Community Partner Spotlight

Vermont Beaver Association 

The Vermont Beaver Association began in 2024 when a small group of beaver enthusiasts organized around the need to raise awareness of the ecosystem services beavers can provide in Vermont landscapes. In the spring of 2024, the Association partnered with Donovan Wood ’24, a student in the CCE’s Community-Connected Learning Course, to develop a website. 

We sat down with our Community Partner, Beverly Soychak, co-founder of the Vermont Beaver Association, to talk about the collaboration, the positive impacts the website had on the association, and what made the partnership successful.

Q: Can you give some background on the website project and how it came about?

A: After creating the Vermont Beaver Association, we were like, how are we going to get people involved? How are we going to get people to find us? What are we going to do? So we started a working group - we’re up to 25 different individuals across the state of Vermont, consisting of people from land trust organizations, river conservation, ecologists, biologists, and infrastructure specialists, and colleges. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. It’s been really wonderful, but we had to have a way to connect everything and display all of the work. As a startup nonprofit, we never would’ve been able to afford a website. We were calling around getting quotes from $8,000 to $10,000.

It’s really expensive and we wanted it done right. We didn’t want something that was just hacked together because we were hoping that this stays around and that it’s a channel for everybody to go to. So the partnership that we formed with [the CCE] was just perfect timing, and we gave the student that we worked with free rein to do whatever he wanted. We met with him and told him, this is who we are, this is what we want to do. It’s your grade, it’s your thing. Have at it, and we trust you. He created the logo all by himself, and I’ll tell you, the logo is one of the best parts of the website.

He did a great job and it’s growing every day. It’s been about a year and we’re just taking off. It’s something that we never would’ve been able to do if it weren’t for the College. That’s why community engagement is so important because colleges and communities do have a symbiotic relationship. The colleges provide tax dollars and all this stuff for communities, and then the communities provide places for the young adults to go. To be able to bring the two together and work together, I just think it’s really important.

Q:How did you hear about the Center for Community Engagement? What was the first connection point?

A: My partner has done a lot with Middlebury College, and he has a connection with Alexis Mychajliw, Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies. She is the one that connected us [with the CCE] because she saw our vision and she knew we were struggling, and she was just like, Hey, let’s partner and help each other.

Q: There are many ways for Community Partners to get involved with the College. For the Vermont Beaver Association website, you plugged into the Community Connected Learning Course. Is that correct?

A: Yes, we put our project out there, and then this student picked our project. It’s funny because he didn’t know anything about beavers. He was like, oh, they’re cute and it seems like it’s really important! So he learned a lot of stuff too.

Once he picked us, we met once down at the college and we went through our expectations with one of his supervisors and basically gave him free rein to do what he needed to do. And it was nice because we kind of took him under our wing. His family actually came up and saw one of our beaver ponds. So it was a great experience, I think, for everybody. I mean, we enjoyed having him around and meeting his family.

Q: What advice might you have for a community partner looking to work with a student, and how to make that relationship and project successful?

A: I think depending on what the project is, you yourself have to be organized and flexible to be there to answer questions. The students are very busy and they have a lot to do, and some projects can take time away from other things that are important to them. I know that our student made some sacrifices to get things done for us, and we are very appreciative of that. So I think finding that match and giving them the support they need and being organized would be the big things to just give them that boost. I think if you’re not organized and you don’t really have a clear vision of what you want, it’s hard to communicate to somebody else who’s trying to learn something.

New Community Project

At New Community Project’s Sustainable Living Center in Starksboro, Vermont, a small but dedicated team of staff and many volunteers focus their efforts on finding local, sustainable solutions to address rural poverty, food insecurity, and energy poverty within the community.

Q&A with Pete Antos-Ketcham, NCP’s Starksboro Center Coordinator

Q: Can you share a bit about the New Community Project and your role?

A: NCP is a small nonprofit organization. It was founded in 2003 by David Radcliff, who was formerly with the Church of the Brethren in their World Programs Office in Elgin, Illinois. NCP works for social justice and ecological healing as a way of building a more peaceful and nonviolent world. So there are a lot of issues that tie into that, where social justice and the environment intersect.

A major component of the work, aside from speaking and teaching here domestically in the United States, is that David leads what are called Learning Tours: six to eight different trips around the world to places where NCP has an NGO partner on the ground where the people and the planet, usually both, are struggling because they’re on the receiving end of the extractive nature of our global economy. That could be the indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon that are struggling because of Chinese oil company drilling, or the conversion of rainforest to palm oil plantations for food additives. It could be South Sudan where girls and women have a difficult time developing personal and economic agency (and avoiding young marriage) because they don’t have access to education. We partner with organizations there to help them with schooling and with micro-loans to give them the capacity to stay in their rural communities and have an economic opportunity that they might not have otherwise had. 

We work with indigenous communities [in the U.S.], the Dineh in the Desert Southwest, who are struggling with gas and oil fracking and intergenerational poverty from being the receiving end of colonialism, all the way up to the north slopes of Alaska, where the Gwich’in people are struggling with oil development on the North Slope and how that impacts their traditional relationship with the caribou herds there. Until recently, we were working in Myanmar, but there was a military coup there, and so that’s been difficult. But the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Nepal, the Dominican Republic… There are a number of different countries where we take people on Learning Tours.

A Learning Tour is an opportunity to see firsthand and hear from the people who are being impacted and experience the impact of these issues deeply with the goal of being moved in a way that [people] want to come back to the United States and address the macro issues, both in their personal lives and with those around them. To sustain that standard of living that we expect here in the global north has a profound impact on the rest of the world. And it’s neither just nor sustainable. We need to all participate in what my friend Cliff refers to as downward mobility so that the rest of the world can experience some upward mobility and just have access to bare minimum necessities. 

Q: It’s impressive how far-reaching the work is. What NCP is doing here at the local level is also inspiring and very much rooted in this community. Can you speak to that?

A: My colleague Tom Benevento, who’s down in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and I, we operate the two on-the-ground sites here in the United States. These centers or hubs exist to give people the opportunity to engage with these issues in the local setting because you can take these issues of environment and justice and you can find things to work on all around you, wherever you are in the world. Here in Starksboro, we’re interested in earth care and people care. A high percentage of the population in Starksboro and surrounding communities here in northeast Addison County and adjacent Chittenden County are struggling with some level of rural poverty. Here we’re dealing with issues around food and nutritional insecurity, energy burden, or poverty people experience because they have inadequate housing and rural isolation. Those issues all kind of connect along with lack of access to affordable transportation and economic opportunities to create very difficult life circumstances for people who live around here. 

So we’ve worked on creating community, nurturing a community response to these issues through the programs we operate, whether it’s our weekly Food Share Program, which combines rescued food from area stores that would ordinarily end up in a landfill and connects it to people or our Food Justice Garden, where we demonstrate to people that the best low energy, least-pollution way of ensuring and nutritional security is by producing it as close to where you eat it as possible. Relying on our industrial food system (and long supply chains), which wastes 40% of the food is a significant component of climate change and just is all-around unsustainable as everybody kind of saw during COVID when stuff started disappearing off grocery store shelves. So [those are] the three layers.

As I said above, one of NCP’s mission statements is that we’re a small organization with a big goal, which is to change the world. And we really are just that - the capacity we have to make a difference is only possible through the partnerships that we create with other organizations and people to help us accomplish our work. There are only three full-time staff (and only myself here in Vermont) so we must rely heavily on volunteers and our partners around the world to try to effect change.

Q: How long has NCP partnered with the CCE?

A: I think it’s been at least six years now. It predated COVID because I know we had some first-year orientation groups actually come up and spend the night with us and then volunteer the next day. Our partnership really expanded during COVID when I was losing groups. But Middlebury stepped up and provided a level of support that allowed our organization to respond to a dramatic increase in demand for our services. I think a lot about that, those couple of years where I was just like, I don’t know how I’m going to get to help with all of this and then Middlebury came through and got it done.

Q: How do you work with Middlebury students? How do our interns and volunteers support the mission of NCP?

A: We’ve had groups, whether it’s from MiddVolunteers or sports teams from the college through our partnership with United Way of Addison County. And then there have been sports teams and first-year orientation groups, so larger groups come and work with us for a day helping us support our food justice gardens. There’s just a lot of work in the preparation, planting, care, and then the harvest in the gardens. 

In recent years, what’s been great is that through connection with CCE and the Privilege & Poverty cluster, I’ve had students come in and spend a semester interning with us. And that’s played out either in working with us in the gardens in the fall, and helping do the actual physical work in the gardens. But a lot of it’s been coming and working with us at our weekly food pantry that we run on Sundays, coming and being a part of that team, and helping us with the actual distribution of food to those in need. 

Q: Does that entail driving out in the community and delivering food?

A: We operate out of the First Baptist Church in the center of the village and people come to us. So it’s really about aggregating all the food that we get in a week, going through it, organizing it into food boxes, and then doing the physical distribution and then the cleanup on the other end of it.

Q: Can you share more about your summer internship opportunity?

A: The summer internship is an opportunity to be of service to people in need and to the planet.  I have a little short video that one of our past interns made [and] part of that was about living here, but [also] the different experiences of not just doing the hands-on work– but how she reframed her thought process on how to live in this society and try to move away from just being a dependent consumer and move towards being an independent producer. And then reframing her whole thinking process about the consumption of resources, and what that means for the environment, and people. 

So [the internship] is an opportunity to not only get your hands dirty, be in the garden, but it’s also an opportunity to engage [with] and look at environmental and social issues in a way that’s a little different than how students may be presented with it. And the best example of that would be maybe that not everybody (especially most of the global south) can afford to have an electric car, but we could all walk and use bicycles to get around. It’s not about having solar panels to power your electric clothes dryer, but maybe it’s about hanging your clothes up on the line to dry in the sun. It’s the idea of solving environmental and justice issues through simplicity and simple living which comes from our relationships with other people around the world who just don’t have, and probably never will have, access to the wealth and resources we consume in the global north..

And start reframing this idea of what we really need to cover those basics and how to find joy and meaning in life that isn’t revolving around seeking evermore technology and convenience. Because those come at a price that is increasingly difficult for people and the planet to pay.