Everything OHI does—every group home we staff, every case manager we deploy, every Special Olympics athlete we cheer for, every family we feed at the Brewer Area Food Pantry—flows from two deceptively simple statements that have guided this organization since the day it was founded.
Our Mission
To inspire people to recognize possibilities and lead meaningful, self-directed lives in the communities they call home.
Why this mission matters
When OHI was founded in 1979, adults with intellectual disabilities and mental illness in Maine had few choices about where they lived, who they lived with, or how they spent their days. Most were institutionalized—in places like Pineland Center and the Bangor Mental Health Institute—where the prevailing belief was that people with significant disabilities could not live independently, could not hold jobs, could not form meaningful relationships, and could not contribute to their communities.
OHI was built to prove that wrong.
Our mission is not passive. To inspire people to recognize possibilities means actively challenging the low expectations that systems, families, and individuals themselves have internalized over a lifetime. It means sitting across from someone who has been told their whole life what they cannot do—and saying: Let's find out what you can.
It means a Direct Support Professional who drives someone to a job interview for the first time. A case manager who helps a person find their first apartment. A peer support specialist who walks alongside someone through their first week back in the community after a hospitalization. A LEAD ON! coordinator who discovers that the quiet woman nobody expected much from turns out to be a passionate animal lover—and finds her a volunteer role at the local shelter that transforms her sense of purpose and belonging.
To lead a meaningful, self-directed life is not a luxury. It is a right. And in the communities that they call home—not in institutions, not in segregated settings, but in neighborhoods, on Main Streets, in workplaces and parks and food pantries and swimming pools—that right becomes real.
That is what OHI's mission looks like in practice, every single day.
Our Vision
Everything is possible.
Why this vision matters
Three words. Endlessly radical.
When Bonnie-Jean Brooks moved into the Bangor Mental Health Institute in the late 1970s to understand firsthand what the people she was about to serve had experienced, she saw things that should never have been possible in a civilized society. She also saw something else—people. People with histories, with personalities, with preferences, with humor, with resilience, with potential. People who had been failed by every system built to serve them.
She built OHI around the belief that it didn't have to be that way. That everything is possible—not as a feel-good slogan, but as a genuine operating philosophy that demands something of every person in the organization, every single day.
Everything is possible means we don't write people off. It means we don't accept that someone is "too complex" or "too challenging" to be supported in the community. It means we take on the cases others won't, open the group homes others don't, and build the programs the system hasn't yet imagined.
It means that when the Brewer Christian Food Cupboard closed in 2012, leaving hundreds of food-insecure families in Brewer and Eddington without a local pantry, OHI didn't wait for someone else to solve the problem. We opened a pantry. Today, it serves nearly 900 households a month, and a woman named Amanda, who came to us sick, struggling, and unable to afford fresh produce, has lost 120 pounds, reversed her diabetes, and described the volunteers there as her cheerleaders.
Everything is possible. Amanda is proof.
It means that when a person with Prader-Willi Syndrome—a condition so complex that many providers won't touch it—needs structured, specialized residential support, OHI is one of the only organizations in Maine equipped and willing to provide it.
It means that Shawna Ferris, an OHI Direct Support Professional, was named the ANCOR 2025 DSP of the Year for the State of Maine—because our staff doesn't just show up, they believe, deeply and personally, that the people they support are capable of more than anyone expects.
“ Everything is possible" is not something we say at fundraising events. It is the standard we are held to every morning when our staff walks through the doors of our group homes, community offices, food pantry, and program sites across six Maine counties.
Our Message
With OPPORTUNITY, HOPE and INDEPENDENCE, Everything is possible.
Mission and vision in practice
These are not words on a wall. Here is what they look like on the ground:
In our residential programs, individuals who once lived in institutions now have bedrooms they have decorated themselves, kitchens where they cook meals they have chosen, and front doors they can open and close as they please.
In our community programs, adults who were once told they would never hold a job are interviewing, being hired, earning paychecks, and contributing to their workplaces and communities.
In our behavioral health programs, people navigating the most complex challenges of mental illness and co-occurring disorders are being met with dignity, patience, and a whole-person approach that treats their physical health as inseparable from their mental health.
At our food pantry, neighbors who are food-insecure are welcomed, fed, and treated with the same dignity and respect as everyone who walks through our doors.
In our advocacy work, OHI is at the table in Augusta and Washington, fighting for the funding, policies, and protections that make all of the above possible.
The promise
OHI has been keeping this promise for nearly 50 years. Through the closure of Pineland Center. Through the expansion of community-based services across Maine. Through a global pandemic. Through the workforce challenges that have tested every organization in this sector. Through everything.
We have never wavered from our mission. We have never stopped believing in our vision. Because the people we support—350 adults across six Maine counties, and the hundreds of thousands who have come before them—deserve nothing less than our absolute, unshakeable conviction that for every single one of them, everything truly is possible.
That is why we exist. That is why we show up. That is why we will never stop.