The Vermont Community Fellows Program brings together youth and adults to understand and address complex local issues

For years Conversations from the Open Road And Vermont Folklife They worked together, supporting each other’s missions to understand how complex issues affect ordinary people and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a Vermonter. Now, thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders, the youth engagement program and the cultural research organization are joining forces for a joint effort: Vermont Community Members Program. In Fiscal Year 2024, Senator Sanders provided $665,000 in Congressionally Directed Expenditures for this program through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Sanders was proud to secure this federal funding so young people could help tell Vermont’s story to future generations.

The Vermont Community Fellows Program will provide funding, practical skills, and ongoing mentoring to 7-10 Vermont residents ages 16 and up to meet common needs through collaborative field research projects with places, people, and groups that are important to them. “Our aim is to create a multi-generational network of talented ethnographers and documentarians who will work with others to identify local concerns and explore solutions,” says Kate Haughey of VT Folklife. Applications for the program’s inaugural cohort are open between November 1 and December 15, 2024.

Fellowships lasting twelve to eighteen months combine in-depth workshops, ongoing mentoring, and hands-on community involvement. Participants will learn the methods and ethics of collaborative ethnography, including interviewing, audio recording, photography, and media editing. With these skills, they will research and document diverse perspectives, examine past and current efforts to solve local problems, and work collaboratively with community members to solve these pressing problems.

What is “collaborative ethnography”?

The Vermont Community Fellows Program is built around collaborative ethnography methods; it is an approach to research that centers the knowledge and experiences of individuals in communities and deliberately disrupts shared power imbalances between outside researchers and those they work with. “The basic premise of collaborative ethnography is that it is possible to find a common humanity among people divided by race, class, gender, location, or culture,” says Kate Haughey. “This is uniquely suited to anti-oppression efforts.”

As a practice, this approach treats categories and tags as questions rather than answers, making it particularly useful for:

• Understanding problems that do not have a single explanation or solution
• Exploring complex relationships between people and institutions
• Identifying the basic assumptions people make about something and how those assumptions connect (or don’t connect) to the actions people take.
• Documenting formal and informal community interactions and events
• Identifying unexpected consequences and unintended consequences
• Complementing or complicating quantitative data

Building from the ground up, Fellows will focus on individuals’ daily lived experiences in their communities to understand what is most important to them and how they see themselves in the future. Throughout the research process, Fellows will share what they have learned with their communities and solicit and integrate feedback. They will then create a plan together to imagine and implement the change, and work together to make it happen.

“We believe that all people have unique knowledge of their own experiences,” says Mary Wesley of VT Folklife. “This process channels this knowledge and creates a pathway to creative responses to complex issues such as youth mental health, flood resilience and access to local food.”

Making the past useful in the present: Vermont Folklife Archive

1. This list is adapted from Field Notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology (page 12, 2017), by UVM Professor of Anthropology Luis A. Vivanco. Vivanco adapted his list from Lecompte and Schensul’s book Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research, 1999.

In addition to conducting new research, Community Fellows will also work on interviews conducted in the Vermont Folklife Archive, a collection of more than 7,000 audio recordings as well as photographs and texts. Federal support will allow VT Folklife to hire an additional full-time archivist to make relevant Archive content available to Community Members. “There is a very good chance that Vermonters in the past faced the same or similar challenges as Vermonters today,” says VT Folklife Archivist Andy Kolovos. “The records in our archive provide insight into past perspectives on life here—perspectives that can help guide action in the present.”

Developing our strengths

For the past 15 years, Mary Simons has been leading road trips across the country and inviting young people to engage in a process of learning and documentary media making through her Open Road Conversations program. “The fieldwork and research process we facilitate is a way of exploring and revealing attitudes, perceptions and values,” he says. “By making sense of these together, we open the door to dialogue, mutual understanding and positive change.”

Simons and Vermont Folklife have worked together for more than a decade. “For a long time, we have wanted to bring together the strengths of our programs to reach a wider audience,” says Kate Haughey. “Especially because opportunities to learn this transformative method of community-based research are often limited to the academic field. We believe that every person’s curiosity and interest in their community can lead to change. We are so grateful to Senator Sanders for making this possible!”

To learn more about the Vermont Community Fellows Program, visit: http://vtfolklife.org/communityfellows. Applications for the first group of Scholars will be accepted between November 1 and December 15, 2024.

Check out more from Vermont Folklife and Conversations from the Open Road:

VT Folklife’s latest research and exhibitions:

• “In Our Words, In Our Society” – Created in partnership with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, this exhibit amplifies the voices of our neighbors who experience the complex dynamics of homelessness, food insecurity, and economic hardship.
• Pride 1983 – Explores the origins and enduring legacy of Burlington, Vermont’s first LGBTQ2+ Pride celebration on June 25, 1983.
• El viaje más caro / The Most Expensive Trip – A nonfiction comic book anthology presenting stories of survival and recovery told by Latin American immigrant farm workers in Vermont and illustrated by New England cartoonists

Latest works of Open Road Conversations: