Board Of Directors
Jay Davis is president of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Jay was a reporter for the Hartford Times, Providence Journal, Berkshire Eagle and the Boston Globe before moving to Maine in 1971. He has been a reporter and editor for most of the years since, for the Republican Journal and Waldo Independent in Belfast, Maine Times and Village Soup. He was the Maine Press Association Journalist of the Year in 1988 and has won numerous local, regional and national writing awards. He retired from front-line journalism last year and has been writing a novel at his home in Belfast.
Allyson Hughes Handley is president of the University of Maine at Augusta. President Handley began her tenure at UMA in March, 2008 arriving from Kentucky where she had been serving as Senior Policy Advisor for Postsecondary Economic Development Initiatives. Before that, she had served as President of Cogswell College in California and Midway College in Kentucky. During her tenure at Midway, she was named by Kentucky Monthly Magazine as one of the twelve most influential women in the state.
Dr. Handley has also served as a Dean and a Vice President at National University in San Diego, and has taught at The Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, University of San Diego, and as an adjunct faculty member at Spalding University in Kentucky. Dr. Hughes Handley received her B.A. from the University of Western Ontario, and an M.Ed and Ed.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.
Fletcher Kittredge is the CEO and founder of GWI in Biddeford, Maine. Fletcher grew up in Arundel, Maine and went to Colby College, where he majored in English. He graduated in 1984 and in the same year, went down to Cambridge, Massachusetts and started working at the research lab, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). The following year Fletcher started graduate work at Harvard University in Computer Science.
In 1993, the New York Times had a front page article about the Internet and how it was going to be very big. Fletcher took a small inheritance of $48,000, moved to Maine, and started Biddeford Internet Corporation in 1994. Biddeford Internet Corporation is still operating today, but does business under the name GWI. In Maine, GWI has 51 facilities state-wide and sells service in all 16 counties. In New Hampshire, GWI has facilities in Strafford, Rockingham and Hillsboro counties. In 2009, GWI received a $25 million Federal grant to deploy 1,110 miles of high capacity fiber optic in rural Maine as part of the Three Ring Binder (TBR) project. Headquartered in Biddeford, Maine, GWI is a telephone company as well as an internet service provider.
Bert Languet is principal of Golden Pond Wealth Management. Bert Languet has worked in the field of financial management since 1994. He is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and has an MBA from Thomas College. His undergraduate degree is from Colby College. Bert has been published in the Journal of Financial Planning, has written for the Kennebec Business Monthly and been a speaker at the Maine Chapter of the NAIC’s annual meeting. He serves on the boards of the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Central Maine Youth Hockey Association. Bert’s hobbies include spending time with his children including coaching them in hockey and baseball, fly-fishing, snowmobiling, ice fishing and skiing.
Ann Luther is past president and current treasurer, League of Women Voters of Maine and co-chair of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections. Ann retired in 1998 from a career in the private sector. At the time of her retirement, she was a Senior Vice President and product manager at SEI Investments in Oaks, Pennsylvania, with responsibility for a department of more than 200 information systems professionals and a budget of over $50 million annually. Ann is a founder of the Mt. Desert Island Restorative Justice Program and served on its Executive Board.
Gordon Lutz retired in 2008 as Director of Corporate Support at the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, where he worked for 8 years. Previously he spent 12 years in independent film distribution in New York, followed by a similar period as a free-lance commercial photographer for corporate and individual clients and national publications, and occasional writer and reviewer. After working as their Marketing and Development Coordinator, he served 6 years on the board of the Arcady Music Society, the last two as president. He was one of the founding directors of Maine Jazz Arts in the early 1990s, and upon retiring served as the Corporate Sponsorship chair of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s development committee. He has a B.A. from Lawrence University in Wisconsin and earned the M.F.A at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. A native of Princeton, NJ, he moved to Maine in 1987 and now lives in Holden.
Mary Mayo is vice president for development at GrowSmart Maine. Mary has worked in media since college, most recently for MPBN as VP for Development. She and her husband have two grown children and recently moved off of Peaks Island to a farmhouse in Bowdoinham.
David Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. His retirement from the KJ and Sentinel capped a 41-year career that he began at the Wenatchee Daily World in Washington, where he worked as a reporter. He also was the head of the investigative reporting team at the Milwaukee Journal and an investigative reporter at the Hartford Courant. He played a key role in the development of the national Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. In addition, Offer has served as the top editor at the Newport Daily News in Rhode Island. Offer holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He has received numerous state and national journalism awards during his career.
Matthew V. Storin was editor of The Boston Globe from 1993 to 2001. From 2002 to 2006 he was associate vice president for news and information at the University of Notre Dame, and from 2004 to 2010 he was an adjunct professor in the Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics and Democracy.
Storin began his journalism career in 1964 at the Springfield (MA) Daily News and, beginning in 1965, covered Congress for the Griffin-Larrabee News Bureau, a regional news service. He joined the Globe’s Washington Bureau in 1969. In two stints at the Globe, covering 25 years, he served as Congressional correspondent, White House correspondent, Asian bureau chief, and held several other senior editing posts. He also was editor of Maine Times, editor and senior vice president of the Chicago Sun-Times and executive editor of the Daily News in New York.
He is a graduate of Notre Dame and also received an honorary degree there in 2006. He and his wife, Keiko are residents of Camden, Me. They have four children and six grandchildren.
