On a rainy day in the summer of 2023, Alexandra Bullen Coutts was driving to Nomans restaurant in Oak Bluffs to attend a graduation ceremony. It was her first week as executive director of Adult & Community Education of Martha’s Vineyard (ACE MV), an adult education nonprofit, and the second-annual graduation for students who had completed a career training course was taking place there. She showed up, looking for the celebration, and found that there were only three people in attendance: one student, who’d graduated from ACE MV’s early childhood education program, and her parents. 

“I thought, ‘Well, this is where we’re starting,’” Bullen Coutts said. 

Before the pandemic, the organization, which was founded in 2008, had focused on enrichment courses. Students could sign up for Spanish, photography, dance, or cooking classes. But, as the Island community re-emerged from lockdown, ACE MV sensed a growing need for career training programs. What locals really wanted was a way to gain workforce training and certification that would allow them to find meaningful, well-paying jobs in the trades, health care, and education so that they could stay on the Island and work in the available sectors, provide for their families, and contribute to their community. The early childhood education program and an electrical course were added in 2022.

Today, ACE MV offers nine programs in five “pathways”: health, education, building and technical trades, language access, and small business, as well as a few enrichment courses. The organization has also shifted from predominantly offering its own classes to largely serving as an intermediary – it does the work of finding and facilitating classes and trainings, typically led by other organizations off-Island, which students take virtually. ACE MV supports these students with in-person, on-Island meetings where the group or “cohort” of students pursuing the same pathway meets to discuss what they’re learning and talk with local business owners in their field. 

The five-person full-time staff – and two to five additional contract “facilitators” who support each cohort – are there to help Island students from beginning to end: they make their offerings known, sometimes even proactively reaching out to locals who are looking to build a career but are unsure where to begin. They assist with securing funds for tuition, which, thanks to a variety of funding sources, typically offsets the cost completely for Island students. They help their students with the logistics of online classes and are there to problem-solve if the coursework or scheduling gets tough. Then, they’re ready to celebrate their achievements once the students complete their programs. 

This year’s graduation ceremony was again held at Nomans, on June 17, a beautiful sunny day. Bullen Coutts gave a speech, looking out at the crowd of about one hundred gathered attendees. She spoke about the ceremony she attended a few years back and how much the organization has grown since. The leaders of the different pathways also spoke about some of the accomplishments they’d witnessed across the more than 350 students who had participated in a course through ACE MV that year.  

“Those accomplishments really can be anything from, ‘this person showed up with a smile at every cohort meeting, despite working two full-time jobs and being a single mother,’ or ‘this person was always there to support her classmates,’” Bullen Coutts said. In the years since graduating, former ACE MV students have bought local businesses, passed journeyman license exams, and shifted from jobs without much room for growth to careers that they hope to stay with for the rest of their lives. 

This mission matters to Bullen Coutts, who has lived full-time on the Island since 2006. When she sees the students who sign up for these classes, she sees the future of the Island community. “Why I’m in it, really, is because workforce is just another name for people who live here and want to continue living here,” she said. 

•••

ACE MV was founded eighteen years ago by Lynn Ditchfield, a teacher at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS). Working out of an administrative office in Vineyard Haven, the organization has offered almost 1,500 classes to Islanders since its inception, with many taking place at the high school. The typical age range for students is twenty-seven to forty-four and, this year, the program cohorts ranged from 27 percent to 67 percent bilingual, with the highest percentage in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certification program. 

The organization’s shift from enrichment classes to workforce training began with board chair Nancy Hoffman, a leader in the world of career and education development. Her experience comes, in part, from her years with Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit based in Boston, which works to improve educational and workforce outcomes for low-income young people and adults who might otherwise struggle to find meaningful careers. Hoffman joined the ACE MV board in 2019 and was the board chair from 2020 (or thereabouts – records are fuzzy) until this year. 

“I’ve always seen the Vineyard as a very intense microcosm of the inequalities in this country,” Hoffman said. “It’s been a fascinating place, a kind of personal laboratory where I can see the impact of programs that I’ve worked on for twenty or twenty-five years and what works and what doesn’t here.” While chair, Hoffman said the most impactful lessons about what the Island community needed came from the community itself, which was asking for career training.

The shift began when they took stock of this need. “We just began to listen more,” Hoffman said. They also did research into the college completion rate in the state and looked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator. The stories they were hearing and the numbers they saw indicated that people wanted workforce training in order to afford life on the Island. “I’ve been super, super lucky to have Alex,” Hoffman said, “because she bought into the whole career pathways idea very quickly.” 

For everyone involved in ACE MV, the Island-wide need for stable income is clear. Martha’s Vineyard is not just a microcosm of inequality but, in some ways, an exaggerated version of the affordability crisis taking place elsewhere. On the Island, the median residential home sale price rose from $675,000 in 2015 to $1.69 million in 2025, according to LINK MV, a multiple listing service. Only about 40 percent of the Island’s housing inventory is available for year-round occupancy, and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s 2024 housing needs assessment reported that more than one in every three year-round Islanders is considered cost-burdened by housing. The challenges of establishing a secure residence on the Island have become nearly insurmountable for a growing portion of the local population.

As a result, essential service workers, such as nurses, plumbers, and veterinarians, have found the cost of living too high and have moved off the Island. “The consequences are we lose that industry,” Bullen Coutts said. “For example, we don’t have very many dentists. There’s a lot of things that people used to be able to do on the Island that now they can’t, and they have to go off for. Car mechanics,” she continued, “we have fewer and fewer, and as electric vehicles become more and more popular, and none of them can be serviced or repaired on the Island currently, all of those cars have to be brought off.”

