Using the humanities, we connect with people across Vermont to create just, vibrant, and resilient communities and to inspire a lifelong love of learning.
Vermont’s diverse people and cultures thrive as they explore bold ideas and complex challenges. Together we spark creativity, connection, insight, and transformation.
Vermont Humanities staff and board commit to using the following organizational values in our work:
We will aim to integrate the humanities into the educational, civic, and economic life of Vermont. Because the humanities include everyone, we will work to bring down barriers to inclusion.
We will use our programs to help address historic gaps in power between groups and to amplify
under-represented voices.
We will encourage people to form bonds across boundaries, develop channels of cooperation, and nurture resiliency in their local communities and statewide.
We will build and grow long-term relationships with communities and organizations and form a broader spectrum of partners across racial, class, and geographic lines.
We will acknowledge that we have much to learn from our colleagues and our communities and that we do not have all the answers.
We will help Vermonters learn about the world and themselves and encourage everyone to engage with the humanities in the ways that they find most compelling.
We will nurture, support, and promote the achievements and innovations of humanists and cultural organizations in Vermont.
We will foster sustainable and healthy relationships among our staff and board members, with our partners, and with the organizations we support.
We will help create spaces for complex—and sometimes difficult—conversations about the human experience. We’ll learn from our mistakes, improve our ways of working whenever we fall short, and reduce the influence of the biases that we all carry.
On Saturday, June 10, an incident of hate violence in Lyndonville targeted and threatened our partners at the Cobleigh Public Library and our dear colleague, Vermont Humanities Program Officer Toussaint St. Negritude. We stand in solidarity with Toussaint, the library staff, and the Lyndonville community against hate violence and extremism.
Vermont is not immune to the dangerous times we’re living in. Here are some ways that you can help support our diverse communities here in Vermont,
Our communities are living in a time of great transition. To meet the social, environmental, and public health needs of our day, cultural organizations like Vermont Humanities must devote ourselves to transformational thinking, planning, and action.
Poet Sarah Audsley joined us at the Taconic Mountains Ramble State Park for Words in the Woods.
Humanities Camps are filled with reading and writing projects, field trips, and outdoor activities.
We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
We supported Historic New England’s “More than a Market” project that explored the experiences of new Americans through food markets.
Our free public events help bring the power of the humanities to communities across Vermont.
