“Everybody’s a winner” this generation of young people has been taught. Whether awards for participation (as opposed to excellence) have hurt or helped the millennial kids is not the subject of this column. Let me borrow the phraseology, though.

We had 152 nominations for our second annual Source Awards, given to Mainers, Maine businesses and institutions that are working to make the state a more sustainable place.

Growing from tree to table

As we did last year, Source turned to Bowdoinham woodturner Jeff Raymond to make our awards, black cherry bowls emblazoned with the Source logo and ready for fruit, salad or just sitting around looking gorgeous. Raymond always has a good story to tell, so we asked about the origin of the black cherry. Little did we know the story would lead back to Source.

Brett Johnson, owner of Maine Street Design Co., a Portland interior design firm, saw last year’s Source Awards issue, which featured Raymond’s bowls, and decided that when it was time to remove a giant black cherry from his Yarmouth backyard – it was throwing shade on the vegetable gardens and fruit trees – he’d give the wood to Raymond.

Now Raymond gets that a lot, and says he doesn’t always take people up on the offer. “If I did, I would be under a mountain of wood,” he said. “I’m already up to my knees.” But this tree was unusually large. “It came from the neighborhood of big trees.” The late Herbie, the largest elm in New England until it had to be cut down in 2010 because of Dutch Elm disease, had grown just a few doors down. Its sheer size would give Raymond great flexibility in how he could use it.

Johnson gave his arborist strict instructions to cut the tree down in a manner that would allow Raymond to do whatever he wanted. It took him two days to haul off all the usable wood (the rest was donated for firewood). The trade-off included some jumbo hand-turned bowls for Johnson. Raymond also made a two-foot tall urn. And there was still plenty of wood left for the 2016 Source Award bowls. “This is the thing about woodturning,” Raymond said. “It’s a community and it all comes full circle.”

– Mary Pols

We’re not exaggerating much when we say everybody’s a winner.

Last year, I wrote in this column that we were stunned by the number and scope of the nominations. That struck us with equal force this year, also their astounding quality. Features Editor Chelsea Conaboy and I took a first pass through the nominations to try to narrow a (as it turned out very large) list of potential finalists. I’d read a nomination, place it in a “keep” stack, read the next one, keep, the one after that, keep, keep, keep, all while telling myself that soon I would encounter an easy-to-eliminate nominee. Wrong.

The tremendously strong candidate pool made our jobs as judges tough. But unlike parents and schools, we couldn’t boost everybody’s self-esteem; we did have to select winners in the end – seven amazing individuals, school clubs, businesses and institutions out of a number more than 20 times that. A separate group of judges selected the three Russell Libby scholarship awardees. Read about both in this issue of Source.

As we debated the merits of the nominations, several words and phrases came up repeatedly: innovative, replicable, practical, playing a catalyst role, providing missing infrastructure… Our winners are those things and much more. They inspire us.

We hope they inspire you, too. More than that, we hope they spur you to take action yourself to make Maine and the world a more sustainable place. Teach a kid, advocate for a solar project, carpool to work (preferably in a car that doesn’t guzzle gas), compost your trash, campaign for viable green policies, love a farmer, get involved with a nonprofit, eat humanely raised and harvested meat, be a good neighbor. As Source Awards judge Barton Seaver said about the last, “You could define sustainability as the action of being a good neighbor.”

Given the scope of the challenges we face, it’s going to take every one of us.