About
Midcoast Trails Stewardship is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization
Midcoast Maine is a beautiful place, and for outdoor enthusiasts, it offers some of the best terrain for outdoor recreation in the state. Fortunately, local municipalities understand the important role that outdoor recreation plays in fostering healthy communities. We are also fortunate to have incredibly active, strong organizations protecting outdoor spaces on the community’s behalf – such as Coastal Mountains Land Trust, Georges River Land Trust and Midcoast Conservancy. Community organizations such as the Midcoast Chapter of the New England Mountain Bike Association (MCNEMBA) and the Trail Runners of Midcoast Maine (TRoMM) provide opportunities for local residents to stay active in the outdoor community.
Midcoast Trails Stewardship has been established to help support our local partners in providing a resource for fundraising, trail construction, trail maintenance, and trail stewardship education, while creating new opportunities for trails enthusiasts in our area. Our goal is to bring private donors, outdoor industry resources, local partners and highly motivated and experienced trail staff together to maintain and improve existing trail infrastructure, while supporting the missions and goals of our partner organizations.
Why Midcoast Trails Stewardship
The Midcoast is lucky to have multiple land trusts and organizations already protecting and providing public access to our wilderness. Many of the trails in our local network were created by hand and have been maintained by these organizations and their volunteers.
However, as the community of trail users has grown and diversified over the last decade, so has the demand for trail expansion, for trail maintenance and for modern standards for multi-use trails.
Local volunteer efforts through partner organizations such as the Midcoast Chapter of the New England Mountain Bike Association and Trail Runners of Midcoast Maine have made some inroads in meeting that demand – but are also small organizations that are entirely volunteer driven.
Sidecountry Trails – a local trail building company – has also made inroads. For the past three years, the Sidecountry Sports trail crew has provided trail building and maintenance services to local nonprofit partners – however, the capacity for Sidecountry Trails to fundraise has been hampered by their for-profit status.
As we have evolved, we have discovered that a nonprofit business model is the optimal structure to provide the level of maintenance and funding required for the entirety of the trail network, along with being a better fit to serve our local partners and local communities.
Midcoast Trails Stewardship (MTS) will provide a vision for a comprehensive, interconnected and intentionally designed Midcoast trail network. MTS will strengthen community partnerships between municipal, non-profit and private land managers; maximize fundraising capacity to help keep up with the demand of trail users and to deploy a staff of professionally trained trail builders to build and maintain multi-use trails in the Midcoast. This will increase the capacity of our partner organizations to develop a best in class trail network.