'Pay attention.' How an unusual Vermont nonprofit builds community

On the Wednesday before the Fourth of July, on this 250^th anniversary of our nation’s birth, I was mercifully far from home in DC and its holiday forecast of hundred-degree temperatures, a Trump rally, and 850,000 air-choking fireworks. Instead, I found myself preparing to sit down with some of my fellow countrymen to a free dinner of homemade macaroni and cheese and salad, served on mismatched china on long tables. I was at the weekly community meal hosted by a tiny American experiment within our larger one: the Civic Standard of Hardwick, Vermont.

I first heard about the Civic Standard a year ago from a friend, Rowan Jacobsen, who like the Civic resides in the remote Vermont corner known as the Northeast Kingdom and who wrote an excellent profile of the organization in 2024. The nonprofit, which just celebrated its fourth anniversary, is a little hard to describe. Started by a former Bread and Puppet performer named Rose Friedman and a couple like-minded neighbors, the Civic Standard is a community organization, a theater company, a civic center, and a provider of free meals. Its current projects include a skate park, a summer theater camp for kids, an afternoon pie café, a softball team, and putting on a “fake wedding” that is actually a play in nearby Greensboro. It is carefully nonpartisan, with the goal of remaining welcoming to the whole community. And it provides for its neighbors—as of 2010, the median income in the small town of Hardwick was well under $30,000—with both predictability and a light touch: “a party, not a soup kitchen,” as Rowan wrote.

Friedman, who currently leads the organization as its Executive Artistic Director, is not a Vermonter—“not at all,” she said—and grew up mostly in New York City. But she has lived in the area for more than two decades, and her love for it is palpable. I was interested in talking to her because, four years in, she and her collaborators seem to be maintaining a community project of the kind many of us long to participate in, if not start ourselves. And it has now weathered some significant challenges—including a terrible 2023 flood that ultimately led the group to decamp from an old riverside house that was previously home to Hardwick’s newspaper to sturdier digs across the street—without throwing in the towel.

Perhaps most of all, I just admire the Civic Standard’s oddity and specificity, and its very distinctive Hardwickness. Plenty of people can put on a show, but few of them could also serve vat after vat of Cabot-cheddar-laced pasta in a sprawling living room featuring a skateboard library and a toy tractor collection, to a crowd that included kids, senior citizens, and at least one small dog. It was a model that inspired me when I was conceiving of Porch Party, and I suspect it has pollinated many other far-flung community projects as well.

As Friedman and I talked, guests arrived for the dinner and filtered in and out of our conversation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Porch Party: How did the Civic Standard get started?

Rose Friedman: I consider the whole founding to be kind of a complicated thing to define. We started naming it as the time when we got the keys, so that is how we define the start. But there are so many threads that came before that, programs that we were already developing and experiments we were doing in town.

PP: Like some of the theater that you were doing.

RF: Yeah, so that was me and Justin [her husband, Justin Lander] doing Modern Times Theater and calling it a lot of different things, and then running kids’ programs and camps and making big carnivals and...just trying things out. And then during Covid I was making food and giving it away on the porch of the Grange in East Hardwick. So that was a big building block of the whole thing. And then Tara and Erica [cofounders Tara Reese and Erica Heilman] and I started talking about the work that I was doing, which they were both intrigued by, and they had their own philosophical thoughts about the community and what needed to happen.

So then I was like, I think we need to make a nonprofit, and I think we need a building.

PP: Why did you feel like you needed a building?

RF: Because I felt like there had to be a visual representation of what we were talking about. The thing about all the programs and experiments I was doing was that they were all kind of one-off. Like, I would do a thing, and people would be like, oh, it's you again, and it's great, and you do so much great stuff. And I would be like, okay, thanks, but also, this is the same thing. It's one continuous line. And people just didn't see it that way.

They were like, Oh, now you're giving away soup. Last time I saw you were doing a show! And I was like, it's not just that these happen to be things that I'm doing right now. It's all stemming from the same general plot and thought process.

