wouldn’t have been able to capture the data needed to distinguish the true power of long-term mentoring from short-term interventions. By following students across their entire developmental arc, we proved what we had always known intuitively—deep, consistent relationships over time don’t just support young people; they change the trajectory of their lives.”

Highlights of the study showed that in several key metrics, infusing youth-serving programs with an intentional focus on mentorship, guidance, and positive aspirations made a marked difference. Some of this showed up in school, where Aspirations Incubator students significantly outperformed their peers in math and English testing. Moreover, Aspirations Incubator students saw dramatic increases in access to post-secondary pathways, community connectedness and belonging, and the development of social-emotional resilience. These include:

• 89% of Aspirations Incubator students planned to pursue a post-secondary pathway, compared to 53% of Maine 12th-grade students.

• 94% of Aspirations Incubator students reported feeling a sense of belonging and mattering in their communities, compared to 52% of their non-AI peers

• Early data shows that AI students had a 28% higher persistence rate in their post-secondary pathway from fall 2024 to spring 2025 compared to non-AI students.

• 76% of junior and senior high school students within the program showed positive growth in at least five key resilience measures: assertiveness, action orientation, reflection, empathy, and optimism.

(For full data results, citations, and more, please view the full report here)

The improvement in school-based, career-oriented, and whole-person metrics isn’t surprising to Meg and Don. They liken holistic support of young people to a three legged stool, labeling school, family, and community as the three pillars that support a young person. Crucially, if one leg is weakened, overall stability is compromised; therefore, effective programs must involve and support all three pillars. “This work is not about fixing broken communities—it’s about rebuilding the strength of the stool, reinforcing what already works, and ensuring that young people have the relationships, opportunities, and resources they need to thrive in the places they call home,” explained Don.

That asset-based approach mirrors the nature and name of their program. The Aspirations Incubator acknowledges that while many students across rural Maine face an uphill battle, from the growing opioid epidemic to school consolidation, within themselves and their communities lies possibility and hope. A model that prioritizes mentorship inherently commits itself both to elevating existing resources within the community and in identifying the individual strengths of each student. Because of this, achieving such promising results translates naturally into scalability.

“Aspirations Incubator students consistently demonstrate higher aspirations, stronger academic achievement, greater resilience, and a deeper sense of belonging compared to their peers– reinforcing the power of long-term, relationship-based youth development,” Meg shared. As the work continues to grow, more rural students will benefit from the support of relationship-centered, youth-serving organizations and dedicated mentors within their communities. Together, those students will, in turn, positively impact those around them, making the legacy of this work felt for generations.