 All right, so hello, welcome everyone. My name is Travis Poulin. I am the Community Action Network Director for CDOEO, the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. Thank you so much for coming out today and coming to this wonderful exhibit. CDOEO, I have had the pleasure of working for this agency for just over 30 years. We provide services throughout Franklin, Grand Isle, Chittenden and Addison County, and actually several of our programs also provide services statewide. We work with over 20,000 people a year between our nine distinct but really interconnected programs. It is a joy and a privilege, frankly, to have worked for this agency for most of my adult life and all of my professional career. We are so happy to have partnered up with the Folklife Center. This was a really interesting interview process for me. I am used to working with people and trying to help give them a voice. I'd never really had that microphone literally turn back on myself as well. So it was really interesting and I was very grateful for the opportunity. We have a number of folks who want to speak today. So without further ado, I am going to introduce Sarah Russell, the Special Assistant to End Homelessness for the City of Burlington. To Travis and to Vermont Folklife today for having us here and putting together this wonderful event. The City of Burlington works very closely with CVOEO in a few number of their programs, most specifically in the Community Resource Center that I wanted to highlight today through a partnership between the city, CVOEO, and a congressionally delegated spending. We are able to provide services and staffing at the CRC. One of the things that I wanted to say today that I don't really even need a script for is working in the homelessness services for as long as I have as a social worker and now managing policy. One of the most important things that I've come to know are the stories that people have. And so as you're walking around here today listening to these stories, maybe later tonight, hoping that we can remember that it's a gift when someone gives you their story and that's based to hold, which is what we need to hear more of these voices in this work. So I'm very appreciative again to CVOEO and to the Vermont Folklife Center for putting this exhibit together. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. And you're absolutely right. One of the most interesting things is just to remember that everyone we work with has a story. Everyone that we work with is an individual that has their own experiences, their own life, their own traumas that they bring to the table and no one can ever or should ever be looked at as just a one-dimensional figure. There is no such thing as that person is homeless. That's a person first and foremost. And it's important that we remember that not only as humans, but also in the provision of services. Our next speaker is somebody I have really had the pleasure of working with for more years than probably either one of us want to mention. Earhart, who is the outreach representative for the Office of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Thank you. Thanks, Travis. And yes, it has been a while. Travis and I go way, way, way back as I think some folks in the audience know. And so thank you. Thank you for having me here today on behalf of Senator Sanders. Again, my name's Earhart Montcom and outreach representative, representing the senator here based in Vermont. And I'm so glad to be here to celebrate the opening of this really important project that highlights the experiences of so many people in our community who are living in poverty. And also, the stories of those folks, like Travis and others who are here today, who have dedicated their lives to helping eliminate the pain, the suffering, and deprivation that comes with living in poverty. Thank you, Travis, and everyone at CVOEO who made this project possible. Thank you, Sarah, as well for the work that you do each and every day to help eliminate homelessness in our city. And thank you, Kate and Andy, for taking on this project and the important work that the Folklife Center does to tell the stories of Vermonters, the stories that are not heard every day. And of course, I also wanna thank Macaulay Lehrman, the photographer who took the photos. And last but not least, thanks to all the folks who gave generously of their time to tell their stories, to share their stories, which is not always easy to do at all. So, and thank you all, all of you who are here today for lifting up the voices and centering the untold stories of those suffering from the ravages of poverty who live mostly ignored and unseen in our communities. On Bernie's behalf, I wanna thank everyone here for the work that you do each and every day to connect low-income and marginalized people in our community to the basic resources that they need to live lives of dignity and hope, from housing, food, and economic opportunity to the sense of community and belonging that everyone needs to be successful in their lives. Having grown up in a family that struggled financially, Senator Sanders understands well the toll that economic hardship can take and the importance of meeting people's basic needs. In a country that is the richest in the history of the world, it is completely unacceptable to Senator Sanders