BRATTLEBORO-When State Treasurer Mike Pieciak asked his father what he earned after moving to Brattleboro in 1970, the answer was $10,000 — about $80,000 in today’s dollars. On that salary, his father, the family’s only wage earner, supported a child and owned a home.
“To think about what family could have one spouse working, have a child, and own a home on an $80,000 salary — it doesn’t feel realistic,” Pieciak told a packed Latchis Theatre on Oct. 28. “What do we do to solve that challenge?”
That question framed the public launch of Next Gen Brattleboro, an alliance of the town, the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, and the Brattleboro Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Its goal, which organizers call “802 by 2032,” is to bring 802 new working-age households to town in the next six years.
The evening ended with news from the Vermont Community Foundation: a $1 million matching challenge to launch a new Greater Brattleboro Leadership Fund.
Pieciak, who grew up in Brattleboro, said communities that aren’t intentional about affordability “are going to be left behind. And oftentimes, unfortunately, those communities are our small towns and our rural neighbors.”
“The fact that Brattleboro is being intentional about that question is a huge step in the right direction,” he said.
‘A north star for our town’
Emcee Emma Spett opened by listing the questions she said every small town in Vermont is asking: “Who will run our businesses? How are we going to fill our schools and keep our downtowns vibrant and busy? How can we afford to live here and stay here?”
Spett and her fiancé, Andrew Baldracchi, moved from Burlington to Jamaica about two years ago to open River & Rye, a restaurant and inn. Spett is also a program manager at the University of Vermont’s Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships.
She said she still thinks Brattleboro “is the coolest place on the planet.”
Brattleboro Town Manager John Potter described Next Gen Brattleboro as three things: an alliance of the organizations on stage; a movement built on four pillars (affordability, advancement, vitality, and belonging); and, as “a north star for our town,” the 802-by-2032 goal of attracting younger people and working-age families.
“As a forester, I’d be remiss to not remind everybody that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago,” Potter said. “The second best is today.”
For the town, he said, the payoff is affordability. A larger tax base would help pay for services that residents and visitors value.
Growth brings its own costs, Potter acknowledged, “but I think we have the economies of scale in this town, with a full-service town, that will ultimately be better for the whole community.”
BDCC Executive Director Adam Grinold called the target aspirational but concrete: “802 new working-age households,” he said, adding that each includes someone who needs a job, “and behind that job is an employer who needs a person.”
About 15 years ago, Grinold said, BDCC and its regional partners began studying the region’s demographics. They found an aging workforce and a shrinking population and set two goals in response: lower the median age, and raise wages.
“If we don’t move the needle on those numbers, the employers that are here will run out of people before they run out of ideas, and the employers not yet here [will] never come,” he said.
BDCC concentrates on attracting manufacturing and health care, which pay more than the average job in Windham County, Grinold said. That means helping manufacturers such as G.S. Precision and Fulflex stay and expand, and supporting workforce training at the Brattleboro Retreat and Brattleboro Memorial Hospital.
But a job alone won’t keep a young family here, he said.
“We need to be able to have childcare. We need workforce training. We need healthcare. If we don’t have those things, those folks leave,“ Grinold said. “And not one of our organizations can do all of those things for everyone.”
‘Everyone’s downtown’
Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, said Main Street is where the region checks its pulse.
“Brattleboro is everyone’s downtown,” she said. “If you live in Vernon or Dummerston or Jamaica and you say, ‘I am going downtown,’ we all know where you are talking about.”
When downtown is thriving, with crowds out for First Fridays, that energy ripples across the region, Trzaskos said.
“And the reverse is also true. When we feel like somebody else is closing their business, I think you feel that across the community.”
The alliance is launching a program called Vacant to Vibrant to fill empty storefronts for the holiday season. More than 40 applicants have proposed projects, she said, an effort made possible by working with the town, the landlords, and other partners.
“We need to be doing more of that. We don’t need to change Brattleboro,” Trzaskos said. “We just need to take what’s great about it and just turn the dial up.”
Rachel Shields Ebersole, six months into her job as executive director of the Brattleboro Regional Chamber of Commerce, said the alliance itself is news. The four organizations have long worked well together, she said, but “it took a lot to get us all in the same room regularly and agreeing on: How are we going to work together? What is it going to look like?”
“No business owner is just a business owner,” she said. “They’re a partner, they’re a parent, they’re a resident.”
She told of a young family who found Brattleboro online and stopped by the chamber office while visiting to ask what it was like to do business here.
She introduced them to someone in their field, connected them to BDCC, which is participating in the state GROW (Grants for Relocation Outreach Work) program for new and returning Vermonters. And, because they had a child the same age as hers, Shields Ebersole pitched them on her children’s school and explained how Vermont’s childcare credits work.
A few months later, the family walked into her office and announced they had moved.
“So, check that one off,” Shields Ebersole said, noting the goal is now officially “801 households.”
Asked to name Brattleboro’s superpower, Shields Ebersole pointed to “people who make stuff happen.”
