Talkin' 'bout her generation
Planner aims to keep young people in state
|
|
India Burnett Farmer, a 24-year old Rutland County planner, is working to give Vermonters in their 20s and 30s more reasons to stay in the state. Photo by Cassandra Hotaling |
Toolbox
By KEVIN O'CONNOR Staff Writer - Published: March 26, 2006
Young Vermonters first tried to spark up the state when Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys torched haystacks during their revolutionary raids of the 1770s.
Fast-forward to India Burnett Farmer, a new breed of firebrand.
The 24-year-old works at the Rutland Regional Planning Commission on issues such as economic development, which in turn has required her to organize focus groups.
Farmer scheduled one for a coffee bar. That's when things started percolating.
"People just didn't sense a feeling of youthfulness here," she recalls of the discussion. "You go to other places I don't want to name names, because we all don't want to be Burlington or Brattleboro but we want our community to meet everybody's needs. How do we build a feeling there are people and things out there for all of us?"
In response, Farmer helped form RutBusters, a grass-roots group working to seed a more vibrant social and economic scene for Vermonters in their 20s and 30s.
Its efforts the "RutVegas Vibe" e-mail event calendar, for example focus on Rutland County. But the underlying problem is reported in small cities and rural towns statewide. Consider this month's New York Times headline "Vermont Losing Prized Resource as Young Depart." Or Gov. James Douglas' $175 million Vermont Promise Scholarship proposal, which aims to keep college graduates in state by paying up to half their tuition.
The number of Vermonters 65 and older is expected to increase 125 percent by 2030, while the total of those from 25 to 44 will decrease an estimated 2 percent. Who's going to take over for the baby boomers and take care of them?
Farmer has a plan: Instead of her generation complaining there's nothing to do here, they need to settle in and do something about it.
"If the young people we're targeting become more active in their communities, they'll be less likely to leave," she says. "We're trying to build commitment through involvement."
She's a good example of how it can work.
Blue Ridge beginnings
Farmer was born India Burnett-Holliday in 1981 the year MTV went on the air in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her family traces its past back four centuries to Jamestown, the country's first permanent English colony. She herself grew up in Floyd, population 436, a short drive from Virginia Tech, whose motto invites students to "Invent the Future."
But Farmer felt more restless than rooted. Graduating from high school in 1999, the science student decided to try college someplace else. She followed her backyard hills up the Appalachian spine to Green Mountain College in Poultney. She liked the school's green philosophy.
"They gave me a lot of money to go there."
She liked its ecological focus, too. Farmer channeled her interest in biology, chemistry and geology into an environmental studies major. That led to a course in public policy, which led to an internship at the Regional Planning Commission, which led to her learning how to apply her schoolwork to the real world.
But first, she had to write an honors thesis. She looked around her 3,596-person college town for inspiration.
"What sustains these small communities?" she wondered.
One semester later, she had a 100-page rumination on how rural communities meet their social, economic and environmental needs.
"One of the things I found was that communities are most successful when they have high levels of social capital."
That means people feel a strong connection to their place and each other. That, in turn, means they want to work for the common good.
Farmer didn't know she was about to become living proof.
Growing gaps
Farmer had planned to graduate in Vermont and return to Virginia. Then she met her future husband, Andrew Farmer. A New Jersey native, he was a senior when she was a freshman.
"I was graduating and planning on traveling to Belize," he recalls, "but I stuck around to see what would develop."
He found work on local farms until she finished college in 2003. That's when they got married.
(How to you add another hyphen to an already hyphenated name? You don't. India Burnett-Holliday instead became India Burnett Farmer.)
Back at the regional commission, she moved from intern to planner. Farmer now helps local selectboards and planning commissions on projects, such as a recent study of the region's economic climate. During that process, business leaders couldn't stop talking about growing gaps in employment.
"We kept hearing that half their workforce is nearing retirement age and they can't fill entry-level positions because there aren't enough young people."
That recent front-page New York Times story played up the problem: Vermont not only has the lowest birth rate of any state, but also the highest rate of students attending college elsewhere. The number of 20- to 34-year-olds has shrunk almost 20 percent in the past 15 years. By 2030, the state will have only two working-age people for every retiree.
But employers didn't need a newspaper story to learn that. They already know about half the state's 8,000 teachers are at or near retirement age. The median age of Vermont nurses is approaching 50, with experts forecasting the supply will not meet demand after 2011. And of the state's 350 dentists, more than one-third say they plan to retire within a decade, even though many have been unsuccessful in recruiting replacements.
Why aren't young people moving in?
"There were a lot of ideas housing's too expensive, there aren't enough good jobs but we were recognizing there was a gap in our information and understanding of what actually was going on," Farmer says. "We hadn't gotten to talk with the people we were talking about."
Pinpointing the problem
The commission decided to gather a focus group of locals in their 20s and 30s. Rather than interrogating them in folding chairs under fluorescent lights, Farmer helped organize an after-work gathering at a downtown coffeehouse.
