For years Conversations from the Open Road and Vermont Folklife have worked in tandem, supporting each other’s missions to understand how complex issues affect everyday people and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a Vermonter. Now, thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders, the youth engagement program and cultural research organization are joining forces on a unified effort: the Vermont Community Fellows Program. In Fiscal Year 2024, Senator Sanders secured $665,000 in Congressionally Directed Spending for this program through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Sanders was proud to secure this federal funding so that young people can help tell the story of Vermont for generations to come.

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

The twelve- to eighteen-month-long  fellowships combine in-depth workshops, ongoing mentorship, and hands-on community engagement. Fellows will learn methods and ethics of collaborative ethnography including interviewing, audio recording, photography, and media editing. With these skills, they will seek out and document diverse viewpoints, examine past and present efforts to address issues of local concern, and work in partnership with community members to address these pressing issues. 

What is “collaborative ethnography”?

The Vermont Community Fellows Program is built around the methods of collaborative ethnography—an approach to research that centers the knowledge and experience of individuals in communities, and intentionally disrupts common imbalances of power between outside researchers and the people with whom they work. “Collaborative ethnography’s central premise is that it is possible to find a common humanity among people otherwise divided by race, class, gender, place or culture” says Kate Haughey “it is uniquely suited to anti-oppression efforts.” 

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

• Understanding problems that have no single explanation or solution 
• Exploring the 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 outcomes and unintended consequences 
• Complementing or complicating quantitative data 

Building from the ground up, Fellows will focus on the everyday lived experience of individuals in their communities in order to understand what matters most to them and how they see themselves in the future. Throughout the research process, Fellows will share what they’ve learned with their community and solicit and integrate feedback. They will then co-create a plan to envision and enact change, and work together to realize it.

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

The past made useful in the present: the Vermont Folklife Archive 

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

In addition to conducting new research, Community Fellows will work with interviews held in the Vermont Folklife Archive, a collection of over 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 accessible to Community Fellows. “Odds are good that Vermonters in the past faced the same or similar challenges as Vermonters today,” says VT Folklife Archivist Andy Kolovos. “The recordings in our Archive provide insight into past perspectives on life here—perspectives that can help inform action in the present.”

Building on our strengths

For the last 15 years, Mary Simons has been leading road trips around the country, and challenging youth to undergo a process of learning and documentary media making through her program Conversations From the Open Road. “The fieldwork and research process we facilitate is a way to explore and uncover attitudes, perceptions and values,” she says, “By making sense of these things together, we open the door to dialogue, mutual understanding, and positive change.” 

Simons and Vermont Folklife have been working together for over a decade. “We’ve long wanted to bring the respective strengths of our programs together to reach a wider public” says Kate Haughey. “Particularly because opportunities to learn this transformative method of community-based research have often been limited to the academic sphere. We believe every person’s curiosity and care for their community can lead to change. We’re 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 cohort of Fellows will be accepted from November 1 to December 15, 2024. 

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

Recent research and exhibits from VT Folklife:

• “In Our Words, in Our Community” – created  in partnership with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity this exhibit amplifies the voices of our neighbors experiencing the complex dynamics of homelessness, food insecurity, and economic challenges. 
• Pride 1983  – explores the origins and lasting legacy of Burlington, Vermont’s first LGBTQ2+ Pride celebration on June 25, 1983.
• El viaje más caro / The Most Costly Journey – a non-fiction comics anthology presenting stories of survival and healing told by Latin American migrant farmworkers in Vermont, and drawn by New England cartoonists

Recent work from Conversations from the Open Road: