CDAE alumni are working for positive change in the housing sector across Vermont. From doing communication work for Habitat for Humanity and meeting the needs of the homeless community, graduates are putting their CDAE skills to use for housing as an essential resource for all. 

Ellie Scott is the Marketing Manager for Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity (GMHFH). She has been with the organization since graduating from UVM in 2023 with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Communication and more recently with a Master’s in Public Administration.  Such an education in CDAE empowered her with skills to run the public relations and social media of GMHFH, which are essential aspects of an organization powered by volunteers.

In CDAE, Scott appreciated guidance from professors who genuinely care about her and furthering her education. She learned valuable critical research skills as a result of the design classes and constructive feedback, while also learning some “softer skills” in project-management oriented classes in PCOM. In the MPA program, Scott operated within an internship that allowed her to use housing data to find “how to inform where to build next,” work which contributed directly to her work in housing. 

With a hammer and saw in hand, Scott has also strengthened her construction skills when building houses for deserving families across the state. Life after college is all about “educating yourself,” Scott says, a value instilled in the classroom and beyond in CDAE. 

CDAE graduate Isabella Donohue also applies her education to housing as the Homeless Outreach Service Provider at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity (CVOEO). After graduating from UVM in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in Community and International Development, she worked in case management at the Elmwood Shelter, otherwise known as “the Pods” in downtown Burlington. 

Donohue has a case load of around twenty clients at any given time and her favorite part of her job is simply “seeing people actually succeed” in an ever-changing world of housing and government policies that seem to be working against them.

Donohue’s says CDAE classes “encourage us to use critical thinking skills, they are not about memorizing certain pieces of information and parroting it back.” Instead, “It's about digesting information and then creating your own opinion on it.” Such skills are crucial when she pivots at a moment’s notice to help her clients. 

Donohue has given back to CDAE through her organization of the aptly named Giving Tree around the annual holidays, a program to support community members in need. She explained that people “forget that holidays are for everyone, it's not about Christmas or a specific holiday, but just about being grateful for each other and knowing that the rest of the community doesn't forget about you just because you're homeless.”

Donohue says that she’s “prepared to look [housing crisis issues] and analyze them and understand them because of a lot of the content from CDAE classes.” The variety of classes, research methods, and lenses for problem solving in CDAE helped her prepare for this field. She says, “life is interdisciplinary, nothing happens in a silo.”

Nate Lantieri is another CDAE graduate working for change in the housing sector. Now the Research Coordinator at the Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA), Lantieri graduated from UVM in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Community and International Development. 

In his current position of two years, Lantieri manages a website called housingdata.org which is a resource “that we make available to anybody to understand what's going on in all levels of the Vermont housing market, whether about the state, their county, or their town.” 

Lantieri is a firm believer in the idea of housing first and its stability as a building block to access jobs, health care, and the benefits that come along with these basic needs. Lantieri regularly uses the social science research skills he gained in CDAE for this work. But on a deeper level, the department taught him the value of “keeping an eye on the big picture, and how we all have to do our part.”