LEWISTON – Help feed the hungry. Get computer access to people who need it. Help the community with health issues and English skills and more, all while teaching college students that they can make a difference.

From a Lisbon Street storefront.

They’re big dreams. But four area colleges and three community organizations have banded together to make those dreams come true.

Bates College in Lewiston, Central Maine Community College in Auburn, the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College in Lewiston, Andover College in Lewiston, Empower Lewiston, Lewiston Adult Ed and the Lewiston Public Library have formed the Downtown Education Collaborative, a partnership that allows them to share resources in an effort to both aid the community and provide greater service learning opportunities to the colleges’ students.

“We can go places we haven’t gone before,” said Michelle Vazquez Jacobus, service learning coordinator for Lewiston-Auburn College.

The idea for the partnership came two years ago when a handful of people from the colleges and organizations happened to attend the same conference. There they learned about a similar collaborative in Illinois. They thought a public-private partnership could work well in Lewiston-Auburn, a community that had a lot of colleges doing service-learning projects “but it felt like it was happening in very fragmented ways,” said David Scobey, director of Bates’ Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

Over the past two years, the seven colleges and community organizations have gradually come together to form a partnership. In January, they’ll take their biggest step yet: move the Downtown Education Collaborative into an empty storefront at 219 Lisbon St. Soon after, they’ll hire a director.

“That will turn things from a simmer to a boil,” Scobey said.

The collaborative has already worked on a few pilot projects, including one in which students study the nutritional challenges facing people living in Lewiston’s poorest neighborhoods. That one involved students from Lewiston-Auburn College and Bates.

Although they haven’t firmly decided on upcoming projects, members say they’d like to get better Internet and computer access to poor people, help the community with health issues and English skills and help meet the nutritional needs of the area’s poorest residents. The colleges also want to hold classes together and offer joint service-learning projects.

The colleges couldn’t be more different from each other – Bates, for example, is private, expensive and deals with traditional college-age students while Lewiston-Auburn College is public, dramatically less expensive and deals largely with older, sometimes mid-career students. Members admit there are challenges with that.

“I think we’ll have to learn to speak each other’s language,” Jacobus said.

But she and others also say their differences are most often a strength.

“There are four different perspectives,” said Christine Lashua, service-learning coordinator for Andover College.

The collaborative plans to pay for the new space and its new director in part with a $132,000 grant it recently received from the Jesse B. Cox charitable trust. It will fundraise any other money it needs.