In April 2010, every person and housing unit in Vermont will be counted by the United States Census Bureau. The decennial census, America’s largest non-military mobilization of workers, has been a part of our history since 1790.  Every decade Vermonters have eagerly awaited the updated counts of people and housing units in our state, counties, and local communities. However, this decade will be a little different. For the 2010 Census, government workers will fan out across the nation to perform basic headcounts, and then that will be all. No longer will our ten-year census provide data on income, employment, poverty, education, migration, ancestry, disability, language, transportation, and the cost and condition of housing. Vermonters and all Americans will now get these valuable data points from a new source: the American Community Survey.
    Beginning in 2010, we will have access to American Community Survey data on our state, counties, and communities in annual releases. This new arrangement will take some getting used to: the data for our towns and villages will be released in rolling five-year averages. Every data point will be accompanied by a margin of error. The rules of what type of resident can fill out the survey have also changed.
    What do these changes mean, and why were they made?  What data can we expect from the 2010 Census, and for what information will we now have to turn elsewhere? This presentation will discuss the many changes that we can expect from the data on our state and its communities from the new American Community Survey. The presenters will also discuss areas that have not changed as well as the preparations being made for the twenty-second U.S. Census.
    Frederick Schmidt of Shelburne, Vt., is University of Vermont (UVM) Associate Professor of Community Development and Applied Economics Emeritus. He is the former Co-Director and founder of the Center for Rural Studies at UVM. William “Chip” Sawyer of St. Albans, Vt., is a Senior Outreach Professional at the Center for Rural Studies where he specializes in community development and planning and provides support and technical assistance for local decision-makers and entrepreneurs in Vermont.  As Manager of the Vermont State Data Center, Sawyer acts as a liaison between the U.S. Census Bureau and data users in Vermont.

Rural Vermont towns have a strong sense of community as well as a beloved sense of place. However, these values exist within the growing challenges of infrastructure failure; rising property values and taxes; generational poverty; crime; domestic, alcohol, and drug abuse; school closings; access to jobs and job loss; aging population; lack of medical care; agriculture failures; disparities between the wealthy and the poor; environmental or civic disasters; and land use issues. How do small towns deal with the impact of these social, economic, and environmental forces?
     For the past six years, Karl Decker and Nancy Levine have visited some thirty-five Vermont communities where they have interviewed residents about serious issues their towns have faced. In this seminar they will report on their findings from a number of these communities and discuss how these problems were recognized, faced, maybe solved, or have yet to be resolved.
     Nancy Levine, from Shelburne, Vt., is a poet, short story writer, and a pediatric neurology nurse at Fletcher Allen Health Care. Karl Decker, from Monroe, Conn., and Townshend, Vt., is a photographer, a former small-town newspaper editor, and an English teacher for more than four decades. Together they have visited thirty-five small Vermont towns, met, and interviewed nearly three thousand people. As co-writers, they have written and photographed for thirty-five articles on these towns for a series that appeared in every issue of Vermont Magazine for the past six years.  An appearance by Vermont’s troubadour, Jon Gailmor, will introduce and conclude the presentation.

Community, Environment, Hard Work, Independence, Privacy, Small Scale—these are the identified common values of Vermont residents that the new report “Imagining Vermont: Values and Vision for the Future” describes.

In this seminar, Paul Costello and Sarah Waring will share the results of the two-year Council on the Future of Vermont project.  Following in the path of statewide public dialogue projects from decades past, the Council on the Future of Vermont combined many months of public forums, focus groups and listening sessions, with statistically significant polling data and trend line research. The finished product is a reflection of Vermonters’ values, concerns and priorities, which compares and contrasts the trend lines and history of Vermont public policy issues with the common understandings of Vermonters today.

The final report of the Council, “Imagining Vermont,” will be available to all attendees of the seminar. Costello and Waring will overview the process of the project, including the key findings from public dialogues, the historical background to the project, and the significant changes over time uncovered in research and polling. The results of the project are categorized into six topic areas: Vermont Community, Vermont Economy, Landscape and Natural Resources, Youth and Education, Health/Transportation/Safety, and Vermont Civic Culture.

Paul Costello has served as the Executive Director of the Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD) since 2000. He is a University of Vermont alumnus and holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from McGill University. Costello is a member of the Housing Vermont Board of Directors and president of Partners for Rural America, the national association of state rural development councils.

Sarah Waring was born and raised in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. She joined the Vermont Council on Rural Development in 2007 to manage the Council on the Future of Vermont following positions in Montana and Washington, D.C. She is an alumna of Haverford College and has a master’s degree in applied anthropology from the University of Maryland. She serves on the boards of the Ninevah Foundation and the Corporation of Haverford College.

The Council on the Future of Vermont was a project of the Vermont Council on Rural Development, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to assisting Vermont communities develop their capacity through effective use of public and private resources. The Vermont Council on Rural Development works as a neutral facilitator for public policy research and community development programs across Vermont.

   
    An earlier version of this paper was presented to an international symposium on Samuel de Champlain and the French presence in the region, held at Champlain College, Burlington, Vt., in July 2009.

The near-concurrent exploratory missions of Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson in 1609 signaled the opening of an axis of contact, commerce, and warfare through the borderland between New France and the Dutch and English colonies to the south. Over the next two centuries, the Champlain/Hudson corridor was the avenue for the recurrent military campaigns, the commercial and cultural exchange, and the advancing dispossession of the Native Americans, that transformed an indeterminate “middle ground” into a clearly defined spatial-territorial border. This seminar will re-examine the region’s turbulent military history in the context of this broader social and economic transformation.

Andrew Buchanan teaches American military history at the University of Vermont. While his work has focused primarily on World War II, he has become deeply interested in social and military history of the Champlain Valley since moving to Essex, N.Y., three years ago.