Portlander brings entrepreneurial expertise to Bangor chamber
Photo/Courtesy Bangor Region Chamber
Johann Sabbath, the Bangor Region Chamber's new director of program development and membership value
After seven years away from Maine, Johann Sabbath returned in 2008 with plans to attend business school and to build upon the experiences in government and economic development he had in this country and abroad.
But after a scant two weeks, Sabbath concluded that at 20-something he would rather be in the thick of things and make a stronger connection with his home state.
"I just felt compelled to stay and compelled to get to work," says Sabbath, a Portland native whose undergraduate studies took him from Southern California to Southeast Asia.
Sabbath is now using what he has learned to help promote economic development in eastern Maine. He recently started as director of program development and membership value for the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce.
It's a weighty title with responsibilities to match.
Sabbath, 27, will be shepherding some of the chamber's key programs, educational seminars and communications for its nearly 800 members in 21 Bangor area communities.
One key program, the Bangor Region Leadership Institute, provides a way for existing or emerging leaders to hone their skills, while the chamber's Building Bridges program helps to ensure that the skills being taught in educational institutions match the needs of those in the front lines of business and industry.
Then there's FusionBangor, an outreach and networking project that provides resources and support to the ages 19-40 entrepreneurial crowd who may be considering leaving Maine or who already have left and may want to come back.
It's for people like Sabbath, who now prefers to think of his seven-year out-of-state sabbatical as something reciprocal: He's using what he learned outside to benefit Mainers.
A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sabbath has been a speech editor, Democratic field organizer, carpenter, wilderness guide and served for two years as a legislative aide in the office of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California.
Returning to Maine but not quite ready to return to school, Sabbath focused on community involvement. He founded entreverge, a coalition of more than 50 Maine businesses and organizations that identify highly prospective entrepreneurs and hook them up with the support and resources they need to prosper. Sabbath will retain ties to entreverge but on a more informal basis.
He has served on boards of Realize!Maine and PROPEL, both organizations focusing on keeping young business people in the state of Maine. He has been active on an advisory committee of the Institute for Civic Leadership in Portland and was a field organizer with Change that Works, a health care reform advocacy organization.
Sabbath was hired last month as part of a retooling of the nearly 100-year-old chamber of commerce.
Sabbath was looking for a new challenge while the chamber was looking to enhance its intellectual capital portfolio.
"He's bringing us a lot of experience and insight," says the chamber of commerce's president and CEO John Porter, himself only a few months into the job.
Porter, a former Maine journalist and communications consultant, assumed the helm of the chamber in late January, replacing Candy Guerette, who was dismissed about six months earlier for alleged poor performance after nearly 13 years on the job.
It is Sabbath's hands-on experience, Porter says, can-do attitude and people savvy that make him such a good match for the chamber and the challenges ahead.
Porter says Sabbath speaks with conviction and not naiveté when he talks about Bangor becoming the fastest growing region in the state in the next 10 years.
Bolstered by strong educational systems in the area, access to varied transportation and technology as well as a burgeoning population, the resources are there, he says.
Although technology has helped make location less of a factor in a region's fortunes, economic development won't happen by itself. "We have to make strategic investments, we have to bring in the right intellectual capital into the region," Porter says.
For Sabbath, who has lived on the West Coast and studied abroad, right now nothing beats being back in Maine.
"I want to live here. I want to work here, learn and give something to the business community in Maine," he says.
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