Trzaskos said it is “a place where you can be the fullest expression of yourself” — plus a bit of local lore about a crystal beneath the town.
Grinold said it is “the realistic kind of optimism.”
Potter offered a hot take. “The drama. I’ve worked in other towns where there’s, like, apathy,” he said. “And I think drama is the opposite of apathy.”
‘Data is not destiny’
Kevin Chu, executive director of the Vermont Futures Project, put Brattleboro’s goal in a statewide context.
The son of immigrants who came to Vermont from southeastern China in 1986, Chu said he worries that the opportunity his parents found here “might not be as likely today as it was 20, 30, 40 years ago.”
The nonpartisan group’s Vermont Economic Action Plan, released in January 2025 after conversations with more than 5,000 Vermonters in all 14 counties, looks at workforce shortages, the housing crisis, and strains on healthcare, education, and childcare and traces these problems to two root causes: demographics and housing scarcity.
In 2000, Chu said, Vermont had about 226,000 residents ages 25 to 49 and about 77,000 who were 65 or older. Today about 30,000 fewer people are in the younger group, while the 65-and-older population has nearly doubled.
That shift has “massive implications for our workforce, for our economy, for healthcare, for our tax burden,” he said.
In 2025, Vermont averaged 14,000 to 15,000 job openings a month against 7,000 to 8,000 job seekers, Chu said. “So if everyone in Vermont who was looking for a job found a Vermont-based job, we’d still have thousands of jobs to fill.”
The Vermont Department of Labor projects about 17,000 workforce exits a year through 2034, Chu said. Only about 5,000 high school seniors live in the state.
“Even if we retain 100% of those students, it doesn’t close that gap,” he said, adding some in-migration is necessary.
That gap analysis underlies the Vermont Economic Action Plan’s population target of 802,000 Vermonters by 2035. The area-code number is good marketing, Chu acknowledged, “but it’s actually informed by that workforce gap analysis.”
Brattleboro grew by about 79 people from 2010 to 2024, he said, while its median age rose. The town has fewer working-age residents relative to children and seniors than the state as a whole.
“Data is a good starting point for understanding where we are and how we got here, but it doesn’t dictate where we have to go,” Chu said. “Data is not destiny. We’re choosing what the destiny is for Brattleboro.”
‘Yes is the answer’
Any talk of growth has to include housing, Chu said. More than 40% of Brattleboro’s homes were built before 1940, compared to more than 20% statewide, and construction has dropped sharply since the 1970s.
Average household size has also shrunk from about 3.21 people in 1970 to 2.18 statewide and about 2.12 in Brattleboro.
Even if Vermont’s population had not changed since 1970, Chu said, the state still would have needed about 65,000 new homes just to keep up with that trend of smaller households.
He got a laugh with a pair of slides.
“One of these things is accused of attracting crime, lowering property value, and changing the character of places, and it’s actually illegal in many communities,” Chu said of housing. “And the other one is cannabis.”
In some places, he said, it may be easier to open a dispensary than to build housing.
“We have to shift the default so that ‘yes’ is the answer when new housing gets proposed,” he said.
The demand is already here, Chu argued. About 10,000 people work in Brattleboro, and 71.6% of them — more than 7,000 people — live somewhere else, according to the Census Bureau’s OnTheMap commuting data.
“You would only have to capture a small portion of that to reach that 802 goal by 2032,” he said.
Public opinion is moving his way, Chu said. In the Vermonter Poll, conducted with the University of Vermont, more than 80% of respondents last year ranked keeping Vermont’s population growth and density low as the least important of three priorities; affordability ranked first. A majority now supports growing the population to strengthen the workforce, the poll found.
Support for new housing softens closer to home — statewide, then in respondents’ towns, then in their neighborhoods — but “there are more people that say yes than no at every single scale,” he said.
The alternative, which Chu called the “scarcity pathway,” means hard conversations about losing hospital services and consolidating schools. A community defined only by what it says ‘no’ to is in what he called “economic stick season.”
He likened the roughly 2% annual growth he said it would take to get there to building strong bones.
“You can’t just chug a gallon of milk once in a while and hope you have strong bones,” Chu said. “You have to drink your milk every single day.”
Why bet on Brattleboro?
A second panel brought up business owners, artists, and educators who have already made their bet on the town.
“If we want 802 more households to make the same bet, we need to know what makes it easy and what gets in the way,” Spett said.
Jessica Daley Kull, co-owner of the Vermont Country Deli, moved back from the West with her husband, Mike, in 2014 after her parents asked them to join the family business.
The couple wanted to start a family near relatives, she said, and found unusually strong support here: close collaboration among midwives, doctors and the birthing center, and easy access to lactation consulting and children’s services such as occupational and speech therapy through the Winston Prouty Center.
About two years ago, when her parents retired, the couple bought the business.
“We’re kind of the gateway to Vermont,” she said, noting the deli as the first stop for many visitors and their last on the way home.