MVRHS has long acted as a partner in this endeavor. They seek to prepare young people to go into these essential fields through the Career Technical Education (CTE) program, which offers classes in automotive technology, building trades, culinary arts, early childhood development, health assisting, horticulture-landscape maintenance, and maritime studies during the school day, alongside the typical academics. 

Sara Dingledy – now the Island school district’s curriculum, instruction, and operations coordinator – was the principal of MVRHS for nine years. She has been on the board of ACE MV since last year and is taking over the board chair position this year. She sees the two programs as reaching for similar goals. “I think that ACE is like CTE for adults,” she said. “A lot of people who may not have gone through the CTE program find themselves gravitating towards the trades, and they can have that kind of learning experience a little bit later than the high school age.” 

This work seems especially important because of our geography, Dingledy said. “In many places that are not an island…you have lots of opportunity through community college structures or technical college structures to continue the work, and you can go to a town over, and it just doesn’t really exist on the Island, so building that infrastructure is really helpful,” she said.   “A lot of times people who are in the trades are going to learn where they work, so you risk losing people if they feel like they can’t learn here, and then you risk losing a workforce that the Island really needs.”

•••

When we can retain our workforce, it means there’s someone to clean our teeth or shingle our roof, but having a clear vision of a stable future makes a meaningful impact on the individual as well. Devin Costa was in his late twenties working as a bartender on the Island in the summers and spent his winters traveling. When his grandparents, who lived in Rhode Island, got sick, his flexible schedule meant he was able to spend time caring for them. Losing them last Christmas inspired Costa to make some changes. 

“The service industry can promote some bad habits if you’re not careful,” he said. “I just realized I had to do a 180 in life, and I had to grow up.” He was looking for a job in the trades when he saw a Facebook post from ACE MV about their programs. Costa signed up for the Clean Energy Seminar. “I didn’t really care what trade it was at the time,” he said. He was just looking for someone “that was willing to take somebody with no experience, and let them apprentice under them, which is very hard to find.”

A member of his cohort introduced him to the plumber he now apprentices for on the Island. Once he has enough hours of apprenticeship completed with the company, Haynes Plumbing, Costa will sit for the journeyman license test. “I think I found the perfect spot for me to go into, especially being new,” he said. “It’s a family company, it’s really intimate, and they just have your best interest in mind.” His goal is to stay with the company, and on the Island, for the foreseeable future. He also hopes to provide a helping hand to any of the boys or young men in his family that may want to go into the trades in the future. 

Alexia Garcia’s story is similar. Garcia, who is originally from Ecuador, moved to the Island in 2004. After almost a decade of rising through the ranks from front office secretary to operations manager at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, she was ready to do something that felt more personal and creative. In 2022, she and her brother Marlon bought Tisberry, a frozen yogurt and smoothie shop in Vineyard Haven where she’d long been a regular customer. The next year, the siblings signed up for ACE MV’s Small Business Certificate program through Bristol Community College.

Her teachers at the college helped her with business planning and technical skills, such as using QuickBooks for accounting. One of her instructors helped her understand her customer base and what gaps might exist on her menu. Garcia’s face lit up when she described her and her brother’s goals for the business.    “Tisberry is a source of joy,” she said. “That’s what I tell my staff. As soon as a customer walks in, they need to feel loved, they need to feel cared for. If they don’t, we’re missing the point.” Another point is to provide job opportunities. They intentionally hire teenagers and teach them about customer service so they can use those skills the rest of their lives. 

Garcia, who has one child and a baby on the way, said she feels like she’s also reconnecting to her sense of creativity. Outside of work, she is passionate about photography but hadn’t taken pictures in over a decade. She recently picked up her camera again to photograph a baby shower. And a true sign of success: this summer, she went to the beach for the first time in five years. 

“I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am with Tisberry had I not had ACE,” she said. 

•••

Beyond facilitating online learning, ACE MV brings educators to the Vineyard. Sam Hart was executive director of the organization from 2016 until 2019. During his tenure, he looked everywhere for these partnerships. “I went into the Chamber of Commerce on a whim one day and there was this stack of flyers,” he recounted. The flyers were from a man who lived in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and was offering a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) course on the mainland. Hart called him and asked him to lead this class on-Island. The man brought his truck over on the ferry and taught the class for Islanders. 

These days Hart is still working in education, as the director of operations at MVRHS. “Life shouldn’t end after high school on Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “I get to meet all these fascinating high school students, and they’re at that incredible point in their life where everything is new and exciting. But you really want to let them know there are things going on here. You can get professional development here. You can meet people who are brilliant, and they can pass that knowledge on to you, and you can get the credential you need. That can happen here.”

Next year, due to growing demand, ACE MV will add two new programs focusing on automotive work and behavioral health. Bullen Coutts said the hope is to continue adding new programs that cater to the interests of students and the services that the Island desperately needs. She sees the people coming to the Island on the ferry to work at job sites each day, and she sees them leave. The demand for workers is here but the workers, increasingly, are not.

When the workers can live where they work, the economy grows. And if they can’t? “It’s just a loss of community,” she said. “It’s a loss of a place that you can live and be neighbors with people who are working in your community and are part of the fabric of the community. What you end up with is a place where you just have people who need the things done.” Things like a roof shingled or a pipe fitted or a car repaired. Some communities work this way, she said, but the draw of life on the Vineyard comes from a richer fabric of diversity. 

“We want to be able to have families here who have children, so that the children can go to the schools, and the schools are staffed by teachers who live here and also have families here. That is what a community is.” In order to maintain our community, we need to show the community members they can have a full, rewarding life on the Island, Bullen Coutts said. “I very much want to be a part of the solution.”