Microsoft Corporation is one of VCRD’s partners in the Vermont Digital Economy Project. Through a generous in-kind donation of three discounted three-year licenses of their extensive catalog of online courses called the Microsoft IT Academy Program ® (ITA), Microsoft has enabled the project to expand free online digital workforce education in three regions of Vermont. Microsoft’s donation…
One of the most important services we are delivering is digital skills training. We’re doing that through both our Internet Intern program, a paid internship program that is now active in 24 Vermont libraries, and through our iConnect workshop, a train-the-trainer half-day program on how to teach digital skills to others. Mary Geoffrion in the…
On Wednesday May 21, VCRD and a Community Visit Resource Team went back to Vergennes for our last session as facilitators of the Community Visit process. At this final visit, we kicked-off the Task Forces that address the three community priorities identified in the process. Over the course of the prior three months, the people…
I recently attended the 20th Annual Historic Preservation & Downtown Conference deep in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. This year’s conference had the theme of “Preservation and Community” and was held at the lovely renovated Town Hall building in downtown Brighton which was originally an opera house that had fallen into disrepair. The building, through much effort…
One of the most exciting services that we are delivering through the Vermont Digital Economy Project is the installation of Wi-Fi zones and hotspots in communities throughout the state. Our goal is to positively impact 25 towns with this technology, and we have so far successfully installed access points in 20 zones and hotspots. We…
Windsor — A student sitting on a bench doing homework on a laptop. A businessman enjoying lunch outside a cafe while surfing the web on a tablet computer. A tourist scanning the Internet on a smartphone while navigating downtown streets. These are the scenes envisioned for downtown Windsor when a Wi-Fi zone is established there…
This article was written by Tess Gauthier, Project Coordinator at the Snelling Center for Government In the last newsletter, I provided an update of the Snelling Center for Government’s work on 15 municipal websites as part of the Vermont Digital Economy Project. And, previously, we’ve discussed the community process by which we work with towns to…
Over the past few months, we’ve been writing about our Community Visit process that is underway in Vergennes. Through this signature program of VCRD, we are bringing together local prioritization and community engagement with state, federal, and regional experts and resources to help Vergennes define the projects that will sustain the city and make it…
On April 16, over 100 Vergennes community members gathered in a community meeting to consider the ideas that were discussed through the Vergennes Community Visit process and to set priorities for action. At the Community Meeting participants reviewed all the issues that the Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD) Visiting Team had heard in focus…
The citizens of Vergennes have set the top three priorities for their city, in an effort to take a big picture approach to planning for the future. More than 100 people turned out to a community meeting last week. It was the second event in a three-month “Community Visit” facilitated by the Vermont Council on…