Freedom & Unity: Stick with the America we fought for

“If you want to honor veterans, here’s my ask: Don’t just thank us for our service. Serve. Reach out to a neighbor who’s struggling. Learn their name. Show up. Stay.”

“Isn’t that the American dream?” a newly unhoused neighbor asked me as we sat on a bench while she ate her free sandwich from a community lunch program. “Work hard, follow the rules… it’s as American as apple pie, right? I’m 60 years old. I worked all m … (read more)

Like too many disenfranchised Americans, Jerome Hazelwood is an unhoused neighbor of our community. BIPOC neighbors are five times more likely to experience homelessness in Vermont than their white neighbors. Since this interview, he was “exited” from Ver … (read more)

His wife scurried to collect their things as her half-asleep, disheveled partner hollered at the authorities who had come to “move them along” from their encampment under a bridge.

While the comfortably housed segment of our communities might consider homelessness to be a blight on society, to the unhoused and housing insecure members of our community, homelessness is a devastating reality.

“Unwanted person.” That is the term twice used in the Addison Independent’s Middlebury Police Log to juxtapose the interest of a business and the presence of a human being.