It started as a class assignment.

Franklin County is one of Maine's most rural counties. The economic realities are visible in daily life: fewer summer jobs, fewer places to see adults doing skilled work up close, fewer chances for a young person to test what they might be good at before they're old enough to be told what they are.

The gap wasn't lack of talent. It was lack of exposure. A fourteen-year-old who has never seen someone price a product, source a supplier, or close a sale can't picture themselves doing it. And the town they'll leave — or stay in — pays the cost either way.

In 2018 Bonita Tompkins, a business teacher at Mount Blue High School, noticed how little of the working world her students had ever been shown. The teachers around her were already at capacity. So she and her class took it on as a problem to solve. They named what they were building for what it was: created by students, for students.

CES took the space on Main Street just fourteen days before the pandemic shut Maine down — before the store had officially opened. It came back. The makerspace filled in behind it. Engineers began driving to Farmington on Wednesdays to teach. The Tiny Home for homeless youth got built with thirty partners in front of a national TV crew. Six acres came next. Then a federal planning grant. Then the next hundred kids.

Early on this work met skepticism, doubt and a fair amount of cynicism, mostly because nobody had seen the model before. Learning to explain it has been a years-long job of reworking the words until they land.

We've learned that talent and creativity alone aren't enough. The structure matters, and the people delivering the program matter more. Not everyone can do this work. The right professionals in the right roles are what keep it authentic, focused and worth a young person's time.

There's a comparison we keep coming back to: working the perfume counter at Macy's. Polished, poised, ready to give someone a good experience. When a young person learns to carry themselves like that, they start to feel the line running between confidence, competence and opportunity.