CRAFTSBURY – Katherine Sims founded Green Mountain Farm-to-School, worked as a Vermont House Representative for four years and is currently working as a consultant for nonprofits. She communicates with both the local community and the scientific community to be informed on topics around legislation and nonprofit work. She gave some interesting insight into how government works in Vermont, and how she brings the community together. Her work has created new ways for communities to discuss and solve problems they face.
photo by Karen Gowen
“The citizen legislature structure that we have right now definitely inhibits neutral, unbiased,
fact based decision making, and it’s a shame because we make really big decisions that affect people’s lives and we spend our resources on things that may or may not have the intended outcomes that we want,” said Sims
As a citizen legislature, Vermont has representatives who have jobs outside of the state house, which can help make them more relatable and easy to talk to, but also means that any opinions they get on a bill come from people who are testifying with a motivation for or against it. This makes it difficult to gain objective information about the topic, and makes it difficult to make evidence based decisions. In order to get other perspectives, Sims needed to seek it out herself, which can be difficult to consistently do in such a short session period.
Sims reiterated the importance of hearing the perspectives of multiple people. “Especially in a small state like Vermont, where our districts are pretty small and the number of constituents that we have is really small, I’d say it always made a difference when I heard from, you know, 10 people on an issue. That really captured my attention. So I hope Vermonters know that your voice, whether it’s an email, or a phone call, or a letter, really does make a difference in our small state with our local representatives.”
Her goal is to meet people where they are at and make sure that everyone has a comfortable and accessible way to express their views. Part of Sims’ job was to have a list of experts in different fields that she could turn to when she had a question. In her time as a representative, it was important to know experts who didn’t have a connection to proposed bills and could better inform her on their topics.
Sims said, “I pretty quickly discovered that this place, which has so many incredible farms producing so much food, is still, for so many people who live here, a food desert, where they have a lack of access to that healthy food.”
Green Mountain Farm to School started small, with the realization that children in Vermont did not have easy access to fresh local food despite living close to so many small farms. Sims talked to kitchen staff at Vermont schools to get produce from local farmers, but she soon discovered barriers to collaboration such as changes to systems, transportation and lack of communication between groups. Her solution was to take matters into her own hands. She would go to schools to help them order food from local farms, pick up food to transport in her little Subaru. After working with others it grew bigger organically until it became a statewide program,” she said.
“It’s not like I started that work, which people look at now and say, ‘it is very successful,’with an awesome idea that worked perfectly. It took a ton of persistence and trying and iterating over and over until it worked. It’s often a bumpier and longer journey than it might seem from the outside.”
In rural communities it can be difficult to get an internet connection when internet providers are motivated by profit and don’t have an incentive to build a line out to those who need it. This issue especially became apparent during the 2020 pandemic, when people needed to have an online connection to make a living. Craftsbury was unique at that time because it had formed a nonprofit to help fund getting high-speed internet to people. Later, towns joined together to pay for and build internet infrastructure in what are called Communications Union Districts, one of which became NEK Broadband.
“When I was at the Northeast Kingdom Collaborative, we held a series of listening sessions across the region and asked people, ‘what’s working, what are the gaps and what do we need?’ . . . It was a lot of identifying what was a problem, hearing from people, and trying to pull together different expertise and perspectives, creating a plan and then figuring out how to move that plan to action.”
Sarah Tutt
Sarah Tutt contributed this story written for the Sterling College Science Communication course. She is a second-year student majoring in Ecology and minoring in Environmental Humanities. She enjoys fiber arts and rock climbing, and hopes to work in freshwater ecology and conservation in the future.