as it should be to all of us that almost 600,000 people are living homeless on the streets of our nation on any given night. And that here in beautiful Vermont, we have 2,800 people without a permanent place to call home, including almost 600 children, not to mention seniors, people with disabilities, many with life-threatening medical conditions. It is unacceptable that we have more people living with food insecurity and relying on food shelves and SNAP benefits than ever before. It is unacceptable that we have a national minimum wage of only $7.25 an hour, a minimum wage that hasn't been increased in 14 years, forcing people to live on starvation wages in many parts of the country. It is also unacceptable that we have one of the highest child poverty rates among developed nations at 16%, amounting to almost 11.6 million children living in poverty in 2020. Study after study shows that child poverty can have a profound and lasting impact on people's, on a person's life, which is why Senator Sanders fought hard to expand the child tax credit, which briefly, unfortunately, was able to reduce child poverty in the United States to a historic low of 5.2% before Congress failed to extend it through the Transformative Build Back Better Act, which would have lifted millions in this country out of poverty. It is unacceptable that while the very wealthiest people in our country get much richer, more people today are living in poverty than ever before. This is an issue that cannot be ignored. We need to create millions of decent paying jobs, raise the minimum wage and protect the most vulnerable people in our society, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. This is why this project is so important, unless everyone in our community begins to understand what it is like to live with the daily struggles of poverty as a state and nation, we will never be able to eliminate it. And unless we do everything in our power to eliminate that poverty, millions in our country will never be able to live decent lives in dignity, lives that allow them to realize their hopes and dreams and realize their full potential as human beings. Thanks again for initiating this important project to help all those in our community who have the good fortune never to have been touched by poverty to better understand the plight of those who are forced to live with it. Thank you. And that's one of the reasons I love working with this guy. So thank you so much, our hard. Our next speaker is James. I hope I don't get your last name wrong. James McNerney, so close, who is with the Constituent Services for the Office of Senator Peter Welch. Thank you, James. Well, thank you very much for the intro. Again, my name is James McNerney. I'm Constituent Services and Outreach Representative for Senator Peter Welch. So happy to be here today, this beautiful afternoon on behalf of the senator and for this great, great debut of what a really important exhibit right now. I wanna touch on something that Sarah and Travis said earlier about remembering the importance of the fact that these are real people that have real stories to tell about the challenges of poverty as we face them here in Vermont. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. You know, we live in an era right now where in the news we're hearing every day about the fight over the debt ceiling. We're hearing a lot of figures, we're hearing about billions of dollars being spent on this program and billions of dollars have to be cut on this program. And I think that now is the time for a sort of exhibit like this to highlight and underline the importance of remembering that we're not just talking about figures when we talk about the importance of these programs that we're fighting for, that Senator Welch is certainly committed to fighting for in Congress. We're talking about real people who are really affected by homelessness, by hunger, by lack of access to nutritious food. And that's why this exhibit is important because it is focusing on the humanity at play here and focusing on the importance of remembering that we are talking about real people who are facing real challenges. So on behalf of Senator Welch, I just wanna congratulate and applaud the work that went into this exhibit. I wanna thank CVOEO and Vermont Folklife for all of the work that went into bringing this together and look forward to seeing this around the state in the future. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, James. Our next speaker is David Sher, the State Director for the Office of U.S. Congresswoman, Becca Ballant. Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction. Again, my name is David Sher, State Director for Congresswoman Becca Ballant. To echo what has already been said several times, but that is really so important, that Congresswoman is a great believer in the importance of remembering that the work that we do is to alleviate suffering to help individual human beings who need the support of government, need the support of social services. It can be very easy when you're working on policy issues in D.C. or here in Vermont and Montpelier to just think in terms of numbers, think in terms of budgets, think in terms of programs, but really we're talking about people. And something like this is people like you and I, people who have the same feelings we all do who are in hard times and struggling. And I think that's something that she always talks about when she talks about her work with staff and she talks about her work publicly. These are people, they need help and this is what our calling is in the work of public policy. A few things that the Congresswoman has been working on, housing is really important to her, it's one of her main priorities in this first term. Her first town hall that she had, statewide town hall was about housing. She's been doing a lot of work urging the House Appropriations Committee to provide significant supports for things like transitional housing, emergency shelter, support for individuals who are experiencing homelessness, expanding HUD programs, expanding programs for first time, first generation home buyers and also manufactured housing. So she's really working hard and focusing on this issue in the U.S. House. But more than that, I think, I talked to her a bit about what you're doing here today and what this exhibit will mean over the summer. And she absolutely loved it. This is, she loves the humanity, she loves the arts and she thought that this was a really genuinely wonderful way of uniting public policy and the arts together to have a greater impact than we might otherwise have in either one of those realms. She was a long time weekly columnist in her hometown and she was just so enthusiastic about this idea. So she really wanted me to pass along to you who have been involved in this, her congratulations, her gratitude. This is a wonderful way of highlighting stories, human stories, individual stories and a wonderful way of utilizing the power of the humanities to help and push public policy and also using public policy to lift up the humanities and the power that it can bring to increase our understanding. So thank you so much to CVOO, Vermont Folklife Center and other partners here. You're doing great work and the Congresswoman is grateful. I just have to say that on a personal note, I try to live my life gratitude forward. And one of the things I am very grateful for is that I was born and raised in Vermont and that we have the representatives that we do. So thank you all. Our next speaker knows a great deal about this special project. I'd like to introduce Kate Hoy who is the executive director of the Vermont Folklife Center. Thanks Travis. So yeah, I'm Kate Hoy, director of Vermont Folklife and I'm here today with my colleague Andy Colovas who is the director of archives and research at Vermont Folklife. He's gonna give a tour after this speaking program ends. So stick around. So the goal of this project was to explore the dynamics of poverty in Vermont through the work of CVOO. And to do this, we engaged with CVOO employees and people involved in their programs. My colleague Andy and I did long form interviews with 31 people, 19 clients and 12 staff. These interviews took place at a range of sites from offices and meeting rooms to the VFW Day Station in downtown Burlington, the Samaritan House in St. Albans, hotel rooms in Colchester, feeding Chittenden in Burlington's Old North End. And since this project began actually during the pandemic also on Zoom. And we approached this project the way that we approach all of our research efforts at Vermont Folklife by forging personal connections with people by collaborating around a community defined question or social issue. We talked to people about their actual lived experiences in order to understand them on their own terms. So after completing these long form interviews, we worked with the interviewees and a community advisory committee to choose audio excerpts from 15 of the interviews that best represented the broader themes that we were hearing. And because Vermont Folklife is dedicated to sharing people's experiences as they see them, we returned to these 15 interviewees to receive feedback on those edited excerpts and made changes as needed. We followed the same process with the photographs made by Macaulay Lerman, who's unfortunately not able to be here today. This collaborative feedback process ensured that the people featured in this exhibit had control over how they are represented. And this process can be really transformational for those individuals involved, including for Andy and me. So when you listen to the life stories of five, 10, 15, 30 people experiencing homelessness or economic or food insecurity, you not only develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what it's like to live on the margins, but you also see the many systemic failures of our society that got us where we are today. We are all complicit and we're all responsible for addressing these issues. Good news, which hopefully you'll learn from this exhibit if you don't already know, CVOEO is working to address these issues every day, directly and from a variety of angles. So our hope for this exhibit is that the public will stop and take the time to listen to the range of experiences represented here, and like the food service manager at Feeding Chittenden Mid-Hot recommends to try to put themselves in somebody else's shoes. We feel that this exhibit challenges assumptions about what it means to be experiencing homelessness or food insecurity. This work treats labels and categories as questions rather than answers, and it's an invitation for all Vermonters to consider what a future without poverty might look like, and more importantly, what it might require from all of us to get there. So we wanna thank everyone who supported this project and especially those who shared hours of their time and experiences so that we could put this all together. Thank you. I'm Andy Colavos. I'm the associate director and archivist at Vermont Folklife. Kate and I worked with Addy and Jason and others on staff to help create this exhibit drawn from a series of interviews we created. As Kate mentioned, it's framed around this idea of exploring the dynamics of poverty in Vermont through the programs of CVOO and the experiences of staff and clients to try to give us some insight into what it's like to live in that situation and what it's like to try to help address it. And as Kate also mentioned, we interviewed 31 people for this project and the process of whittling it down to folks who really fit in, who we could fit in to the exhibit. That's a better way to say it because we sort of, we set a point, we said 15 because we felt it was a manageable number and it really was who were saying things well that were representative of the 31 people we interviewed and in the case of a lot of the clients, who we could locate after we had interviewed them to connect with them again, to go back to the material, to get their approval and to make sure that they were good with how they were being represented here. And that was, you know, I mean, now I'm not surprised but of course I'm used to interviewing people who are settled, who are not in motion all the time, who are not always on the edge and always at risk. So there were a large number of folks we would have loved to have included who we just could not connect with again after we had talked to them. In addition, there were some people who were happy to be interviewed but for a variety of reasons didn't want to be included in the exhibit. One person in particular was running from an abusive relationship. You know, I don't even know her real name because she just used the false one. Another was a woman living in a shelter who said, I have a full-time job. They don't know I'm homeless. You know, so that interview is in the archive and is available, like all of them, to people who are interested in listening to the full stories. But stuff like that was often a factor in why people couldn't be included in the exhibit at all. Our plan for the tour was just to pick out a few people who we thought we'd highlight and then give you the opportunity to go through it yourself and listen to what's engaging to you. And I wanted to start with Taylor and Adam here. Taylor and Adam both work on the CORA team, the outreach team for CVOEO. They also both worked at the Holiday Inn during the pandemic when in Taylor's words, it was the largest homeless shelter in the state of Vermont. The model that they both articulated to me about it really was about integrated services. So it wasn't just housing. It was access to caseworkers. It was access to mental health support. It was all of those things. And from their perspective, it was crazy because of the number of people and the pandemic and all this stuff. But it was an incredibly powerful way to work with the folks that they were trying to, to whose needs they were trying to address. And they both went back to that. The one great regret is that their third partner, Todd, was elusive and would never reply when we asked for an interview. In part because I believe Todd likes to keep it on the DL. So he really wanted, he didn't wanna be in the front. He didn't wanna be forefronted for what he was doing. But these three folks, Todd, Taylor and Adam, are the ones who work most closely with people who are directly experiencing homelessness. They're in the park, they're going to encampments and they were really, really important to helping us find other people who would wanna be interviewed because they know all the people and the people know them. So if, and we'll get back to this, I got him Rabbit over there, you know, Todd said, talk to Rabbit. And Rabbit talked to us in part because Todd said, you should talk, consider talking to these guys, you know. So the Cora team members were really like a vital hub of a lot of the project activity. Let's see, okay, come on down. Now I just picked these folks in part because they're the ones that I interviewed. So that's part of it. But also because their stories were pretty compelling. I was, I really like the city of St. Albans. We've worked very closely with the museum up there. And when, you know, and I was interested in exploring the CVOO's activities outside of Chittenden County. So with support of the Burlington office, we made a connection with Samaritan House, which is an organization that CVOO had just assumed administration of at that time. And we went up there a couple of times and did interviews on site with people. And I wanted to highlight two of them. This woman, Jen, here. And Sean, who has that wonderful photo in front of the fountain in the park. One of the things that became clear as we did the work, which a lot of you already know full well, is that one of the key connectors to homelessness and poverty is addiction. And both these folks had struggled for a long time with addiction. And their addiction directly contributed to