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Andrea Cianchette Maker’s Long Game
How a lawyer with a paper mill past helped Maine imagine a different future, then built the scaffolding to reach it.

On a bleak economic stretch in 2014, after a career partially spent circling Maine’s paper mill towns, Andrea Cianchette Maker walked back into Pierce Atwood, the Portland law firm, with a knot in her stomach and a conviction she couldn’t shake. She wanted to help create good jobs in Maine. As administrator of the Maine Pulp & Paper Association, she was now overseeing its wind-down. There were no longer enough mills to sustain it. Forty thousand manufacturing jobs had vanished since the early 1990s. Communities up and down Maine’s rivers were hollowed out. What bothered her most wasn’t just the loss; it was the absence of a plan.

“I didn’t see anyone trying to change the trajectory of our economy,” she says. “So I went looking for places that had.”

Maker is a lawyer by training and a civic engineer by instinct. She pulled case studies like blueprints. North Carolina’s turn from low-wage manufacturing to the Research Triangle. Upstate New York’s climb back from decline. Utah’s quiet work to keep its young people. JobsOhio’s sector playbook. The pattern was clear enough to trace. Private sector leadership, working in concert with government and universities. Long vision. Goals that outlast politics. Then she set out to build the Maine version.

The spark that became FocusMaine

She started calling business leaders. One of the first was Mike Dubyak, then preparing to retire as WEX’s chief executive. Maker shared her idea for a private-sector effort that would choose a few high-potential industries and commit to them for a decade. Dubyak didn’t ask for another white paper. He said he was in. Together, they co-founded FocusMaine. Soon after, they found an uncommon ally: the Harold Alfond Foundation, long known for its focus on education, healthcare, and community development. It, along with more than 25 other funders, helped turn the vision into reality. All believed in the ten-year, collaborative model FocusMaine was built to prove.

There were skeptics. Some told her not to bother. Others worried about turf, money, and credit. Maker kept moving. “I thanked them for their time and went back to the people who said yes,” she says. FocusMaine incorporated a simple premise. Invest where Maine can compete in growing global markets. Bring the right players to the same table. Measure progress like a business.

Food and life sciences became their targets. They were not chosen because they were fashionable. They were chosen because the research said they could scale here. The initial yardstick was blunt and brave. Then the team got rigorous about attribution. If FocusMaine could not connect a job to a program it sponsored or a barrier it removed, it did not count it.

But the number that changed the room came later. “We asked how our companies were growing compared to everyone else,” Maker says. “In 2024, Maine’s overall job growth was about 1 percent. The broader food sector grew 3 percent. The companies in our programs grew 6 percent — twice as fast as the food sector and six times the state average.” She remembers the high-fives at a food producers showcase. It wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was proof.

When the strategy must bend

The life sciences plan began with a familiar New England idea. Recruit Boston companies looking to expand. The pitch was Maine’s costs, space, and lifestyle. It turned out that the gravitational pull of Boston, plus a pandemic and limited state incentives, made that a hard sell. As president, Maker could see the approach was stalling. On trips to Boston with state officials, she met consultant Sarah Delmar, a native Mainer with deep experience growing innovation economies in Cambridge. Maker brought her onto FocusMaine’s advisory team, then hired her to help chart a new course. Over the last 18 months, Delmar led a pivot that rested on years of groundwork and a simple insistence: hold a vision for life sciences in Maine and keep showing people what is possible.

The new play centered on what Maine already had. Research at the University of Maine, the University of New England, Bigelow, GMRI, and others. Entrepreneurs willing to commercialize it. The Roux Institute’s momentum. A few companies already pointing the way, like those turning byproducts of the sea into higher-value goods. FocusMaine worked alongside partners to push for the building blocks an ecosystem needs: a shared commercial lab where startups can rent benches and scale without burning precious capital, and a statewide hub to coordinate strategy. Years of holding that vision, making the case in Augusta, and leading those early trips to Boston paid off. The state awarded a $2.35 million grant that helped unlock a roughly $10 million lab development. The governor created the Maine Life Sciences Innovation Center and hired Delmar to stand it up. “This is a triumvirate,” Maker says. “A place to work, a center to coordinate, and leadership to move it forward.”

The way Maker runs a room

Talk to people who have watched Maker and the compliments arrive with specifics. She is the person who, midway through a meeting, reminds everyone why they are there, then shepherds the conversation back to the outcome that matters. She learned facilitation as a young leader on the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education and refined it with mentors like Carol Wishcamper, Henry Bourgeois, and David Flanagan.

