Gov. Janet Mills and the Legislature passed several laws on gun control and mental health after the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston that was Maine’s deadliest on record.
One less-talked-about change was the creation of a new office. State leaders announced this month that Jamie Bourque, who has worked in Maine’s public health field for more than 20 years, will serve as the first director of the Office of Injury and Violence Prevention under the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The office will establish a hub that pulls together different sources of data on violence in Maine, a rural state with a low crime rate but also recurring cases of homicides, domestic violence, overdoses and juvenile justice issues that have shattered families.
Bourque, 43, who led the Maine CDC’s disease prevention office for the past five years, said her office will also focus on much more, including mental health and substance use disorder awareness, suicide prevention, safe gun storage and engaging young people.
She talked about her plans for the office in a Monday interview. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.
BDN: Could you share more about your background and what got you interested in violence prevention work?
Bourque: I am a lifelong Mainer. I grew up in Ellsworth, and my parents were major influences on getting me to where I am today, both personally and professionally. My dad was a big outdoorsman, and he became a Master Maine Guide. My mom was always in the stands at our sporting events.
From my parents I took two lessons that I think will serve me really well in this new office, the first being the importance of having a caring, engaged adult in a young person’s life, and the other is the importance of firearm safety through that lens of Maine’s strong outdoor heritage.
I developed a really strong interest in public health in high school. During my junior year, I started volunteering at a local HIV/AIDS service organization. I studied education at the University of Maine and then I went on to study public health and the University of New England. I started in infectious disease prevention and then more recently I’ve moved into chronic disease and injury and violence prevention.
I also became a mother during the course of my career, and I’ve been increasingly interested in injury and violence prevention especially through the lens of a parent, and I’ve learned a lot about how the work we implement as a public health entity related to injury and violence prevention can have a really positive impact on the lives of young Mainers and their families.
Most recently, I spent the last five years working with Maine’s existing suicide and engagement programming, which gave me a solid foundational understanding of the work this new office can build upon moving forward.
BDN: The governor formed this office as part of the response of the Lewiston mass shooting, but it obviously has many areas of focus. How would you describe it to the average Mainer who is hopefully not a victim of violence but may wonder how it will affect their life?
Bourque: The impact of prevention work is something that can be really difficult to identify in the moment for two reasons. It often takes time to see a change that the prevention work impacts. Oftentimes the impact of that work is only recognized in retrospect.
This office will have a focus on enhancing youth and family engagement work. Upstream primary prevention is a significant focus for this new office. I acknowledge that is very jargony.
Imagine that we’re standing on the banks of the Penobscot River, and we see several people float by who have fallen in. Of course we can help them by throwing them ropes or life preservers or sending boats out to fetch them, but we can also walk upstream and find out why people are falling in the river, and we can take steps to prevent them from falling.
That moving upstream is where the majority of this work is really going to focus.
BDN: How do you anticipate your office will navigate the challenges of violence prevention in a state where a notable percentage of residents value gun ownership and hunting?
Bourque: I think with any work we do in public health, it’s important to listen to our communities, hear their concerns and think about what’s important to them. As a lifelong Mainer, I really feel strongly that people want young people and our families to feel safe and for young people to thrive, and I think that’s something we can all get behind.
Part of what we’ll be doing is listening to people. We’ll be looking at data. We will use that to help drive some of our decisions, but we also won’t be operating in a vacuum, and I think that’s really critical. We need to hear what people’s concerns are, and we also need to be clear with what we are doing. Community engagement will be a big part of that.
BDN: What are a few new initiatives or programs you are hoping to implement in the coming months? How might this office evolve?
Bourque: We’ll be pulling together data that already exists to help us better understand the landscape and looking at it through a public health prevention lens. Part of what we’ll be doing is seeing where we fit into that existing infrastructure, because we definitely don’t want to duplicate efforts that are already happening nor do we want to reinvent the wheel.
While I don’t have a specific answer of an exact program that we’re going to be pulling off the shelf and implementing, the reason for that is that we really want to make sure that this new office is focused on community needs and not duplicating efforts and services.
BDN: Numerous places in the U.S. have seen funding cuts for violence prevention efforts when policymakers argued they were not creating immediate or noticeable improvements, such as drops in homicides, but that gets at how violence prevention work often needs time to create meaningful change. How will you define success for this office?
Bourque: We’re looking at how other states and communities measure the success of these programs. Some of that measurement will be specifically tailored to the interventions that we end up landing on for Maine.
Also, we need to communicate what we’re doing and how people understand this measurement and that some things might be able to show outputs immediately. Other outcomes will take time to move, so part of our job will be explaining that to our communities, to our Legislature, to interested parties so they understand these are our markers.
