Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
The West River Community Project held its annual meeting on Nov. 10, and heard Board President Clare Adams report that the local West Townshend group is still trying to buy the West Townshend Country Store and Community Post Office, where the meeting took place, at the junction of Route 30 and Windham Hill Road.
An offer of $150,000 to owner Zack Caldwell, formerly of Windham and now a resident of Boulder, Colo., for this once-vital village landmark was rejected, Adams said, but perhaps there is some wriggle room.
She added that one of the goals of the project was to revive the building as a center for local food, art, and music, as well as a coffee house and a place for other as-yet-unnamed community uses.
A non-profit, the two-year-old organization is slowly gaining momentum. It is finishing this year with a vigorous concert schedule, an active thrift shop that took in about $3,500, and a busy community sustainable food pilot program that bought and sold about $8,000 of food to a dozen members.
The vital and vigorous exhibit of paintings, drawings, sculpture, needlework, photography, and sketches had viewers in the public rooms and hallways at West River Valley Assisted Living wide-eyed, not with incredulity but with appreciation and affection. Further, since many of the visitors were sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews of...
The Rescue Project echoes some of the peace and healing initiatives of many organizations that are active in efforts to defuse conflict. But according to its proponents, the project, formed by Leora Kahn, a graduate of the SIT Graduate Institute, exists principally to honor those who have been rescuers...
Joseph Sebarenzi, 48, is a Rwandan Tutsi by birth who now lives in Washington, D.C., where he works for the U.S. Department of Justice on African and sub-Saharan human rights issues. He recently spoke to an audience of approximately 100 students, faculty, and visitors at the SIT Graduate Institute as part of the Rescue Project's ongoing awareness events. His talk was titled “Honoring Rescuers, Fostering Compassion.” And his presence in the room was compelling on several counts. He is tall...
Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CONTACT) is a peacebuilding program at the SIT Graduate Institute in Brattleboro. It was founded by Paula Green, who also founded the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding in Amherst, Mass. Both endeavors are about 15 years old. Karuna is a nonprofit that has worked on peacebuilding in dozens of countries, and also works with CONTACT at SIT, a program of World Learning. The program offers a one-year graduate certificate in conflict transformation, as well as masters degrees...
Tong Chen, the Chinese language teacher at Leland and Gray Union Middle and High School, has successfully cleared an arduous application process to be named the 2012 Vermont Teacher of the Year, and many now express the belief that this award is probably only the first such accolade for her. Chen, 32, has been teaching Chinese for seven years, the first few teaching at the Windham and Jamaica Elementary schools. Chen's nimble intellect, clear-headedness, and popularity as a teacher become...
Brattleboro Community Television, a nonprofit public access television station, has trained volunteer producers and videographers and has broadcast news, opinion, event announcements, meetings, and just about anything else that anyone would like disseminated for the past 35 years. Cornelia “Cor” Trowbridge, BCTV's executive director, calls the operation, “a little, flexible organization with a broad vision that connects people with their community.” And lately that connection has expanded. In the past decade, BCTV's income has risen by more than $100,000, from...
Fourth grade students, a volunteer, a teacher, and a reporter at Vernon Elementary School now know a lot more about some spiders common to New England than they used to, as well as some of their webs, their bodies, their diets, and the adaptations they've developed to survive in their environment, thanks to programs created by the Four Winds Nature Institute in Chittenden. During a training for this detailed spider program, the trainer, the volunteer, and the reporter spent a...