“You go to a meeting knowing your desired outcomes,” she says. “Then you design an agenda that drives to those outcomes. You help people see the role they can play, and you keep the group focused on the shared goal.” She calls it nurture. Others might call it command without ego.

There is also the simple truth that women who lead often recognize. “If I do not steer, I can become invisible,” she says. She has no interest in disappearing. Not when the stakes are the future of the state that raised her.

Apprenticeships, first jobs, and a door to the water

FocusMaine’s programs live inside partner organizations. Maker prefers it that way. The work endures when it belongs to many. One of her favorite examples is the aquaculture apprenticeship. A one-year pathway that produces farm managers, not just entry-level help. She tells the story of Michael Scannell, a Black Mainer who could not picture himself on the water until the program put him there. He went from pre-apprentice to manager and is now studying marine science with an eye toward running his own farm. “It changed his life,” Maker says. It is hard to argue with that kind of evidence.

The hard parts

Progress, Maker says, was never blocked by opponents. It was slowed by the familiar Maine habits of scarcity and turf protection, from people and organizations who cared deeply about the same goals but struggled to share the space. “It’s hard to stay focused,” she says. “There are so many needs, so many opportunities to help.” Saying no was often the hardest part: no, we can’t take on another sector; no, we can’t do everything. At times the resistance came from fear that resources might shift elsewhere. At others it was simply the challenge of coordinating so much goodwill. “By and large, people were eager to work together,” she says. “But the negativism takes energy you’d rather spend building.”

She also admits it was hard to harness all the enthusiasm that came her way. “So many people wanted to help, and I never felt I succeeded in engaging all of them,” she says. Still, she remains grateful for those who said yes – board members, funders, and partners who saw the promise of FocusMaine and leaned in.

She credits steady, pragmatic tools that keep capital flowing to founders. The Maine Seed Capital Tax Credit. The long, quiet work of MTI. Both give early companies a reason to start here. Both should endure.

Why she believes the arc can bend

Maker is an optimist with receipts. She naturally sees Portland as a talent magnet, and bright spots in places like Skowhegan, Waterville, and Bangor. She sees young people choosing to stay because they can have real work and a real life. She wants more of that beyond the coast and the turnpike. The shared lab and the innovation center matter because they make it easier to start in Guilford, Eastport or Presque Isle and still touch the world.

Her definition of a quality job is plain. Pay a livable wage. Provide a pathway to grow. Do not strand people in a dead end. The measurement culture FocusMaine built is meant to hold everyone to that standard. If the work is not creating better lives, it is not the right work.

The ride that explains everything

When Maker was twenty-one, she and two friends finished racing in the women’s rowing nationals in Seattle, strapped panniers to their bikes, and in 48 days pedaled home to New England. No helmets. No cycling shoes. A straight shot across the north because one of them had to start teaching in mid-August. On the first day they climbed Chinook Pass. The Rockies came later and were a three-day climb. Then came the long work through he plains, the sudden shock of Vermont’s Green Mountains with their steep grades and no switchbacks, and on through New Hampshire. Maker soloed the final leg through the White Mountains to central Maine and Pittsfield. Whenever the climb gets steep, she remembers that trip.

Before she left, she walked into her father’s study armed with arguments, expecting resistance. He simply said, “That will be quite a ride.” Years later, when her daughter announced a plan to travel to South America after a college study program, Maker answered the same way. No doubting questions. No hedge. Just permission to try.

That line is the through-line of her career. When a sector needs a home, when a startup needs a first bench, when a coalition needs a center of gravity, she looks at Maine and says, that will be quite a ride. Then she plots the route, finds the people, and starts pedaling.

What ten years from now should sound like

Ask her how she wants the story told a decade from now and she does not talk about accolades. She talks about conversion. Heritage industries made newly valuable through science. Business leaders with deeper acumen. A state that attracts and keeps talent. A culture that experiments, forgives failure, and learns fast. “It took everyone at the table,” she says. “FocusMaine helped bring the right identities together and hold the space to grow.”

Her perfect day is not complicated. It starts with quiet time and reflection, planning the key priorities for the hours ahead. Then a workout at the gym, breakfast with a friend, a fundraising meeting at noon, a conversation with a political candidate in the afternoon, and dinner with her husband and one or more of her four children and their families. Halloween with the grandkids. Work and family braided tight. Motion without hurry. A leader who still sees what Maine can be, then steps into the room and helps us act like it.