The Bishop of Vermont — a Black woman in one of the whitest states in the country — has experienced hostility and conflict in her role, to the extent that she is always accompanied when visiting churches in the diocese, and her visitation schedule is not publicized.
The Rt. Rev. Shannon MacVean-Brown also faced demands for her resignation from members of the Standing Committee. In 2023, the now-former president of the committee lodged complaints about “leadership and accountability” with the presiding bishop’s office — without first attempting to address the concerns with the bishop herself.
The tensions are remarkable in light of the fact that MacVean-Brown was handily elected on the first ballot at a diocesan convention in 2019, outpolling two white candidates.
“Nobody was thinking, oh, this is going to be great to elect this black woman. I mean, there were just so many other things about who I am as a leader, my experiences, that meshed with who the Diocese of Vermont is. and so it made sense for us to be Bishop and people together,” MacVean-Brown told TLC in an hour-long interview. “And I think we all sort of took for granted that there is an opportunity for us … we could have been more proactive, and foreseen that there could be differences.”
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The situation is described in a 22-page Mission Leadership Review written by the Rev. Gay Jennings, the former president of the House of Deputies who now serves as a consultant to dioceses. She based her conclusions on interviews with 48 people in leadership roles or otherwise associated with the Diocese of Vermont.
“The bishop has experienced people speaking to her and about her in ways that are inappropriate – she is the bishop, but more importantly, she is a beloved child of God,” the report says. “It has to be safer for her as a Black woman. Experiencing a home intrusion; installing security cameras for physical safety; needing two restraining orders; needing to be accompanied on visitations; being verbally assaulted by a few people in the diocese – all this consultant can say is, Lord, have mercy—and, I am pretty sure this would not be happening if she were white.”
The home intrusion was a frightening episode, but did not appear to be related to MacVean-Brown’s diocesan role. Diocesan offices and the bishop’s residence are located in Rock Point Commons, a 130-acre forested enclave owned by the diocese on the edge of Burlington. MacVean-Brown and her husband Phil were at home one night in November 2021 when they heard glass break. They called police, who responded and arrested a man with a long criminal record.
There’s a separate restraining order against a woman who repeatedly confronted the bishop at her home and office. “She was upset with someone at one of the parishes, but was coming to me to try to make me do something about it. And it became invasive in the ways she was trying to do that,” MacVean-Brown said.
Vermont has a reputation as a very progressive state, but it is also nearly 94 percent white, making it the second-whitest state (Maine is a roundoff error whiter). According to a local television report in 2021: “Since 2018, at least three Black female leaders in Vermont, including a state lawmaker, a town board member and the former head of the Rutland area NAACP branch, have left their roles in response to persistent harassment and sometimes violent threats.”
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“Vermont is so beautiful,” the bishop said, and when she visits one of the 42 Episcopal churches in the state, “the drive never gets old, doesn’t matter what season it is.”
But “as you drive around in different places, pockets of the state, you’ll see things that let you know that I might not be safe by myself,” she said, citing militia activity as an example. “And so for peace of mind, my husband goes with me when we make visitations.”
Tension escalated in early 2023 when the president of the Standing Committee contacted the presiding bishop’s office. According to the Mission Leadership Review, “There had been no previous meaningful discussion of the Standing Committee’s concerns with the bishop, and this intervention happened without her knowledge and before she was fully aware of the issues at hand.”
The then-president and another member of the Standing Committee reportedly refused to take part in a reconciliation process, insisting instead that the bishop should resign.
The report is vague about the specific nature of the conflict, and the principals don’t want to discuss it. The Rev. Lisa Ransom, the former president of the Standing Committee, said by email: “Out of respect for my bishop, I will not be speaking to the press.” MacVean-Brown said: “I’ll leave that for others to talk about, you know, the details of that.”
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Four of the eight members of the Standing Committee have been replaced since the conflict erupted. The four continuing members wrote in a May 23 letter to the diocese: “It has been brought to our attention that many, if not all, of the individuals named by the former president of the Standing Committee as having formal complaints about Bishop Shannon were not corroborated by those individuals in follow-up conversations.”
Deacon Stannard Baker, one of the continuing members of the Standing Committee, said the conflict stemmed from a confluence of small problems, rather than a single major cause. For example, he noted that the pandemic began about seven months after the bishop’s consecration, complicating relationship-building efforts.
“She had to hold the line quite, quite strongly on not having in-person services, not having communion, that sort of thing. And before it was safe to leave that, there were small congregations, particularly saying, Oh, we want to go back, we want to go back. And the bishop had to say ‘no, you may not,’” Baker remembered.
The leadership review provides hints of a conflict over governance. “Congregationalism is the dominant polity throughout much of New England’s religious life,” the document states. “The town hall culture of Vermont means people expect to have a say on anything and expect to be involved in all decision-making.”
Congregationalism is a system in which individual churches are largely self-governing, and as the report dryly states: “some aspects of congregationalism are in tension with some aspects of the polity of the Episcopal Church.”
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MacVean-Brown is from Detroit, which she identified as “the Blackest city in the nation.” She said, “I’m used to a really diverse form of leadership, with a lot of Black people in leadership. … So it takes practice doing this, what we’ve done.”
The bishop started a new congregation online during the pandemic, the Green Mountain Online Abbey, which continues to worship as a community today, led by a vicar. When online worship started, “it was funny because we didn’t have enough room in the ‘church,’ because our Zoom account wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. So we had a new church ‘building’ by the next day.”
Financial concerns have added to the tension. In 2021, an assessment by an accountant “revealed that a financial cliff is on the horizon,” necessitating austerity measures. She reached an agreement with Bishop of New Hampshire Robert Hirschfeld and Bishop of Maine Thomas Brown to share resources for ministry and administration, and each of the bishops now serves as an assisting bishop in the other two dioceses.
“We’ve been chipping away at it for the last few years,” working to get clear accounting practices and efficiencies in place, and hiring a new interim chief financial officer. “We’re going to be OK,” she said.
Under her leadership the diocese also has created “constellations” of affiliated congregations, creating more full-time opportunities for clergy. Five of the 42 parishes currently have full-time priests, and three additional full-time priests serve constellations. In December, the diocese (along with the Diocese of Massachusetts) received a Lilly grant of $1.168 million for “an initiative that will provide lay leaders in lay-led congregations with opportunities for spiritual growth.”
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The diocese recently invited Kaleidoscope Institute to facilitate a day of conversation and reconciliation. “Executive Council and the Standing Committee have a mixed assessment of the March 16 Truth and Reconciliation Day,” the two groups said in a May 23 letter. Some attendees had not been aware of the conflict, and “the day was not managed in a way that enabled attendees to hear or discuss details of the 2023 conflict, still less to begin a process of reconciliation. As a result, the work of the day was far from complete, and many attendees left wondering, ‘What’s the next step?’”
Still, “The lay and clergy members of both groups agree unanimously that we support Bishop Shannon MacVean-Brown and look forward to her having a long tenure as our bishop.” She is 57, and thus has 15 years until mandatory retirement.
“We’ve really gathered around her and and begun this process of really understanding some of those currents of racism and misogyny, and how we move forward in a stronger, more thoughtful way,” Baker said.
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