"There was a sense of, 'Gosh, why haven't we done this before?' Everybody has been complaining for eons about the fact all of our young people are going away, but somehow none of us have ever been talking about it face to face."
The cappuccino crowd spoke of too few jobs, too high rents, too little of this, too much of that. The commission eventually collected about 100 surveys from area young people.
"A lot of what we heard was, 'Yeah, housing's kind of tight and it'd be great to have some different jobs, but the quality of life isn't there. We're looking for more interaction with our peers. We're looking for more interaction with our community. We want to live within a vibrant social scene. We want to be intellectually stimulated. We want to be creatively stimulated. We're looking for just more stuff to do.'"
As the focus group pinpointed the problem, it unwittingly became the solution.
"We first saw it as a couple of nights sitting around having a conversation, but the more we talked to people, the more interested they were in continuing. We were surprised there were quite a few who wanted to do something."
RutBusters was born.
"The RutBusters are a group of about 25 or so people mostly between the ages of 20 and 35ish who want to help make Rutland a more hospitable environment for youth," one leaflet begins. "By 'youth' we don't necessarily mean kids. Think more like Hobbit 'tweens' in J.R.R. Tolkien's works, Hobbits weren't considered adults until they were 35.
We are not here to whine, we're here to create community."
Free appetizers
RutBusters began by publicizing what's already available. Its RutVegas Vibe free weekly e-mail newsletter, listing entertainment, educational and "generally fun" events throughout the region, is now sent to more than 350 subscribers.
"There isn't everything we'd ever want to see, it's totally true, but there is a lot going on, and oftentimes it's underutilized because people don't know it's going on," Farmer says. "Now you'll see people somewhere and they'll be like, 'I read about this in the Vibe,' and you're like, 'Cool! That's awesome!'"
RutBusters is branching out with several new projects, including closing downtown Rutland's Center Street more often for pedestrian events (this ranked No. 1 on its recent membership survey), starting a Web site and increasing the area's arts and entertainment options.
A "project kickoff mixer" this month was one way to do that. There, one participant in a cluster of two dozen asked if his 73-year-old mother could attend next time.
"Well, we could come over to her house," replied Chuck Piotrowski, a 36-year-old utility records manager acting as moderator/standup comic. "Does she have cable?"
The line drew a laugh. But for many observers, the decline of young Vermonters isn't funny.
"It's becoming increasingly clear that the demographic shift is going to create problems," Douglas says from his office in Montpelier. He worries the drop in workers will deplete tax revenues to the point where Vermont can pay only for public schools and its share of the federal Medicaid program, leaving the rest of the state's infrastructure without money.
"Retirees enrich our communities, but they don't take jobs," the governor says. "Employers are coming to me expressing concern. We've got to take this seriously."
People are paying attention. Consider the 62-year-old man who crashed the mixer to listen. Once the crowd polished off the free appetizers, he introduced himself as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Scudder Parker.
Taking root
When Farmer's husband was waiting for her to graduate, he started a nursery to propagate grapevines suited to cold climates. Today he collects cuttings from vineyards in Connecticut, Minnesota and Pennsylvania to sell to customers from "the whole northern tier of the country, from Maine to Alaska," he says.
"The aim," his wife adds, "is to open up new agricultural opportunities for the northern region."
That, in turn, got her involved in the new Rutland Area Farm and Food Link, a regional commission offshoot bringing together individuals and organizations focused on the economic, environmental and social role of agriculture in their communities.
"We said we needed a focus group of people who know about agriculture, and it turned into
," she says with a laugh. "It's just another example how the more connected you are to your landscape and the people in it, the more you're going to support that."
The project has taken root. So has the planner. Now renting in Poultney, she and her husband are looking to buy land in the region.
"It was a passive decision we dillied and dallied searching the Eastern seaboard for where we really wanted to be but at this point we have become a part of this community. We've created networks and have really valuable friendships and business relationships. It just kind of happened we were here long enough that when we started thinking about leaving, we were like, 'If we left, we wouldn't have that swimming hole on the river we really love and we wouldn't have
' So we're going to hang around here."
("We'll make our way to Belize some time," her husband adds. "We've got a lot of time to live.")
Friends and fellow RutBusters express surprise that an out-of-stater with relatively little stature ("I'm close to 5 foot 4," Farmer admits) would become such a beacon for the area.
"She's young, she didn't grow up here this could be another dot on the map for her," Piotrowski says. "Her optimism and energy are above and beyond the call of duty."
Farmer sees it differently.
"Committing yourself to your community is a really important piece of that community being successful and you being happy in it," she says. "But we're not only trying to meet our needs, we're trying to focus on how our needs interact with the rest of the community. We're looking for a community that is open and excited about diversity of ages and ideas, so all of us can find a place where we fit."
She hopes not to be a needle in a haystack.
Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.
19