Now the Natural Resources Education Center is trying to come up with $1 million to build a permanent home, and it just received a gift of stocks valued at $20,000 to use toward setting up an endowment.

The center was launched in the Moosehead Lake area in the early 1990s. Without a building, it relies on available space in the region to offer programs for adults and children that draw hundreds of people a year from throughout Maine and New England.

"When you get nearly 80 people to come to a program on lynx in the middle of November, something is getting done right," said Eric Ward, the center's president, in an e-mail last week. Ward, a merchant marine on duty aboard a ship last week in the Red Sea, said the center has never had a capital campaign.

Organizers plan to raise the estimated $1 million needed for a building that would allow the center to serve some 40,000 people a year. An anonymous donor recently gave the center a gift of stocks valued at $20,000 to start an endowment fund. The donor has asked that the income be used to help defray the center's future operating costs.

"A center would provide visitors from the area and away access to programming, information, exhibits et cetera; it would be a one-stop shop for information about the region," Ward said in the e-mail.

For now, the adult programs are held in any available space in the Moosehead Lake region, while the Maine Woods Explorers group has temporarily made its home at The Depot in Greenville Junction.

Programs for children offered under the Woods Explorers initiative are funded by a $248,000 federal education grant and have been well-attended. These local and outreach programs are taught by a professional educator. They focus on the working forest, natural history, water, logging history, American Indian legend and history and recreation.

"It's opened the doors to us to new areas we hadn't thought of," said Jennifer Potvin of Corinth, who home-schools her three children. Potvin said she makes the 70-mile round trip to Greenville to ensure that her children receive the experiences offered by the center. She also said she appreciates the outreach programs that educator Selena Tardiff conducts for home-schooled children in Corinth and in local public schools.

"I think this will help keep kids in the area," Potvin said. "If they're more educated I think they'll appreciate the natural resources that Maine has to offer."

The visitor center would be built on land the center already owns off Route 15 that overlooks the 100 Mile Wilderness, a mountainous terrain containing the Appalachian Trail between Monson and Mount Katahdin.

The center already has a business plan, and trustees are devising a marketing plan. All that is missing is the money to build the visitor center.

Recognized by regional and state leaders and eyed statewide as a model for economic development, nature-based visitor centers have been touted by consultants charged with coming up with ways to encourage Maine tourism and economic growth.

Fermata Inc., a Texas-based tourism consulting group, was hired by the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development in August 2004 to develop a strategic plan for economic development through nature tourism in three pilot regions in the state: the Greenville-Millinocket area, the Western mountains and the Calais-Down East area. It recommended something similar to the Natural Resources Education Center.

Backers say the center would fit nicely into Gov. John Baldacci's Maine Woods Legacy, announced in 2003. It is designed to bring the key players involved in Maine's woods under one umbrella to find solutions to problems that face Maine's natural resource-based industries. It outlines goals identified by Baldacci to help guide the state through the changes in ownership of Maine's forests.

"I have had a chance to see things all over the world," said Ward in his e-mail. "This has given me a real chance to appreciate the Moosehead region and Maine ... the woods and waters are my home. We have something very special and I am going to work to the end to support it."
"This content originally appeared as a copyrighted article in the Friday, February 03, 2006 edition of the Bangor Daily NEWS and is used here with permission."