Local Spotlight: Kayla Lewis

They say everyone has a story, but if you ask Kayla Lewis what brought her to New England, she’s got a good one.

Lewis is originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after graduating high school in 2012, she joined the Navy.  After five years of service, she did some traveling and landed in San Diego, where her sister was stationed. She had the opportunity to go to college through the GI Bill, and one day she was talking with her sister about where she should go next.

“My sister said, ‘You can literally go anywhere,” recalled Lewis.

Her sister had watched the movie “Manchester by the Sea,” set in Massachusetts, and thought Lewis might like living in New England. Lewis watched it and agreed.

“I had never been to New England,” she said. “I Googled it and said, ‘Lets try out New England.”

She packed her bags and embarked on a cross-country month and a half sight-seeing road trip. Lewis first enrolled in Manchester Community College in Connecticut, but switched gears and enrolled in Manchester Community College in New Hampshire. It wasn’t quite Manchester by the Sea, but she earned an associate degree and while performing at a spoken word event met her now husband. She has since visited Manchester, Massachusetts and it remains a special place.

“This past Valentine’s Day, my husband and I, we went to Manchester by the Sea, because if it wasn’t for the movie, if it wasn’t for that town, I would not have met him,” she said.

Lewis said while serving in the military, she never felt the sense of being connected to the place where she lived, but she found that connectivity when she and her husband moved to Biddeford four years ago.

“Biddeford is the first time I got invested into a community and saw the benefits of what happens when you do find a sense of community,” she said.

Lewis is part of Biddeford Community Gardens, where she and other volunteers harvest more than a 1,000 pounds of produce that’s donated to local food pantries and meal programs. She is also helping the Community Gardens group with strategic planning through her business, Upward Consulting, which specializes in community engagement, program design, qualitative research and data collection services. She founded the business in 2023 after establishing a solid work background in the field and earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Maine.

She likens Biddeford to a city in a children’s book describing the characteristics of what makes a community successful.

“It’s one big city, but all these different components are needed in order for us to enjoy walking on the sidewalk,” she said. “The veil of things being just absolutely perfect has been lifted, and I’ve noticed it requires our active participation in order for things to accurately reflect what community members what, upkeep the concept of community, and to make it even better it requires our participation.”

She said while it may seem like there are Keebler elves making everything happen, a city needs many people working behind the scenes to create and keep up its image.

“Community is not a given, democracy is not a given. It requires our active participation,” she said. “And one thing I think with my generation, we’ve kind of forgotten what it actually takes to have a democracy, and the amount of energy and effort, and in some ways sacrifice – because sometimes you have to spend your evenings learning, reading, so that you can participate in a way that’s going to be able to make change. It’s hard work, harder than, I think, many of us understand,”

Lewis recently joined the Biddeford Planning Board, and may some day run for City Council.

“I felt very passionate about needing to step up. I felt like I wanted to do more,” she said, and is eager to learn more about the city’s zoning ordinances and codes.

“One of the things that I want to do while being on the planning board is to empower my fellow community members, and to be almost a conduit of education, that way people can digest the information a lot easier,” said Lewis. “I think if we’re trying to encourage community and people being more civically engaged, there needs to be a better on ramp, and I see my role on the planning board as assisting people with understanding the processes, why things occur, and what they can do about it if they see something they don’t like.”

Saco Bay News Publisher Liz Gotthelf can be reached at newsdesk@sacobaynews.com.