Partner Project: 50 Years of Feeding Champlain Valley
“I’ve been struggling for over a year and a half to get help. I Just want a roof over my head–I want a place where I can lie down and call this place my home, not going room from room to room to room. Nothing feels like home anymore. Nothing.”
She chose the pseudonym “Josie” and, since she’d been burned by interviewers in the past, asked us not to use her voice or anything that could possibly identify her. For the past several months we (VT Folklife Director Kate Haughey and Associate Director Andy Kolovos) had been recording interviews for Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity–CVOEO–clients and employees as a part of an effort to create a snapshot of the experiences of poverty in the northern Champlain Valley. We met Josie in March of 2022 at the old VFW on S. Winooski Avenue that then served as CVOEO’s Community Resource Center. On this damp Saturday we set ourselves up at a table and asked people who had dropped in for lunch if they would be willing to participate in an interview. They would receive a $70 gift card for their time.
We spent two full days at the Community Resource Center, and several more at Feeding Chittenden on N. Winooski, the Samaritan House homeless shelter in St. Albans, in hotel rooms, in people’s homes and at CVOEO’s offices. We heard first-person experiences of food insecurity, of living on the street, in the woods, in a shelter, in a car. We met people who, after months or years on the street, settled into apartments of their own. We interviewed people struggling with addiction and others who were slowly rebuilding their lives in recovery.
The exhibit "In Our Words, In Our Community” on display in City Hall Park in 2023.
Our work with CVOEO has its origin in a project undertaken by long-time VT Folklife friend (and former intern and fellow) Aylie Baker. Aylie spent the summer of 2020 as a volunteer at CVOEO, interviewing employees about their lives, work and the work of the organization. The following year VT Folklife picked up where Aylie left off, expanding the scope of the project to include people receiving services in addition to those who provided them. Our goal? To explore the dynamics and diverse experiences of poverty in Vermont through the work of CVOEO. The project culminated in the collaboratively-created exhibit, In Our Words, In Our Community, which opened a year ago in Burlington’s City Hall Park.
“You get into a hole you can’t dig out of, and you can’t dig out of it because the shovel doesn’t exist. And so it’s a systems issue.”
1975 Burlington Free Press Article announcing formation of the Burlington Emergency Food Shelf.
This fall CVOEO approached us with an idea for a new exhibit–one marking the 50th anniversary of Feeding Champlain Valley (formerly known as Feeding Chittenden). During that first project with CVOEO we had conducted interviews at Feeding Champlain Valley with staff and clients, but these focused on contemporary experience and programs, not on organizational history. So, while we were familiar with the program, the Feeding Champlain Valley exhibit would be a different kind of project–and one that would rest on a different approach.
First we turned to Newspapers.com (through the free access provided by the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration) to learn about the origin and activities of Feeding Champlain Valley through articles in the Burlington Free Press and other Vermont papers. Andy scoured almost 50 years of newspapers in search of references to the food shelf–in all its iterations–over the past half century.
Then, in search of primary sources, Andy reached out to Prudence Doherty at the Jack and Dorothy Silver Special Collections Library at UVM to see what materials their collections might hold. Prudence came back with a treasure trove of documents that included correspondence from early food shelf directors, informational brochures, fundraising mailings and annual reports dating back to the mid-1970s that kept Andy busy reading, taking notes and scanning items for potential inclusion in the exhibit.
While Andy focused on the historical background, Kate conducted interviews with key Feeding Champlain Valley personnel that explored their personal histories with the program, contemporary activities and directions for the future. The exhibit includes historical information, reproduced primary sources and staff perspectives–and was deeply informed by the input from Feeding Champlain Valley Associate Director Anna McMahon, Program Director Rob Meehan and CVOEO Executive Director Paul Dragon. We are grateful to them for working with us, and we look toward opportunities to do so again in the future. The completed pop-up exhibit, 50 Years of Feeding Champlain Valley, is now available as a resource for the staff of CVOEO to share with communities around the state.
We’re going to close out this entry with one of our favorite recordings from our work with CVOEO, an edited piece from an interview Kate conducted with a Feeding Champlain Valley recipient named James at their site in Burlington on August 10, 2022:
