Ellsworth B. “Nick” Mills is president of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.
Nick is an associate professor in the Journalism Department of Boston University’s College of Communication, teaching undergraduate and graduate-level courses in news writing and reporting. He writes “The Virtual Angler” for The Maine Outdoor Journal and has contributed many columns on Afghanistan to the Huffington Post. Before arriving at B.U. in 1988 Nick had a long career as an award-winning broadcast journalist in Boston and New York.
A graduate of Boston University, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia in 1965-66, helping to create a national educational television system, Televisora Educativa de Colombia. Commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army in 1967, Nick was Pictorial Officer at Deseret Test Center in Utah, where he produced films of weapons tests. In 1968 and 1969 he commanded a U.S. Army combat photography team in Vietnam. Nick served in 1998 as interim director of Boston University’s London Internship Program, and in the summer of 2000 and the spring of 2010 as interim director of the Boston University Washington Internship Program. He has also served as a consultant and program evaluator for the university’s International Programs Division.
Nick has done extensive international media consulting and training. In 2004 he served as an advisor and trainer in the Office of the Spokesman for the President of Afghanistan, in Kabul. In 2005, he spent three months in Kabul meeting with President Hamid Karzai, gathering material for a book (Karzai – The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan, Wiley & Sons, 2007). In the 1980s Nick worked with the Afghan Resistance and was a founder of the Afghan Media Resource Center in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1987. For several years he ran a summer program at Boston University for Portuguese journalists. He has also worked in Iraq, Kosovo, Beirut, Tajikistan, Portugal, Switzerland, Panama, the Caribbean, Ecuador, Colombia, and Vietnam; and in Washington, D.C., as a frequent trainer for journalists at Radio Free Asia. Nick Mills lives in Cumberland and Upper Dam, Maine with his eight flyrods and an Old Town canoe.
Jay Davis was the Center’s founding president, serving from 2010 to late 2012. During a long newspaper career, 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.
Jed Davis grew up in New York City, where he practiced law for 7 years after graduating from Yale Law School. He served as a lawyer in the U.S. Navy Reserve JAG Corps.
In 1971, Jed moved to an old farm in Fayette, Maine, where he still lives and where he helped raise 3 wonderful children. He has served as Town Manager of Fayette and Readfield. He has been in a law partnership, in Augusta, with Jim Mitchell since 1976. Recently, Jim’s wife, Libby, joined them.
Committed to issues of social justice, Jed was a founder of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine in 1985, and still serves on its board; is chairman of the board of the Augusta Boys & Girls Club for Teens; is chairman of Fayette’s Planning Board; and he served for a number of years on the board of Spurwink Services.
He is proud to be on the board of this important organization.
Ann Goggin is the president of Goggin Energy, which is dedicated to helping homeowners and businesses improve their energy efficiency and reducing use of fossil fuels through use of energy efficient electric heat pumps, solar hot water, and solar electricity. Ann has over 30 years of experience in commercial real estate development and property management, during which time she developed an increasing concern for the effect of the built environment on the natural environment.
She is a former Falmouth Town Councilor, former board member of GrowSmart Maine, and former chair of the Falmouth Green Ribbon Commission on Energy and Climate Change. Through The Goggin Company, Ann administers the Seacoast Energy Initiative loan program. She lives in Falmouth with her husband Jim.
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.
Neila Smith worked as a broadcast journalist for more than twenty-five years…working at Newsweek Broadcasting, WCBS-TV in New York, and WCVB-TV and WLVI-TV in Boston.
Raised in Maine, she left New York and returned to Maine in 1983 to anchor the news at WCSH-TV. She also anchored at WMTW-TV, and WPXT-TV. An alumna of Boston University, her broadcasting career began in Boston radio (WCAS and WEEI-FM) and resumed in Portland, Maine, when she was asked to co-host a morning news/talk program on the ABC affiliate, WMTW-AM/FM in 2001.
Neila is also the Founder and Past President of Well Suited, a non-profit organization that helped low-income Maine women make tailored transitions into the work force by providing, free of charge, business apparel for interviews and the workplace. Well Suited eventually joined its international sister organization, Dress for Success.