The Burlington-born jam-rock group Phish raised more than $4 million last weekend at a trio of concerts to benefit the Vermont-based addiction-recovery organization founded by the band’s guitarist, Trey Anastasio.

The Oct. 25-27 concerts at the MVP Arena in Albany, New York raised money to kick off a $10 million fundraising campaign for the Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program in Ludlow. The money will help pay for capital improvements, property acquisition, staffing increases and a scholarship fund. Anastasio, who has been frank about his own experience with addiction, opened Divided Sky last year with co-founder Melanie Gulde.

“It’s hard to put into words how grateful we are to Phish and their fans for this generosity,” Gulde, who serves as Divided Sky’s program director, said in a news release announcing the fundraising result. “But this isn’t about words – it’s about action. And because of these concerts, we will be able to help many more people take charge of their lives and to recover from addictions.”

Money was raised at the concerts through ticket and merchandise sales and a pay-per-view livestream. According to the news release, 100% of net proceeds will support the Divided Sky Foundation.

The Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program focuses on helping people build life tools to maintain sobriety while staying active and involved in the outdoors and pursuing their personal passions, according to the news release. Nearly a dozen alumni who have completed the 30-day program were at the Albany concerts. More than 300 tickets were given to people who work in recovery or a related mental-health field.

This is the second straight year that the band that started at the University of Vermont in 1983 has raised money to benefit the state where Phish began. Last year, Phish played two benefit concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York that raised more than $3.5 million for flood-recovery efforts in Vermont and upstate New York, according to the news release.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.

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:

John Rodgers, the Republican candidate for Vermont lieutenant governor, announced endorsements Wednesday from the state’s three most recent governors — among them, notably, former Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. 

Rodgers has already been backed publicly by the state’s current chief executive,  Republican Gov. Phil Scott. But in a press release Wednesday, Rodgers, who is vying to unseat the office’s Progressive/Democratic incumbent, David Zuckerman, said he also has the backing of Shumlin and former Republican Gov. Jim Douglas. 

In the release, Rodgers’ campaign framed the endorsement as “unprecedented” bipartisan support for a candidate seeking the state’s second-highest office. But the party dynamics, Shumlin contended in an interview on Wednesday, are “murky.”

The former three-term governor pointed to how Rodgers identified as a Democrat while serving for nearly two decades in the Legislature, only running as a Republican when he announced his bid for lieutenant governor earlier this year. (Rodgers has hesitated to fully embrace the GOP label himself, he said recently.) And Shumlin noted, as well,  how Zuckerman has long allied himself with the Vermont Progressive Party. 

“Let’s remember that one of them’s a Democrat, and the other one’s a Progressive, in my view,” Shumlin said, adding that he thinks Rodgers’ messaging is more in line with the majority of voters on one of this year’s most animating issues — affordability. 

“You won’t find a more dedicated, logical individual who understands working Vermonters better than John Rodgers,” Shumlin said. He said that includes voters who have “common sense,” are “hard working,” have “limited incomes” and are “watching property taxes.” 

Shumlin added that Rodgers, who owns a stonework and excavation business, also “can build you the straightest, most beautiful stone wall you’ve ever seen.”

Both Zuckerman and Rodgers are also farmers, and the two have clashed repeatedly on the campaign trail over the details of their backgrounds as they both seek to appeal to working-class voters.

Rodgers, like Scott, has been deeply critical of the Legislature’s Democratic leadership in debates and other forums this fall. Asked if he shared those sentiments, too, Shumlin contended that, “I don’t agree with John Rodgers on everything.” 

“This is not an indictment of anybody,” he said, referring to his endorsement.

Shumlin’s backing comes less than a week before Election Day on Nov. 5. The former governor said Rodgers reached out to him seeking his endorsement, and the two finally connected this week, a conversation that spurred Shumlin to declare his support. 

While Shumlin is perhaps the highest-profile Democrat to endorse Rodgers, Rodgers has a number of GOP backers, too. That includes Rep. Casey Toof, R-St. Albans, who is also Rodgers’ campaign manager, as well as John Klar, a firebrand writer and farmer from Brookfield who’s campaigned heavily on culture war issues in the past.

Reached by phone Wednesday, Zuckerman pointed to his own slate of endorsements, including from another former Democratic governor, Madeleine Kunin, as well as from the prominent environmental activist, Bill McKibben. He also highlighted his support from Vermont Conservation Voters, an environmental group, and a number of unions, including the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

The lieutenant governor, who is seeking his fourth term this year, also has support from numerous Democratic leaders in the Statehouse. 

“I have fought long and hard to increase the minimum wage and fight for universal health care,” Zuckerman said, asked to respond to Shumlin’s comments about working voters, “so that everyday Vermonters would be better off.”