
It’s an exciting moment for us as we announce that Friends of Casco Bay is moving. After more than 30 years of residence at Southern Maine Community College (SMCC) in South Portland, we are packing up and saying goodbye to the campus. Soon, on March 20, movers will cart our charts, science equipment, computers, and more to our new office on West Commercial Street in Portland.
“We’re looking forward to working in the new space,” says Executive Director Will Everitt. “Our new office is open-concept which is better for how we work now. Key to our work, it has a larger lab, which we were able to build out thanks to the generous support of our members. We have a long-term lease and plan to be there for years to come.”
Looking back at 30+ years at SMCC

As we load keyboards and files into totes and boxes, Staff Scientist Mike Doan looks back at our long residency at the college. Mike was once an SMCC student and started with Friends as a water quality monitoring volunteer in the 1990s. He remembers that our first office on campus was housed in a small barn near the water. Next, we moved into an experimental structure built by SMCC students. It had an attached greenhouse and a troublesome wooden foundation. Mike recalls it as small, quirky, and crowded (see photo). “There were six of us stuffed into a hallway-like space. We had one phone and one email address we all shared.” One staff member even kept her pet iguana in the greenhouse. Our next move was only as far as the building next door. “We moved in a day – just walked out the door and set up space. It was really nice to spread out a little bit.” Friends operated out of our current building for nineteen years.
We have created countless memories at SMCC over the last 33 years. Mike fondly remembers celebrating many staff birthdays, walking Willard Beach, visiting his young son at the campus daycare, eating lunch in the cafeteria, working with SMCC marine science professors and students. There were a couple of tense moments on campus too: evacuations during a bomb threat, a gas explosion, the quiet years of the pandemic when Friends staff all worked from their respective houses. Mike would go to the office to get equipment at that time and remembers, “It was all boxes and cobwebs.”
Packing up and saying goodbye to SMCC is bittersweet. “It’s like we’re leaving our parent’s house. We’ve been here since almost the beginning. We’ve grown up here.” Reflecting on all the people who have passed through our offices, all the former interns, volunteers, and coworkers, Mike notes, “The good times here were all about the people.”
A new space with a long history

Our new office is in what was once the Portland Star Match factory, a building that has its own long and storied history. After a fire destroyed the original factory near Back Cove in 1869, the owners of Portland Star Match wanted a sturdy building that would prove resilient to fires. They built this iconic brick building in 1870. Today it is a colorful compound of offices and businesses in the working waterfront area of West Commercial Street.
“All of our staff will be working on the same floor for once,” says Will. “We still have a view of the Bay. The elevator makes the space more accessible for volunteers and staff. Many of us will be able to walk and bike to the new space and the commute is shorter for almost all of our staff.”
Our new and modern conference room is filled with light, exposed brick, and a nod to the past with creaky wooden floors. The newly built lab space is big enough for our equipment and the needs of our science team. Despite the nostalgia of being on campus, Mike is looking forward to working in a bigger lab space, enjoying a shorter commute, and growing as an organization.
Though we’re moving and it’s a big transition to make, Mike offers us the bigger picture: “It was never about the physical office location. It’s always been about the Friends.”