We are building the community we know is possible.
Every day, people in Lewiston work hard to strengthen our community.
Mentoring youth, creating new pathways to homeownership, growing nutritious food, opening small businesses, and more: Lewiston is full of people who see potential and possibility in our community.
The Growing Our Tree Streets Transformation Plan has been an important part of how we define the challenges we see - and how we address them in our Tree Streets Neighborhood.
Below, we’ve talked about some of the ways people, businesses, community groups, and the City of Lewiston are responding to the Transformation Plan’s calls to action. Click on the topic you’d like to learn more about or scroll on through and read it all!
One more thing…. Did we miss something?
Are you a part of the solution - or know someone who is - and we haven’t included it here? We want to know!
Child care: Increasing quality child care options to meet family needs
Child care is critical to Lewiston’s economy. Parents need child care to work. Kids need to be taken care of in a place that is safe, provides structure and socialization, and supports their development. Maine’s highest concentration of children five and under live in the Tree Streets. One of the greatest Tree Street resident-identified needs is quality, affordable childcare with flexible hours for working parents.
Our schools are working hard to keep up with the significant needs of Lewiston’s students. Increasing the number of Lewiston children who are ready to learn when they get to kindergarten is particularly challenging – and important. Quality childcare and early education programs, like Head Start and public Pre-K, are proven to prepare children to be school-ready and improve long-term academic performance.
Responding to community-led priorities, Choice funding and the Transformation Plan support broadening and improving childcare options: more early childhood education, more second and third shift childcare, more culturally-informed approaches to childcare, and more locations to best meet the needs of Lewiston’s families.
Early Education
More of Lewiston’s children will be ready to excel in school with the expansion of the Promise Early Education Center Head Start classrooms. A major expansion opened in 2022, with 30 more Head Start slots and increasing staff size by 7.5 positions. These new slots prioritize Tree Street families. Promise’s programming is proven to improve student achievement and the additional support they provide for families helps keep kids in our community healthy.
Parents gain greater access to economic mobility when they have quality, reliable childcare. Child care is central to parents starting a career and finding steady employment.
Investing in children is investing in Lewiston’s future. Quality childcare gets children ready for school, setting them - and our public schools - up for success.
Expanding Child Care Businesses: Supporting Families & Entrepreneurs
The City of Lewiston is working with CEI Child Care Business Lab and the John T. Gorman Foundation to expand high-quality child care in the Tree Streets by five additional locations (about 40 childcare spaces). More child care facilities also means additional jobs for child care workers and support for entrepreneurs interested in starting a child care business.
Expanding child care is also an investment in Lewiston’s workforce: access to affordable, quality childcare enables parents to maintain employment. This increase in supply helps to meet the demand for child care, benefiting our entire city. By investing in child care and early childhood education, we invest in a Lewiston whose children are thriving academically and whose families can earn a living wage. These investments also provide entrepreneurship opportunities for people interested in starting childcare businesses, and more jobs for people who want to work with children.
Food Access: Increasing local access to nutritious, affordable food
During the planning phase of this work, Tree Streets residents overwhelmingly prioritized the need for good, affordable food within walking distance. The Tree Streets are considered a “Low Supermarket Access” Area – the only Lewiston neighborhood to receive this designation. High rates of lead poisoning in the Tree Streets reinforces the need for access to healthy, nutritious food, which helps offset the harmful effects of lead poisoning.
Choice Initiative funding and community-driven planning helped launch the Lewiston-Auburn Community Market, a food co-op, training center and community space currently under development. By the end of 2024, LACM had secured 85% of the financing necessary build the $8.5 million project on the site of the soon-to-be former Lewiston Police Station, next to Kennedy Park and within walking distance for the Tree Street neighborhood.
People and families will have more access to healthy food that they can afford within walking distance. They will spend less money on their grocery bills and won’t have to spend money on a bus or a cab to get groceries.
But the LACM isn’t just located within the community where it is needed. It is a community-led, co-operatively owned project. Residents creating the food center’s business and systems will help run the food center once it opens. The food center will create jobs and business opportunities Tree Streets residents.
The Transformation Plan has also focused community efforts on preserving and expanding long-standing healthy food programs in the downtown neighborhood, including the Lewiston Farmers’ Market. The Farmers’ Market has grown their market and invested in improvements in their riverfront location. They are a SNAP-friendly market that draws farmers, food producers, makers, and crafters from across the region.
