Call to Vermont’s Small Towns!
Expertise and funding available to support community revitalization
Your village is an essential part of both your community, Vermont’s identity, and its future. The Village Trust Initiative is a new program offering expertise and funding to help 20 small towns create or bolster a local community trust organization and take on a transformational revitalization project in the village. These projects could be the revitalization of a general store, the creation of a community center, improvement of accessibility of an old town hall, or renovation of a large historic home into village-scale housing. All community-minded ideas that meet a critical community need are welcome.
The Village Trust Initiative is offered by the Preservation Trust of Vermont (PTV) in partnership with the Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD) and the Vermont Community Foundation (VCF). Drawing on many years of experience supporting community and economic development projects in Vermont, together these partners will:
- Facilitate the development of a new or existing community trust organization, a 501c3 nonprofit organization with a mission focused on the vitality of the community, to lead the implementation of the project. You may have an existing community trust or be a formal or informal group of people interested in forming a community trust organization. You can learn more about community trust organizations here: What is a Community Trust?
- Support robust community engagement and project prioritization.
- Provide technical assistance support for the pre-development work such as permitting, feasibility, engineering, design, and more.
- Provide initial funding and help assemble other funding sources for the construction phase of your project.
To participate in this program your community must:
- Be a town of fewer than 2,500 residents based on the 2020 Decennial Census.
- Have an existing community trust organization or the desire to build one.
- Be interested in a revitalization project utilizing a historic resource or site in an established village environment. Greenspace and trails are not eligible.
- Have or expect to have site control.
- Have or expect to have endorsement by the Selectboard to participate in the program (a motion in Selectboard meeting minutes or a letter indicating support).
Communities that will be most successful in this program may also have:
- An identified community need and demonstrated community support for the project.
- An identified building or site in the Village that could meet the identified need.
Intake forms are due by Friday, May 24th, 2024, at 4pm and are available on the Preservation Trust of Vermont’s website.
All eligible intake forms will be reviewed and PTV and VCRD will follow up with community calls to learn more about your group and project. From this pool of interested communities, the VTI partners will invite a select number of groups to submit a full application for the 2024 Village Trust Initiative Community Cohort. To learn more about this initiative visit (www.ptvermont.org) or contact Kaziah Haviland at [email protected].