Rural Vermont Town Begins Art & Soul Civic Engagement Venture

Middlebury, VT — For millenia, art has uplifted, healed and provoked. But can it bring together college students and dairy farmers, conservationists and developers, transplants from the city and long-time residents? Can it spark them to think about land use? Can it help a town protect its heart and soul?

A team of national non-profit organizations thinks so. Starksboro, with about 2,000 residents, was recently selected to receive $75,000 in funding and resources as part of an “Art & Soul Civic Engagement” program. The program in Starksboro will serve as a pilot project, which organizers hope to apply to other cities and towns across the country. Sponsored by the Orton Family Foundation and the Vermont Land Trust in partnership with the Town of Starksboro, and supported by Americans for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council and Animating Democracy, the project will employ the arts to engage citizens in discussions about their values and visions for the town’s future. The townspeople will then translate those discussions into concrete actions to help Starksboro protect its heart and soul—the characteristics that define it, and that its residents value most—as growth and change occurs.

“As Starksboro defines its future through revising its Town Plan, the use of storytelling and other artistic media will provide powerful new avenues for active and diverse participation,” said William Roper, the Foundation’s President and CEO. “We believe this innovative process will make community conversations more creative, relevant and enduring.”

Late last spring, the Foundation and the Land Trust issued a Call for Community Proposals to Addison County, Vermont, towns eager to collaborate on this new approach to community engagement. After much deliberation, Starksboro, located in western Vermont between Middlebury and Burlington, was selected.

Beginning this fall, a class of Middlebury College students will leave behind their laptops and lecture halls and venture out onto the back roads of Starksboro. With renowned author and Middlebury College professor John Elder, the students will collect personal stories from Starksboro residents and then share the stories with residents at a town-wide celebration this winter.

A Vermont artist-in-residence (to be selected) will then work with the community to translate the collected stories and the values embedded in them into works of art. The sponsoring organizations hope that the communal process of creating art, as well as the art itself, will spark interest and discussions around what people want for Starksboro’s future. Starksboro will then use the values and the vision that emerge to help shape policies and a new Town Plan.

“This project truly resonates with our Vermont communities,” offered Gil Livingston, President of the Vermont Land Trust. “The strong response demonstrates that individuals are thinking quite deliberately about their town’s future—about where they wish to grow and what is important to protect. Ten years ago Starksboro worked with VLT to protect the Cota Farm, which resulted in the protection of a farm, a ball field, and 1.5 miles of Lewis Creek. We look forward to learning how engagement through the arts might aid Starksboro citizens in articulating the core values that could help the town navigate the many challenges it faces.”

Although Starksboro is home to fewer than 2000 people, it encompasses many issues and qualities found across Vermont and the Northeast. With more than 16,000 acres of core forest; eight thriving farms and a maple sugaring industry; and strong citizen involvement in conservation programs, historic preservation, and the local school, Starksboro residents already treasure many aspects of their rural town. At the same time, Starksboro is faced with significant growth pressure, an aging population, and one of the highest per capita densities of low income housing in the State.

While the project is based locally, it has gained the support of national organizations, including Animating Democracy at Americans for the Arts, which works to foster civic engagement through the arts. “Cities are beginning to enlist artists to reinvigorate public processes and advance civic goals. Art & Soul is innovative in combining the arts with conservation and land use,” said Animating Democracy co-director Barbara Schaffer Bacon. “Art can illuminate civic experience and artists can often connect people across real and imagined boundaries.”

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The Orton Family Foundation, based in Middlebury, Vermont, and Denver, Colorado, seeks to help small cities and towns discover and describe their heart and soul—the collective attributes that make communities unique—and build on those attributes in planning toward a vibrant, enduring future. The Foundation serves cities and towns under 50,000 in population in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain regions, and was created in 1995 by Lyman Orton, owner of the Vermont Country Store. The Foundation is supported with profits from the Store.

The Vermont Land Trust is a statewide, member-supported, nonprofit land conservation organization. Since 1977, the Vermont Land Trust has permanently conserved more than 470,000 acres, or about eight percent of the private, undeveloped land in the state. The conserved land includes more than 630 working farms, hundreds of thousands of acres of productive forestland, and numerous parcels of community lands. This conservation work changes the lives of families, invigorates farms, launches new businesses, maintains scenic vistas, encourages recreational opportunity, and fosters a renewed sense of community.

For More Information Contact:

John Barstow, Director of Communications
The Orton Family Foundation
802.388.8612
PO Box 111
Middlebury, VT 05753
jbarstow@orton.org
www.orton.org

Elise Annes, Vice President for Community Relations
Vermont Land Trust
802.223.5234
8 Bailey Avenue
Montpelier, VT 05602
elise@vlt.org
www.vlt.org