St. Mary’s Nutrition Center is a leader in providing healthy food options, access, and education to residents across the Tree Street Neighborhood. Their staff provide fresh and healthy food for nearly 350 households each week through the Food Pantry. Food Corps and the Nutrition Center received funding for expanded McMahon, Montello, and Geiger Elementary School gardens, and new staff assigned to Connors Elementary School. The Nutrition Center’s core work, including impactful youth programs, community dinners, the robust network of Community Gardens, long-standing partnerships with local schools, as well as crucial food access programs, make it a critical partner to our community.
Health: Expanding Access & Options for People & Families
B-Street Health
Center’s Upgrade
Choice is funding significant renovations at the B-Street Health Center where Choice Partner Community Clinical Services will consolidate and expand medical, behavioral and dental care services in the remodeled center.
The renovation will increase space available for mental health and dental care so B-Street can serve more people - all in one location. The upgrade also includes a new pharmacy that puts medication and important health care products and services within walking distance of many people in the Tree Streets.
The renovation will also mean pediatric dental care in downtown Lewiston and additional adult dental care. Both will accept MaineCare, which is critically important in a state where most dentists don’t accept MaineCare. Many people in the Tree Streets do not have dental insurance and rarely access dental care outside of emergency room visits.
Changes at B-Street also mean more space to increase services for much-needed behavioral health care & substance use disorder treatment.
B-Street renovations are set to begin in Spring 2025!
Access to medical and behavioral health support is critical, especially for people and families experiencing the enormous stress of poverty. High rates of lead poisoning and its lifelong impacts to childhood development, behavioral health, earning potential, and other impacts further reinforce the need for comprehensive and preventative health care access.
Substance Use Disorder Treatment
Substance use disorder treatment services are also essential in helping our neighbors transition from active use to recovery. Transformation Plan partner Spurwink Clinical Services now funds additional mental health and substance use disorder treatment services, including an innovative partnership with the Lewiston Police Department. Project Support You provides behavioral health clinicians to work alongside the Lewiston Police Department—who frequently respond to mental health crises and potential overdoses—are critical to addressing substance use disorder. These clinicians help individuals achieve safety through harm reduction, treatment, recovery, and prevention.
Lead Hazard Reduction
Lead hazard reduction work is a signature initiative of the Transformation Plan. After years of partner coordination, millions in federal funding for abatement, and collaboration with hundreds of building owners and thousands of residents, the needle is moving in the right direction on lead poisoning prevention.
Since 2019, Lewiston has experienced a 50% reduction in childhood lead poisoning. In the same period, 200 housing units have been remediated and more than $5 million invested in improving the safety, durability and aesthetics of homes. Over the next 4 years, Lewiston plans to invest nearly $8 million to abate another 300 housing units. You can find more information here.
Collectively, these efforts will increase the overall health and wellness of Lewiston people and families. Providing with more access and options for health care, prevention, safe homes and safe neighborhoods encourages healthy behaviors and prevents and reduces disease and disability.
Housing is central to the Growing Our Tree Streets Transformation Plan and is one of the more visible parts of work funded by the Choice in Lewiston. Two Transformation Plan goals relate to housing: one relates to moving Lewiston toward our goal of being lead-free by 2043 and another relates to increasing our inventory of healthy housing and housing choices for all people.
Housing: Increasing Lewiston’s inventory of housing choices Lewiston people can afford
Choice funding is replacing some of the distressed housing that has challenged Lewiston for years. Choice encourages more investment to rebuild and replace more distressed housing, helping to re-establish Lewiston’s reputation as a desirable city where people want to live.
Choice is partially funding 186 new, safe, energy-efficient, mixed-income apartments Lewiston people can afford to call home. These high quality, larger living spaces will help raise the current standard of available housing in the Tree Streets neighborhood.
Wedgewood
The first Choice-funded development, Wedgewood, has one historic renovation with eight new buildings for a total of 60 affordable apartments and 22 market rate apartments. The Wedgewood development, which covers most of the Pine Bartlett-Walnut-Pierce Streets block on which it is being built, will be one of the most energy efficient city blocks in Maine. Wedgewood will be completed in 2025 and Lewiston Housing is accepting applications for people to live there. As buildings finish and are cleared for occupancy, families are moving in!
DeWitt
DeWitt, named after the DeWitt Hotel once located in the same location on Pine Street, is the second Choice-funded development. It will consist of two new buildings containing 104 apartments. The first floor of each building will be commercial space. There will be 83 affordable apartments and 21 market rate. The first floor will be commercial space that businesses can rent.
We will start to see site work at DeWitt in 2025. Lewiston Housing has an interest list available for people to sign up. When they open the wait list, people on the interest list will be notified.
Innovative Housing Solutions
Lewiston is home to several organizations that have created innovative approaches to addressing Maine’s housing challenges.
Healthy Homeworks is renovating and marketing turn of century multi-unit buildings into attractive, affordable condos for first-time homebuyers. Their Renter 2 Owner Program supports first time homebuyers in unique and innovative ways:
Educates Lewiston residents who want to become homeowners with a realistic, localized, hands-on approach, and connects them with professional resources to pursue the housing type that meets their needs.
Creates desirable, low-risk starter homes in Lewiston by renovating and converting existing downtown rental stock into affordable condominiums, with the goal of creating more options for people seeking to buy their first home.
Gives graduates of their program the right of first refusal to purchase these condominiums if they choose, and provides 18 months of ongoing support and mentorship to help new owners succeed.
Lewiston’s RaiseOp, the state’s first urban housing co-operative, was the first co-operative developer in Maine to be awarded federal low-income housing tax credits to finance an affordable housing development. That development, 18 apartments over two sites (198 Blake Street and 84 Walnut Street) were the first buildings in Androscoggin County to be certified Passive House and only the 15th in Maine. Passive House buildings use only 1/3 of the energy to operate per square foot as compared to a regular home.
RaiseOp offers the architectural drawings and development notes for this development as a resource, “to promote the creation of more housing that helps to meet the affordable housing crisis, and also to promote low-energy, and sustainable neighborhood designs.” They note that developers, architects, and community members are all welcome to view and use this design.
Community Credit Union, headquartered in downtown Lewiston, established the state’s first Sharia-compliant mortgage that suits Lewiston’s local Muslim population. They spent years figuring out how to offer this kind of mortgage to Lewiston residents and note that the mortgage is approved by the independent Shariah Supervisory Board of world-renowned scholars. Learn more here.
Play & Gather: Creating fun, safe places for youth & neighbors to gather outside.
Our community is always changing – and has changed significantly over the last 20 years. Lewiston people know how to connect with neighbors despite differences. There are new and repurposed areas around Lewiston’s downtown that anyone can use and enjoy. These spaces honor our history and move us toward our future: both a century ago and now, kids hop onto sleds and speed down McGraw Hill.
The Tree Street Neighborhood is home to many children, families, and older adults who would benefit from time outside - especially if their home is cramped. Safe outdoor places where people can gather, play, enjoy one another’s company, and build community increases quality of life, health, and sense of place for residents.
The Transformation Plan calls for increasing safe places to play and gather throughout the Tree Streets Neighborhood and ensuring existing spaces are clean, safe and have amenities families want to use.
In the last four years, the City and partners like Healthy Neighborhoods have worked hard to grow the number of outdoor gathering places residents want to see in Lewiston. Mike McGraw Park has a new sledding hill and soccer field on Bartlett Street with sitting areas, trails, an orchard and public art.
Nearby in Franklin Pasture, new bike and walking trails provide new, safe routes from the neighborhood to Connors Elementary School, Lewiston High School and Lewiston Regional Technical Center, and athletic facilities.
Lewiston has seen new – and conversation provoking! – public art. Sculptures, murals, storefront window wraps, hand-painted traffic signal boxes all bring new life and vibrancy to our streets. L/A Arts encourages art and culture in Lewiston, hosting Friday Art Walks from May to October, performances throughout the year, and artists’ work at their downtown Lewiston gallery.
RaiseOp community members are working with Lewiston Public Works staff. They recently completed a full needs assessment of Lewiston’s playground and park assets, and improvements are under way. Knox Street Playground has been completely updated, Paradis Park received a refresh, and Sunnyside Park is going through a public planning process for reconstruction in 2025.
Kennedy Park, the City’s public square, now has new sitting areas, a wheelchair charging station, a new water fountain, game tables, and an outdoor public restroom to compliment the historic bandstand, popular water park and basketball courts, and best-in-state outdoor skatepark.
Click on the map above to check out L/A Arts’ Lewiston/Auburn art tour (there are walking, biking, and driving versions!).
Lewiston Summer Fun & Films, a staple for Lewiston families, is hosted by the L/A Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and the Lewiston Police Department. Activities from aerial artists, carnival games, animal fun with Mr. Drew and His Animals Too, bubble machines and more get families outside and playing before the popcorn pops and the sun goes down for the movie.
