Laurie will continue to be an important voice for equality in the Maine House of Representatives!
Biography
Laurie Osher is serving her second term in the Maine House of Representatives. She serves on the Legislature’s Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee. She is the Legislature’s representative to the HIV Advisory Committee and served on the Maine Climate Council. She is one of the leaders of the Legislature’s Progressive Women’s Caucus and is the leader of the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus and Jewish Legislators Caucus. She is also a member of the Council of State Governments East’s Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee, a coalition of neighboring states and provinces working together to address regional issues in agriculture and its impacts on the rural economy.
Osher moved to Maine in 1999 to be a research and teaching faculty member at the University of Maine in Orono after earning a PhD in Soil Science at the University of California, Berkeley and working as a Research Associate with the Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to attending UC Berkeley, she worked for the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service in Alaska, Colorado and California, the United States Agency for International Development in Peru, the USDA Soil Conservation Service in North Carolina and with an environmental consulting firm in Massachusetts. In 2009, she founded Osher Environment Systems, a small business that advises and assists clients to make their homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient.
Outside of the Legislature, Osher is the Community Resilience Specialist at Eastern Maine Development Corporation. In this capacity, she assists communities in Penobscot, Aroostook and Piscataquis Counties to be more resilient to extreme weather events. She works with town managers, select board members, town counselors and community volunteers to identify issues of concern, propose solutions, plan projects and write grants to fund them.
Osher’s legislative agenda includes creating a state program that incentivizes land management practices that improve soil health and increase soil carbon sequestration, improving the Board of Pesticide of Control’s data collection and management, and creating statewide guidelines for outdoor lighting that increase safety while also reducing night-time glare and preserving Maine’s dark skies. She has introduced legislation to revise the tax system to make it fairer, to fully fund services for adults with disabilities, to create harm reduction health care centers as a tool to save lives, to Maine protect providers of gender- affirming care and to improve the teaching of Wabanaki Studies in Maine schools. She supports raising the minimum wage and works to pass bills ensuring the civil rights of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people and recognizing the sovereignty of Maine’s indigenous nations.
Osher serves on the boards of the Maine Jewish Film Festival and A Wider Bridge. She served on the Orono Town Council from 2017 to 2022. She earned a BS in Agronomy and International Agricultural Development from Cornell University, an MS in Soil Science and Geomorphology from North Carolina State University, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. She is the solo parent of adult twins, Noam and Zivi.