Anne Gass

Anne Gass has lived in Gray for over 30 years. She was elected to the Gray Town Council in 2019 and served as Vice-Chair. She is currently filling a vacant seat on the Town Council left by a member who resigned. This is just one of a long list of ways she has volunteered in Gray, beginning with volunteering in her kids’ classrooms when they were in school, and directing children’s plays after school. She served on the School Board for a term, and later joined the Gray Community and Economic Development Committee.

She also spent 10 years volunteering with the Gray Community Endowment (GCE), where she helped lead the effort to purchase land on Libby Hill from Hancock Lumber. While serving as the GCE Chair, they set up the Gray Bike-Ped Committee (BPC), and Gass later left GCE to lead the BPC. The BPC wrote a Bike-Ped Plan that was adopted by the Gray Town Council in 2014 (along with an update adopted in 2019). They also worked with the Town of Gray to plan and apply for a grant to help construct paths in Gray Village, as part of the Village Area Loop Trail envisioned in the Bike-Ped Plans. More recently, the Gray Town Council also approved a Complete Streets Policy, also developed by the BPC.   

Gass is also the author of Voting Down the Rose: Florence Brooks Whitehouse and Maine’s Fight for Woman Suffrage, published in 2014, a book about her great-grandmother, and the novel We Demand: The Suffrage Road Trip. Gass speaks regularly on suffrage and women’s rights history. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Maine Suffrage Centennial Collaborative, and as the Maine Coordinator for the National Votes for Women Trail, a project of the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites. In 2019, she was appointed to Maine’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women.  

In her day job, she is the founder and principal of ABG Consulting LLC, a small business supporting nonprofits, local and state governments, and foundations in their efforts to help people in need build stable, productive lives. One aspect of her work as a consultant is helping clients write state and federal grants; to date, she has written over $169 million in successful grants since founding her business in 1993, working both in Maine and nationally.  

She received a BA degree from Reed College in 1982, and a MA from the University of Maryland in 1987. 

Gass and her husband feel so fortunate to live in this beautiful town with so many friendly people, where they can hike, run, x-c ski, and ice skate! 

You can contact Anne Gass at agass@graymaine.org.