03/18/16 Yellow Light Breen, Maine Development Foundation
Posted by Erik Jorgensen
On Friday, we heard from Yellow Light Breen, the man with the most unusual name in Maine. Formerly an Angus King administration official and then an executive at Bangor Savings, he recently took a pay cut and added two hours to his commute to take the helm of the Maine Development Foundation (MDF) in Augusta.MDF is a privately-funded extra-governmental entity created by the legislature to focus on public-private partnerships – creating bridges through judicious use of both its public and private aspects to provide objective analysis and develop broad consensus around issues of significance to the economic health of Maine.
No issue is more central to Maine’s future than an effective education and training system, and bolstering that has been a longstanding focus area for MDF. Maine’s per capita income is low, in part because of lower educational attainment in our state then elsewhere in New England. He emphasized the criticality of finding and developing workers with qualifications to staff emerging businesses like Putney, Molyneke, and KepWare, among others.
MDF’s work is around “investing in people and creating a climate of investment in Maine.” It does this through several key programs, such as Next Step Maine, which works to get adults with partial degrees back to school, and Opportunity Maine, which provides tax credits for businesses willing to help reduce student loan debt among their employees. Live Work Maine is a program that promotes jobs in the state holistically, working to get people to move here “from away,” and MDF’s Main Street Development program builds on the fact that Maine’s unique and historic downtowns have been identified as significant assets.
Other MDF Programs include the acclaimed “Leadership Maine” course, which is on track to train 1000 citizen leaders throughout the state, bringing people from various sectors together for intensive leadership training over the course of a year. Additional leadership programming takes place though efforts to educate elected leaders in Augusta about Maine’s economy through seminars and a biennial bus tour.
Finally, the MDF’s other signature program is “Measures of Growth” the annual tracking report on the Maine economy that is published annually, providing a high level “dashboard” view of economic indicators of all types, from citizen educational levels, to manufacturing trends, to investments in research and development.