Decades ago and now, neighbors gather and spend time outside. As we work toward implementing more of the Transformation Plan, kids have more places to start a pick-up basketball or soccer game. Decades ago and now, people can sit down with a friend in Kennedy Park and enjoy the sunshine.
Our vibrant community is being reinvigorated thanks to these investments - and there are once again safe and fun places to enjoy each other’s company downtown.
Jobs & Careers: Increasing job training & career building opportunities so people can earn a living wage
While nearly 90% of Lewiston’s Tree Streets labor force is employed, most households have a hard time making ends meet. Seasonal, temporary, and low-wage jobs leave people underemployed, uninsured and unable to earn a living wage.
Generational poverty among Tree Street residents limits career and educational options. Supporting residents as they identify their skills and guiding them toward appropriate training and programs provides a better chance at obtaining stable, living wages.
People need support navigating job placement programs, where to look and how to find jobs, and how to apply and manage interviews successfully.
Choice funding and Transformation Plan initiatives are expanding education and job training for Lewiston’s unemployed and underemployed residents. Transformation Plan partner Strengthen LA, a program of the LA Metro Chamber of Commerce, addresses barriers to participating in job training so that residents can find careers in various growth sectors. These growth sector jobs can stabilize earnings for residents, which contributes to our community's economy:
The Care Economy
The B-Street Health Center renovations will bring in several new job opportunities including a Dentist, Dental Hygienist, Dental Assistant, Primary Care Provider, Medical Assistant, Patient Service Representatives (multiple), Patient Access Navigator, and mental health professionals that specialize in substance use disorder treatment. Several of these new positions will have on-the-job training opportunities.
Transformation Plan partner Coastal Enterprises, Inc (CEI) has established a Lewiston Child Care Business Lab, where participants enroll in an intensive 6-month program, covering all aspects of both the highly regulated child care sector and small business administration. Graduates have all they need to start and succeed with their own child care businesses serving the Tree Streets Neighborhood.
Promise Early Education Center’s new childcare center now functions as a training lab thanks to a partnership between Promise and Central Maine Community College’s (CMCC) Early Childhood Education Program. The lab provides field placement in a best-practice Head Start program which will lead to an associate in applied science degree. With Choice funding, Strengthen LA, Promise and CMCC will actively recruit Choice residents to enroll in the CMCC program. Promise and CEI-funded home-based care programs give graduates preference in hiring.
Job training and career development services support a range of Lewiston people: veterans who need help reintegrating into civilian life, mothers who raised children and need support re-entering the workforce, older adults who aren’t old enough or can’t afford to retire and need guidance to navigate the workforce, and more.
Construction and Property Management
Strengthen LA and Hebert Construction, the contractor chosen for the first Choice development Wedgewood, have worked together to encourage apprenticeships for people living in the Tree Streets neighborhood, and put Lewiston residents to work on Lewiston construction projects.
Hebert and Tree Street Youth’s PINE Construction (Peer Inspired Navigation of Employment) program works with young adults from the Tree Streets to perform basic labor, learn basic trade skills and worksite culture - all while getting paid.
Strengthen LA also works with Lewiston Housing to connect construction apprentices with Lewiston Housing’s property management work. This will include work experience and full-time employment at Lewiston Housing’s housing developments.
Supporting people toward stable, livable wages benefits everyone. It also enables more people to invest in our city, buy homes, and live healthier lives.
More residents with stable income means more residents contributing to institutions like our library and our schools, helping to create better infrastructure throughout our community. This strengthens our entire community.
Safety & Infrastructure: Building safer neighborhoods together
A safe neighborhood means many things: accessible sidewalks and street crossings, neighbors who know one another, well-lit streets and parks, clean water, access to health care, responsive and responsible police, and a low crime rate. The perception of Lewiston as an unsafe place persists, especially downtown and the Tree Streets.
Safety is important to people’s mental and physical health. Chronic stress from worrying about safety can disrupt healthy brain development for children. It can increase depression and anxiety, decreasing our community’s health.
Everyone deserves to feel safe from violence and crime. Transformation Plan work led by its partners are establishing the supports to set our community up for success and steer clear of potential problems that maybe ahead, and help make Lewiston a more safe, healthy, welcoming, equitable and vibrant community.