“A lot of small towns have the problems that we have here,” she said, “but I think what makes Brattleboro unique is the way we’re going about solving them.”
Will Kasso Condry and Jennifer Herrera Condry, cofounders of Brandon-based Juniper Creative Arts, a family collective of educators, community muralists, and healing arts practitioners, run Sucka Punch, an annual three-day graffiti jam that brings artists, MCs, DJs, and breakdancers from around the country to town.
“It’s gritty. It’s urban. It’s just enough urban for us to do what we do, and we can experiment in ways that we wouldn’t be able to anywhere else in the state,” Kasso Condry said of Brattleboro.
So many children turned out for the first jam that the pair expanded youth programming this year.
“Hip-hop culture is the only internationally recognized culture that was started by youth,” Kasso Condry said. “It’s important for us to give it right back.”
Herrera Condry credited the town for embracing the event, along with a property owner who invests in hosting it on his buildings, a museum partner (Brattleboro Museum & Art Center), and the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, which provides volunteers and helps them navigate “town politics and things like that.”
The goal, she said, is to “not create anything new, but build on what’s already working.”
Gabriel Erde-Cohen, founder of We Clean Heat Pumps and the BRCC’s Entrepreneur of the Year, started the business as a side job cleaning units for Saxtons River Solar Electric, the solar and heat pump installation company his wife and father-in-law founded. They asked him for three years running before he finally agreed.
“I said, ‘No, that sounds terrible,’” he said, but that was before he ended up falling in love with the work and connecting with Green Mountain Power’s heat pump lease program, which helped the business grow.
Based in Brattleboro for eight years, We Clean Heat Pumps now operates in 13 states and performs more than 10,000 cleanings a year.
“The goal is to expand with those Vermont values,” he said. One of those values: paying employees a living wage.
Dory Hamm, a Dummerston native who returned after spending most of his 20s away, is a founder and curator of the Museum of Things Tiny and Found.
In its first six months, the museum has drawn 7,500 visitors, brought in $20,000 through its weekend model, and employed 19 people between the museum and its festival. It also keeps about eight gig workers busy.
Great projects start with an obsession, he said: “Lean into what you love, and then find the people that want to help you.”
Christy Betit, who runs BDCC’s Pipelines and Pathways career education program in schools across Windham County, works with more than 1,000 students a year and connects them with 150 to 200 local professionals through events such as the Reality Fair and career fairs.
In every classroom, students are asked to line up along an imaginary line from “I want to live in Vermont for the rest of my life” to “I want to get as far away from Vermont as humanly possible.”
Most land in the middle or at the stay end, Betit said: “They love it here. They want to stay here.”
The program’s job is to make sure students leave school with a plan, “so that they’re not pushed out of the nest after high school,” Betit said. “So they want to stay here. Let’s give them some housing.”
Also during the evening, students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s business and landscape architecture programs described semester-long studio projects envisioning Brattleboro sites.
Their final presentations are set for Dec. 9 at High Street & Green, 22 High St., in the former First Proof Press space near the building’s High Street entrance at a time to be announced.
And in a live audience poll asking what Brattleboro should look like in 2032, the most common answer was “vibrant.”
A $1 million challenge
The night’s biggest news came last.
Elizabeth Catlin, a Vermont Community Foundation board member who has lived in Dummerston for more than 30 years, said she moved here at age 32 to raise a family and has “kind of live[d] the Next Gen Brattleboro dream.”
She said she has often heard that southern Vermont gets forgotten in favor of the north, but through her work on the foundation’s board, she can assert that “that is not true.”
Dan Smith, the foundation’s CEO for the past 10 years, said he had spent the evening scribbling on his program to get the message right, because it was not one he had been in a position to deliver in his decade of work in that role.
The foundation is partnering with Next Gen Brattleboro to create the Greater Brattleboro Leadership Fund, an enduring fund to support organizations in Brattleboro and surrounding communities.
On his drive to the event, Smith said he got a call from Elizabeth Marks, the foundation’s senior philanthropic advisor for southern Vermont: A $1 million matching challenge had been secured to launch it.
Smith did not name the donors.
“This is not about the VCF,” he said. “This is about some folks who saw what you all are doing and believed in it so much that they were willing to make those commitments.”
The match, he said, is “an invitation to others to help grow this into something that endures for this region and for this town and for all of your neighbors.”
“This is what it looks like for communities to thrive,” Smith continued. “This is what it looks like to have leadership that’s local, that is focused on shifting the conditions that hold our challenges in place and bring in new resources and new people to town.”
‘It will not happen’ without intention
Pieciak closed the evening where he started: with intention.
Brattleboro has strengths “that can’t be manufactured,” he said, “things that cannot be bought: that deep sense of community, that deep commitment to place, and that deep commitment to each other.”
But it is up to residents, too, Pieciak added.
“If we are not intentional about making this vision become a reality, it will not happen,” he said.
He then asked the audience to stand and clap “if you’re going to keep standing up for your neighbors” and get involved.
They did.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.