Changemakers Table Grants Support Healing and Nourishment for BIPOC Vermonters
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Lettuce growing in tribal gardens at the Nulhegan Tribal Forest in Barton. The garden was established by Abenaki Helping Abenaki, a recipient of a Changemakers Table grant. Image courtesy of Abenaki Helping Abenaki.
The Vermont Changemakers Table is a one-year program bringing together early career Vermonters working for change for the good in a variety of fields. The Changemakers Table program grew out of High Meadows' interest in fostering a network of young and emerging leaders in Vermont. The agenda of each year’s cohort is often not limited to environmental issues, the working landscape, or the farm and food system.
Last fall, we wrote a post reflecting on the aims and adjustments of this year’s cohort of Changemakers. In that post, we observed that this year’s applicants prioritized discussing systemic racism over any other topic. Systemic racism is not about individual attitudes or biases we each carry, though that is important to address too. To examine systemic racism requires looking at the structures and decision-making processes that contribute to the oppression of Black and Indigenous People and people of color (BIPOC).
This year, the Changemakers Table secured $20,000 to support a grant round designed by its participants, with contributions from High Meadows, the Vermont Community Foundation (VCF), and the Johnson Family Foundation (JFF). The Changemakers decided the grant round would support localized efforts led by BIPOC and LGBTQ Vermonters to advance social and racial justice.
By creating this grant program, we hoped the Changemakers could enable efforts to tackle systemic racism in Vermont communities. And, as the process unfolded, High Meadows, VCF and JFF could also learn more about what happens when our organizations cede grantmaking power to those with younger and more diverse perspectives. We deferred to the Changemakers as often as possible, allowing them to design the grant round from scratch. We also emphasized throughout the design process that while participants were learning how to build a grant round, we too were learning how to facilitate these discussions without influencing the outcome too much.
After designing an application and distributing it to nonprofits across the state, the cohort chose to fund the following five initiatives out of a pool of 28 applications:
Abenaki Helping Abenaki supports the Nulhegan band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation (in the Northeast Kingdom) in strengthening Abenaki community, protecting customs and traditions, and reviving culture and heritage. Some of their ongoing projects include crop production, raising bison for meat, cultural education, and improving land access and use of the Nulhegan tribal forest. Abenaki gardening and educational programming through the Abenaki Land Link Project also improve food security and reduce health disparities.
The Bradford Public Library is supporting a restorative retreat for young BIPOC and specifically migrant farmworkers in September. The retreat will be hosted at Calabash Gardens, a Black- and woman-owned saffron farm in Wells River, and will include artist performances, workshops, and professionally prepared, locally sourced meals.
The Racial Equity Alliance of Lamoille (REAL) aims to raise awareness about racism, support disenfranchised community members and build an anti-racist community through monthly community conversations among Lamoille County residents.
The Rutland Area branch of the NAACP is hosting a racial literacy training for 18 BIPOC participants to build skills and strategies for overcoming systemic racial trauma. Through the training, participants are given a safe space to discuss how racial discrimination shows up in their lives and how to facilitate community conversations in ways that are not harmful for them.
SUSU commUNITY Farm is an Afro-Indigenous stewarded farm and land-based healing center based in the Brattleboro area. The farm aims to provide a space for BIPOC and other underserved Vermonters to feel safe, heal from trauma, and be nourished. They are also launching a Community Supported Agriculture fruit and veggie box program for BIPOC families and community members in the area.
A Box of Resilience from the CSA program at SUSU commUNITY Farm. Image courtesy of Henry Amistadi Photography.
We were struck by both the story told through the outcome of the grant round and the process designed by the Changemakers group. Each step of the process offered opportunities to learn for both participants and funders. Here are a few of our key lessons and takeaways:
Each grant recipient aims to support BIPOC Vermonters directly, via affinity spaces, community care, land and food sovereignty, and compensation for time and energy spent leading difficult conversations. This has been an exhausting year for all of us, but particularly for Vermont’s BIPOC communities – the collision of a pandemic that disproportionately impacted people of color and a wave of anti-racist protests and institutional reckoning put a huge burden on the shoulders of BIPOC Vermonters. The cohort prioritized work that provides space and resources for BIPOC to heal, feel safe, and celebrate each other. In High Meadows’ other work around farm viability and equitable access to land, we’ve also seen the need for land and food sovereignty surface as a central component of the health, safety, and vibrancy of Vermont’s BIPOC communities.
Existing practices are hard to break away from. HMF and VCF facilitated the design of this grant round intentionally to disrupt our standard practices and allow a fresh set of perspectives to identify any blind spots or inequities in our grantmaking processes. In a few cases, the group was able to introduce new approaches – offering completely unrestricted funding, prioritizing projects led by BIPOC and LGBTQ Vermonters, keeping applications as short as possible, and offering different application formats to accommodate applicants with disabilities, as a few examples. But the group also deferred to many standard practices: building a competitive grant round with a wide-reaching application, scoring applications on a rubric, and then discussing finalists holistically and funding a small fraction of the total applicant pool. We recognized that deeply exploring new approaches would have taken more time than we had. The deadline at the end of the program built in a sense of urgency to make decisions, and when we move quickly, we often default to systems in place that are prone to reinforcing barriers and blind spots. Participants reflected that, with more time, they could have implemented a few more adjustments that may have further lowered barriers for some applicants and better prepared the Changemakers themselves to recognize and counteract their own biases.
The group prioritized racial justice work in rural communities. Grant recipients are based in Lamoille, Windham, Orange, Orleans, and Rutland counties. Multiple applicants and participants noted that BIPOC in rural areas are especially underserved. As the Changemakers considered and scored the 28 applications, they preferred to spread the grants across Vermont, but gave weight to applicants in areas where discrimination and challenges to BIPOC leadership have been prevalent.
The group wanted to hear the stories of the people leading the work – not just the work they are doing. They asked about the why and the who, not just the what. Stories and background from leaders provided important context in many applications. Rather than prioritize groups with steady budgets and long-term strategic plans, the Changemakers wanted to support leaders who had the lived experience and expertise to carry forward this difficult work but lacked resources. For most of the grant recipients, this $4,000 will be a significant chunk of their budget.
Designing a grant round takes time and capacity. There were 24 participants in the full Changemakers program this year, but less than half the participants were able to consistently attend Zoom meetings to learn about and design the grant round. We engaged the full cohort using surveys and Google docs to foster collaboration outside of meetings, but ultimately a subset of the full group ended up driving the process. Part of this lack of capacity could be attributed to the pandemic – many of the cohort members were parents and everyone was suffering from a long year of Zoom fatigue. But this was an important reminder to intentionally design programs like these to minimize barriers to participation – otherwise, we continue to raise up the same voices who have the privilege to participate.
This year’s Changemakers reminded us that slowing down and bringing new perspectives into the processes we use to make funding decisions is critical to a healthy evolution of our work. Without trying out new methods for grantmaking, engaging communities, and learning about the work happening around the state, we miss out on supporting work that is central to promoting vibrant communities and healthy ecosystems in Vermont.
The Changemakers Table is a collaboration between Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, the High Meadows Fund and the Vermont Community Foundation. Anyone interested in receiving information about a future Changemakers program should contact Bobby Lussier (blussier@vermontcf.org) for more information.