Catherine Mardosa: Bringing Community Engagement to Maine’s Community Resilience Partnership

As the community resilience coordinator at the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments (AVCOG), Catherine Mardosa’s job is to make it easier for municipalities to engage with Maine’s Community Resilience Partnership (CRP). AVCOG is a nonprofit, regional planning agency serving the western Maine communities of Androscoggin, Franklin, and Oxford counties. 

The Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF) launched the CRP in 2021. The program provides financial support to municipalities, Tribal governments, and unorganized territories trying to meet the goals of Maine’s climate plan.

The AVCOG region has been awarded thirty CRP grants, including funds to update HVAC systems, develop vulnerability assessments and emergency plans, restore tree canopies, replace windows, and install EV infrastructure.

Many of these were awarded before Mardosa joined AVCOG in early 2025; she’s eager to enroll more communities in the CRP and to help already enrolled communities access grant funding. 

And, through her year and half long research assistantship at the Mitchell Center, she picked up a few strategies that she’s confident will help. 

As a master’s student in the anthropology and environmental policy program, Mardosa worked with Mitchell Center faculty fellow Sharon Klein on two projects connected to her current position. Through one project, she helped pull together a network of loosely connected people and groups working on climate resiliency and community energy into an official network called the Maine Community-led Energy and Climate Action Network (MAINECAN).

Mardosa also contributed to a second Mitchell Center project focused on engaging with low-income and disadvantaged communities and bringing their concerns and preferences into the process of updating Maine’s climate action plan. This research provided Mardosa insight into Maine’s climate resilience priorities and helped her develop a working knowledge of what needs the CRP might provide for low-income and disadvantaged communities. In this role, she also helped Klein enroll the town of Lincoln and the unorganized township of Trescott, into the CRP. 

Mardosa is thankful for the technical writing and spreadsheet skills she gained in her graduate training with the Mitchell Center, but more importantly, it’s Klein’s expertise into community-engaged research that informs Mardosa’s work at AVCOG. 

Klein, Mardosa explained, has an enviable knack for stepping into a community where she and her team are unknown and slowly forging connections through listening and observing. Klein also pays extra attention to important details. In planning meetings with towns, she likes to schedule the events at community gathering spaces and serve food from local restaurants. In one case, she purchased art from a local artist to offer as a raffle prize. 

As the community resilience coordinator, Mardosa is focused on bringing this level of community engagement to western Maine’s CRP initiatives. Before creating Mardosa’s position, limited resources constrained AVCOG’s outreach capacity; they mostly relied on sharing information about the CRP with town councils and select boards. One of Mardosa’s goals is to bring more voices and perspectives into CRP planning. 

She’s already connecting with librarians, teachers, and community members to help with outreach, and she’s designing some flashy pamphlets and posters. Whatever community meetings result from these efforts, Mardosa is definitely going to serve food.   

Mardosa says that her on-the-ground training with Klein was invaluable. “If it weren’t for the Mitchell Center, I wouldn’t have found people at UMaine who were so committed to interdisciplinary research and working in and for the local community. It was exactly this kind of training that has proven so helpful to my current job.”