Safe Streets
Part of the Transformation Plan highlights the importance of improving the walking experience in Lewiston with an emphasis on safe routes to schools includes creating well-lit, better-designed walkways and sidewalks to increase safety for people walking. The City and its partners developed the 2021 Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, also known as the Heads-Up program, which is guiding safety improvements throughout the neighborhood.
“Five Corners” (Sabattus Street-College Street-Horton Street) is a busy intersection for pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and is one of the City’s high crash zones with 29 crashes over the last 10 years. Now, the five-way intersection features a high visibility crosswalk to help drivers slow down and pedestrians cross safely. Sabattus Street-Oak Street-Bartlett Street is another historic high crash zone intersection and received the same high visibility crosswalk treatment.
Rapid Flashing Beacons are an effective way to add improve crosswalk safety, and these devices have been installed at Lisbon Street-Cedar Street to improve safety near Simard Payne Park and Adams Street-Bartlett Street intersection near Mike McGraw Park. Ash Street will soon see raised crosswalks and bump outs to help calm vehicle traffic and improve the experience for residents walking, with strollers, walkers or wheelchairs.
Safe Neighborhoods
Transformation Plan partners in law enforcement are also stepping up to support increased presence, deepening community relationships, and working on innovative policing models to improve conditions on the ground and reduce or prevent crime before it starts.
The Lewiston Police Department’s Community Resource Officers (CRO) are on foot regularly making rounds and checking in across the Tree Street Neighborhood and Downtown Business District. They’ve expanded proactive patrols with selective enforcement teams (SET) and partnered with regional, state and federal agencies to investigate sex and drug trafficking and gun violence.
Proactive patrol officers’ walk around downtown, interact with community members, stop in at local businesses and ask about any issues they’re having, spend time with youth in various locations throughout the community, and be available and on duty for calls.
In August 2024, the City of Lewiston released an initial plan to address gun violence in our community. Over the last many months, we’ve worked hard with community partners, Lewiston Police, Lewiston Public Schools, and many others to address these issues. Recently, the City, LPD, and LPS hosted information sessions for parents where we provided parents with information substance use challenges and gun violence. We know that to prevent and respond gun violence in Lewiston is a community effort - youth, parents, schools, police, adults, business owners, and others.
We have come a long way as a community - especially over the last 25 years. We have seen our share of successes, challenges, joys, and moments of grief. Our community is a global community. We strive to be a place our residents are proud of, where we support each other’s aspirations and cheer on the significant accomplishments of our residents, organizations, and businesses. We are a diverse community in many ways, and while we might not always agree on how we “get there,” we come together when it counts. We all want to rest easy at night knowing our loved ones are safe.
Youth & Education: Improve education opportunities & increase academic performance of local youth
Youth in the Tree Streets are best served when their energy and time is directed toward fun social academic enrichment programs.
Our schools are working hard to keep up with the significant needs of Lewiston students. Adding more people to the team of adults who can encourage and mentor children and teens outside of school supports their education - and families. It also means that our teachers and schools are more likely to be successful because students will perform better.
We all know it takes a village. Transformation Plan partners working in youth development provide supportive and complimentary programs to what families and schools work hard at every day. Tree Street Youth, The Root Cellar, Maine Community Integration, the Community Organizing Alliance, and the Working Communities Challenge are among those partners.
Tree Street Youth offers locally designed and impactful youth programming, including the PreK bridge after school program and the RootED program for expelled and out of school youth, which are both responsive to Transformation Plan goals. Other TSY programs including CEDAR Professional Internships, ELM Arts & Cultural Enrichment, WILLOW Elementary Program, MAPLE Teen Leadership, and BRANCHES College Prep provide support to youth.
The Root Cellar engages and mentors Tree Street Neighborhood children and youth in year-round leadership, high school completion, and career building programs.
Transformation Plan partner Healthy Neighborhoods issued several grants to youth-centered orgs to this work, including Rosati Leadership Academy and Maine Community Integration to launch community-based youth development programs.
Youth thrive when they have a team of responsive, caring adults who love and support them. These programs help grow that team and make sure kids are set up for success at school and for their future. These programs help families successfully launch their children's future and help families engage with schools and their community.
Oh hey, before you go! Did we miss something?
The great thing about this work is that anyone who wants to be part of the solution is welcome. We might miss something because we don’t know about it or because it’s just not included here yet! We want to make sure anyone who is working to make Lewiston the community we know is possible is included. Please let us know if you - or someone you know - is making a difference!