why they were living in the shelter, why they were in need, and all that other stuff. Jen is an example of someone who you've, you know, a kind of a situation you've heard a lot about. She had an injury, she was prescribed opioids, and she got addicted to the opioids, and then it all became about the opioids. That exhibit was really, really interesting for a bunch of reasons. One, she asked her daughter to come with us with her. In part because I think she was nervous, but also I think she wanted to communicate with her daughter about this experience. So, you know, she was describing things, things she had done, choices she had made that had a direct impact on her daughter, and she would turn to her daughter and say, well, yeah, you know, and she would not, you know. So it was, we could call it awkward, or we could call it, you know, a kind of opening, right? That Jen really wanted to do that. And Jen had been sober for an extended period, you know. And to me, the fact that she had achieved sobriety and was working at it was really, really important and that she was, she recognized that her addiction was a hurdle to getting to somewhere else where she'd rather be. Sean's story is another addiction story and another sobriety story. The impacts in his case were jobs, marriage, family, until he ended up living in his Jeep in the woods for a while, you know. And one of the things that Sean's story highlighted, which also is something that Taylor talked about, was how crucial having a cell phone was to getting anything done, you know. So he talked a lot about how, you know, he was living, I don't know, five, six miles out of town and didn't have a signal. So if he wanted to get a signal, he had to walk all the way into town, you know. If he wanted to get something to eat, he had to walk all the way into town, you know. But I was super impressed with Sean and just his dedication to sobriety, his engagement with his life, his willingness to recognize the mistakes he had made and his desire to kind of get his life back on track. And it's not on this, but if you go to the digital exhibit, the online exhibit, he talks about like his desire. He's like, you know, what I really want to do is become a sobriety coach. And I'm in training to do that. You know, so taking his own experience and bringing it out in a way that can help other people. Let's see who's next. Ah, okay. Someone who stole my heart just for a moment is Wendy, who's a board member at CEO and also a client. I just, she's not on the official tour, but we just really like her. In part cause she likes cats a lot, but that's not the only reason. But she lives up in Montgomery and is living in a situation and having some problems with it thanks to, thanks to landlords. This guy here, I mentioned Rabbit, that's his nickname. And that was how he wanted to be represented here. It was a fascinating character, you know, a kind of classic American raconteur. And as a folklorist, I always appreciate that. His experience was one of illness and injury. You know, he worked for many years, migratory basically, doing tree work, up climber, going high up in trees to remove them. Dangerous work, right? And he would travel around the country and do that. And he was like, you know, look, I could arrive somewhere, pull out the phone book, make a couple phone calls and have a job. You know, and that's what he did for many years. Now on top of that, he was also a very active drug addict for many years. And spent some time in prison and all this other stuff. But his story sort of came to a head after Hurricane Sandy when he was working in New York City. And he said he was helping remove a tree that had gone partially down in Brooklyn, was up in the tree, someone on the crew, as he said, made a mistake and he fell, landed on his back, broke three vertebrae and was no longer able to work. So the way he described it to me, limped out of the city and made his way to a friend in Connecticut and then eventually by Amtrak, because he loves trains, ended up in Vermont. You know, now when I met him, he was living in one of the motels in Colchester. Now he's been housed and he's in Williston. And I got to, he showed me like he was really happy to show us his place, the way he decorated it because he's a big cannabis aficionado. So there was a lot of cannabis stuff, hang on. But, you know, and just a fascinating character. And once again, someone for whom hardship came as a result of an injury that he couldn't recover from and didn't have the resources to get care for, even if he had. David, who used the nickname Barack, like Barack Obama, was a guy who Kate interviewed at Feeding Chip. And his story is another angle, another facet of the story of homelessness and want. Mental illness is what affected him and really put him in the positions he had been put in. One of the things that I was really compelled by, and that's why we use the quote, is he was describing being homeless in San Francisco, where he lived for a while. And his thing was, it was walking. It was always walking. You know, not having a place to settle, not having a place that's secure. And I don't know if Kate has anything you'd add about him because, yeah, an interesting kind person. Gosh, let's see. Ah, okay. I wanna encourage you to listen to the story told by James. It's long and the version we