"What a beautiful, essential place Cobscook Institute is!"

-Bill Roorbach

Redefining Rural Education

Cobscook Institute, started in 1999 as Cobscook Community Learning Center, was created to find ways of improving life in the Washington County, Maine region.

Cobscook Experiential Programs feature an exceptional high school curriculum for students from Washington County as well as shorter, intensive experiences outside of the academic calendar.

Cobscook Institute’s retreat center offers lodging, dining, meeting, classroom and related facilities on a beautiful campus that acts as a hub for community learning and as a venue for educational opportunities serving a wider constituency.

Our Mission and Vision

Our mission is to create responsive educational opportunities that strengthen personal, community, and global well-being. 

Our vision is of a community that respects people and planet, and inspires, supports, and sustains people to achieve their greatest potential. 

Our Story

Cobscook Institute, located in easternmost Maine, began as a community development initiative. Today, Cobscook offers a vast array of programs, events, and opportunities to the people of the Cobscook Bay region and beyond.  

In 1999, a group of community members from the Passamaquoddy Tribe, the Euro-American community, and our neighbors from nearby New Brunswick, Canada, came together to find an answer to the question, “What would improve life in this rural region?” The study group that formed around that question focused on educational models that brought much-needed change around the world. The group paid particular attention to Danish folk schools, where teachers and learners of all ages develop and strengthen new skills in a challenging, supportive, community atmosphere.

Our Values

The organizational values of Cobscook Institute, Peace, Honesty, Respect and Empowerment, are represented in the image of the medicine wheel. Cobscook is an intentionally created space committed to building bridges and being accessible to the people of the Cobscook Bay region and to social, economic, cultural, ecological, personal and familial empowerment. It is operated in the spirit of love, respect, humor, and creative, bold adventure.