Commentaries are opinion pieces contributed by readers and newsmakers. VTDigger strives to publish a variety of views from a broad range of Vermonters. Commentaries give voice to community members and do not represent VTDigger’s views. To submit a commentary, follow the instructions here.
This commentary is by Dan Smith, president and CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation.
Since 1986, the Vermont Community Foundation has been a source of enduring philanthropy that supports the strength of Vermont communities. The ability to work over decades offers an important perspective on how conditions change over time.
Given that scope of work, the question we try to stay focused on is: What makes for strong communities today and in the years to come?
We are optimists at our core: Across Vermont, we see plenty of reasons to believe that progress is possible. The work we do with partners in every corner of the state inspires us to that view. Vermonters look out for one another, and they work together.
Our work in communities also informs our understanding of the critical needs facing Vermont — needs such as child care and housing. Alongside our fundholders and donors and in partnership with organizations across the state, we have used philanthropy to leverage impact alongside state, federal and private partners on these and other issues.
Where we can see agreement, trust and respect, we see the potential for progress.
We are also realists. In some important ways, Vermont is at risk of squandering the potential for progress. We have seen the consequences of a deeply systemic opportunity gap that chips away at the health of our communities. We see a rising tide of civic, economic and social disengagement. When lack of child care keeps someone out of the workforce, when the cost of housing and lack of options drives a family to leave the state, when education after high school is essentially a prerequisite for economic security but statistically correlated to whether or not your parents went to college, then we have neighbors experiencing community in very different ways. And our community is only as strong as our neighbors’ experience.
In America, if you were born in 1945, you stood a 90% chance of doing better than your parents. If you were born after 1980, that chance hovers around 50%. That’s not progress.
The future facing Vermont’s children shouldn’t be a tossup, but the fact that it is explains why so many younger Vermonters have lost faith and are cynical about their future and the reliability of our institutions.
The consideration for a strong community is not what it is today, but clarity about — and progress toward — what it needs to become tomorrow. Progress is its own indicator of vitality.
In a recent survey of Vermont Community Foundation grant recipients, we were startled by how many respondents highlighted increased levels of divisiveness and a decline in civil discourse. Many noted community tensions over race, socioeconomic background, new versus long-term residents, rural areas versus urban areas, young versus old, and/or new technology culture versus legacy traditions.
Making progress on these tensions is a necessity for Vermont communities. We can’t expect different engagement without demonstrating the ability to improve.
Fortunately, Vermonters agree on a few things.
Over the last five years, Let’s Grow Kids (part of the Vermont Community Foundation) has led a campaign with more than 35,0000 Vermont supporters committed to the achievement of a universal system for child care in Vermont.
Separately, 32 percent of respondents to the Green Mountain State Poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center in March 2023, identify the high cost of housing as the most important problem facing the state. No other issue got more than 9%.
The Vermont Council on Rural Development outlined core insights from 20 years of community engagement and thousands of conversations into 10 elements of the Vermont Proposition. Specifically included among those elements are child care and housing.
And yet, even where consensus exists, it often feels like we are looking backward, solving the problems of a decade ago and not making headway.
Why? This is an important question, and not just because we need child care and homes. The casualty of a lack of progress is not just tied to the impacts of a specific problem; it also feeds the broader narrative of disengagement and cynicism. Increasingly, I hear people of all stripes and all walks of life saying, “Don’t bother.”
This year, for the first time, the Vermont Community Foundation has carved out a portion of its community impact budget to focus specifically on democracy and civic innovation. Our work to close the opportunity gap and to build strong communities fundamentally relies on increasing the level of faith in what the future holds. The longer our institutions leave problems like housing and child care unaddressed, the harder that faith is to come by.
Our sense is that Vermont’s progress is halting at best or, as in the case of Let’s Grow Kids and the campaign for child care, requires herculean effort.
We do not yet know where our work in this sphere will lead — and, of course, it isn’t up to one organization to define the path forward. Our intention is to create space for Vermonters to wrestle honestly with questions about civic structure, service, engagement, and the ways Vermont might advance on common ground instead of falling back on worn-out conflicts.
Greater faith in the future flows from renewed capacity to solve the problems reflected in shared experience.
What will that take? No state gets where it needs to go solely by doing what it has always done. In many ways, we seem to shoehorn 21st-century goals into 19th– and 20th-century approaches and wonder why progress is hard to come by.
We can respect our past without staying trapped by it — indeed, a lot may depend on our ability to do so.
Civic decline doesn’t solely flow from hyper-polarization. It also emerges in stable states where progress stalls so thoroughly that it leaves the future murkier than the past. It emerges when people stop working together.
In the weeks ahead, there is an opportunity for state leaders to build faith as we stare down the gauntlet of a veto session. Such deep disagreement represents a retreat on both sides to trenches that look all too much like what we see elsewhere.
It is also a set of disagreements out of alignment with the consensus that exists in the state at large: We need a system for child care and we need to build more houses for people to live in.
In a column outlining the value of a compromise on the debt ceiling, the political strategist Mark Penn wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal that a compromise “would be a win for the country, giving people hope that their political system can fix problems.” Absent a deal, the opposite is true.
Vermont faces the same thing. Progress begets faith in the future. Vermonters are clear in their support for advancing a systemic solution to child care. The commitment is costly, but the benefits are real.
Yet, those benefits will be tempered if we don’t also make a similar commitment to revising and updating Act 250 as sought and proposed by the governor and endorsed by the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and others, making the jurisdictional changes to it and other policies that open the door to building more homes for the families who need child care to stay in the workforce, a place to live and own and sink roots in our communities.
Finding the common ground in a deal like this is the kind of leadership Vermont needs if we want to start rekindling our faith in the future and the sense of community that comes from progress shared by all.
Credit:Source link