presented here is edited because in its actual form, it's about 12 to 13 minutes. We managed to whittle it down to a little over six. But it's a story of how the relationships that he built through Feeding Chittenden helped, as he says, save his brother's life. James is a Burlington native. He was born on the Old North End, grew up right around the corner from where Feeding Chittenden is. And I won't ruin the story because it's pretty compelling, but you know, it's a gripping story and I just wanna point that out to you. Oh, golly. Now we're gonna talk about Tony, who's standing right there. So, Tony was one of the first in-person interviews we did, masked in the CVOEO office. Tony was incredibly articulate about issues related to poverty and its impacts on people and in part because it's a life she lived herself, right? So she had both the lived experience and the experience of working as the front face of CVOEO and the first point of contact for a lot of people who reach out to the organization. And it was, we felt that what Tony had to say, the way Tony said it, was so valuable and compelling for other people to hear that we made a point of including it. The only challenge was, how did we pick of, you know, from the eight to 10 amazing little bits of Tony that we thought were marvelous, down to three or four that we can include in the exhibit. So, you know, and just, it was, talking to Tony, we really, Kate and I, we're both very, we really love talking to you. It was a wonderful interview, it was a wonderful experience and you had so much valuable stuff to say. Okay, I'm sorry, you wanna say something? You don't have to. I was gonna say, it was a wonderful experience like Travis said to have the microphone turned back on you and it was, it was a lovely interview. I loved talking to you all because I feel like you got more out of me than I might have been able to articulate, unprompted. But yeah, I don't think I have anything more pithy to say than that, other than that, you know, I was so moved by everyone's interviews, they're all worth listening to, for sure. Thank you, Tony. Now back to the tour. Yeah, no, and I wanna make the point, I've selected a few here for the sake of not talking at you and now it's, you know, so, but everybody here was just super compelling, welcoming and amazing. And the regret we have is that we couldn't have included everybody, you know, because we had to keep it small because there were so many other folks on staff we interviewed who just, because of all the things we couldn't get here. I think we'll close with Mithat as Kate did. Mithat is someone who came here from Bosnia, originally as a refugee, lived through the war and had some incredibly powerful things to say about empathy, about human connection, about seeing things from other people's sides and about how his own experience and upbringing really impacted what motivates him to continue doing the work he does at Feeding Chittenden for CVOO and for the population that they serve. So I encourage you to take some time to wander through the exhibit. If you don't have time today, it's gonna be up into several more locations. Those locations are listed on a brochure over there. It's also available online via the CVOO website. Thank you. QR codes, what do they do? The QR codes, they bring you to a top secret website that will steal all of your information. What they do is these, the QR codes are just another way to access the audio. So they're gonna bring you to the same system that actually manages the dial-in, but it's basically parallel to the online exhibit. Sorry? It's the online exhibit, go to CVOO. That's the best, yeah, they built it on their website. We talked about it and it made so much more sense for them to host it than for us because it really is so central to their mission and a useful and important outreach tool. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so all the interviews we've done are all the interviews that we did for which we have permission are available in full form from our archive. The goal is to gradually get them available through our online system so that you can just listen to them. And that's the process of talking to people so they know we're doing it and then describing the content of the interviews with more detail than we have for this project. You're gonna take it around the state outside of the Champlain Valley too? That's a good question. I think it's totally something we could do. And that's, we, CVOO, and we would love to see this get as distributed as widely as possible. Another thing I'd add is, this is part of it. When we started talking about this, we said, okay, we'll do an exhibit, let's say 15 people, it'll be a gallery, it'll be what we know how to do. And CVOO really wanted to do an outdoor thing and we're like, you know, we've never really done that. And after poking and twirling and trying to find a way to do it, this is where we arrived. And I think it's absolutely wonderful. I mean, the main virtue of these panels is they're inexpensive to produce so we can have a lot of them and they're inexpensive to replace if they get damaged. You know, so it's, and it's highly portable. So we're all really happy with how it turned out. They also get schmutz a little easy too, but that's another matter. So, any other questions? Yeah, thank you all.