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Thank you to MRBN’s current members and welcome to new members as we evolve into a formal nonprofit organization and transition from a Leadership Team to a Board of Directors.
With great excitement, this news is shared by Board President Leslie Forstadt.
The Maine Resilience Building Network (MRBN), since 2012, has built a strong statewide member network with over 900 members and has trained over 20,000 individuals from schools, healthcare, coalitions and organizations. MRBN is built upon strong relationships, solid experience, community engagement, and collaborations. 2019 has been a year full of changes for MRBN. We have developed a strategic business plan, and we are increasing our capacity by moving from a volunteer-run organization, to one with paid staff! This work was completed by the generous support of the Bingham Program. We want to extend a warm thank you to the Bingham Program for their support of MRBN’s mission and work.
To support our goals, we are pleased to announce that we have hired our first staff members.
Executive Director
Kini-Ana Tinkham, MRBN Leadership Team member, served as the Interim Executive Director through the planning and transition to a non-profit, and we are pleased that she will continue as the MRBN Executive Director. Kini was born in Hawaii and returned to Maine as an adolescent. She has family roots in Aroostook and Cumberland Counties. She has nursing and business degrees and has worked in healthcare and non-profit public health organizations for over three decades. As a maternity/labor and delivery nurse her passion for teaching and supporting new families rooted her career in teaching, advocacy, and mentoring. She educated state and national healthcare and advocacy providers to educate women about intimate-partner violence and healthy relationships and create system changes to advance the work. Her work to improve the health and well-being of children, adolescents, women and families has spanned over 35 years.
Engagement and Training Director
MRBN welcomes Joyce Morrissette to the new Network Engagement and Training Director position. Joyce was born and raised in Biddeford, Maine. She received her nursing degree from Simmons College in Boston and worked for 25 years as a psychiatric nurse, followed by 5 years in ophthalmology and clinical research. Joyce is an author, speaker and well-being educator as well as a trained MRBN facilitator. Her recent work is devoted to building resilience in clinicians and in communities. Joyce’s advanced training includes completing the Integrative Health and Lifestyle program for healthcare professionals at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine founded by Dr. Andrew Weil and Martha Beck’s life coach training program. Her book, Receive, So You May Give: A Self Care Path for Nurses was published in 2016. Joyce is excited to join MRBN and looks forward to promoting greater resilience in Maine.
Summer Intern
MRBN welcomes our Daniel Hanley summer intern, Anastasia D’Amico. She is a rising Senior at the University of Southern Maine who is majoring in Human Biology with a pre-medicine track. Anastasia is passionate about advocating for children and she truly believes that by helping build resilience in our children we can give each of them an equal opportunity to be successful. She is here this summer to learn more about MRBN, what people can do to build resilience, and to help MRBN in any capacity needed. For MRBN, she facilitated collecting data from a needs assessment survey for organizations associated with MRBN across the state so that we can learn where our help is needed and what that help may consist of, i.e., networking, training etc. She also helped organize MRBN files as we transition to having a new Network Engagement and Training Director and supported MRBN operations at events.
Moving forward, MRBN will continue to build the Network through new members, and we will work hard to meet the needs of current members and provide opportunities for engagement and professional development. We will be doing extensive outreach to provide technical assistance and training that meets the needs of communities around Maine across many sectors (education, health care, municipalities, and more). Our evolution and growth are with the greatest intention to serve the state and to do so in a responsive, resilience-informed, and effective way. Thank you for your support, and welcome Kini, Joyce, and Anastasia!
Don’t forget the next member meeting is being held on September 26. We hope to see you there!
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