PP: Can you describe that thought process at all?

RF: Yes. It was Covid and I was thinking a lot about how I couldn't do theater and about what the very, very basic version of theater is, and what, taken down to its most essential, happens in theater. I also knew people just needed food, and a lot of people were stuck in their houses, and I wanted to figure out a way to find out who they were and what they needed.

But for me, the supper that we're about to have and the show that we're working on are born from the same source. You can name that source as “ways that people get together,” but the deeper meaning of it is about sort of stepping outside of capitalism, and the way that we actually interact with each other and serve each other and need each other.

Like, what is it really? You can certainly experience entertainment by yourself through a television set. You can certainly eat alone and achieve the nutritious value of the food. But there's something that we know is very different in the experience of going and eating food that somebody else has made for you, not having to pay for it, or deciding what you want to pay, making a donation if it feels good or you can, and sitting with other people to eat, experiencing the unpredictability of eating with strangers. And likewise, entertainment is really different when it's made by you, for you, with you, and live. And, again, with unexpected people sitting next to you and laughing at the same jokes.

So there's a common source to everything we do. But there's also the fact that when you are trying to make theater and art accessible to people and you go really deep into what that means, the logical thread, if you pull hard enough and for long enough, is that you're giving somebody a ride somewhere. That is just what happens if you follow the path.

PP: Wait. When you say giving people a ride somewhere, do you mean in a metaphorical sense?

RF: No, literally. Like if you say, I would like to make theater accessible to every kind of person and I'm interested in inviting everyone to come to this show, but they're not coming. Well, I just keep inviting them. And now I've made the tickets free, or now I've made [the show] this or that way, or maybe a different subject will appeal to them. Or, you know, if I put their kid in the show, then they'll come.

But if you keep pulling at the thread, why isn't somebody coming? Often what's on the other side of that is that they don't have cultural access to it. And that might be because they literally don't have a ride to get there, or it might be because they don't feel a sense of belonging in that place. Or because they don't even understand what the experience of going to see live theater would feel like, if they would enjoy it. So if you just keep pulling, what comes out along that route, to me, is the work of the Civic Standard. That’s the thread that we’re pulling.

PP: In going from these one-offs to this central project, you must have had to learn a huge amount, even from a business perspective. What has that been like?

RF: Very strange and messy and experimental. Like, okay, I guess I'll learn how nonprofit bookkeeping works, which I’m still not good at, and so I guess I'll find somebody to help me. I definitely have a lot of help from people just donating their time and offering their services and contributing what they can. And then people stepping up to be on the board and to serve in all the different ways that are needed to get the organization afloat.

I feel like there's a constant demonstration project happening now that lots of other people can work here and figure out what it means to do this work, which is not always generic nonprofit. Like, you know, it's a do-gooder community center. But the essence of what it started as and what it has continued to be is something a little bit more strange than that.

PP: The strangeness of it is part of what I find so appealing. There's this sense of playfulness or “hey, kids, let's put on a show” that is outside of the basic provision of food or community.

RF: Right. I've always sort of struggled with being a theater maker and also feeling an urgency toward social services, like serving a need. And feeling like those two things were built in conflict in the culture, where you had to choose one path.

PP: Although you have a background with Bread and Puppet. [Bread and Puppet is a locally famous lefty political theater involving giant puppets based in Greensboro, Vermont, that also feeds its audiences fresh-baked bread.]

RF: Yeah, there was a lot of that braiding together there, though not in the way that I wanted to relate to the local place where we live.

PP: One thing that I was curious about: Even as an idea this model is inspiring, because there are a lot of people trying to figure out ways to do this type of work in a way that feels good and is sustainable. But there's this real issue of burnout, or how you keep doing this. What is your mood about that right now?

RF: [Laughs] I’m pretty moody about it! It's pretty moody. It's constantly renewing and rejuvenating in and of itself. It does seem to have a kind of endless spring quality, which is great, and the fear in the first couple of years was that was going to dry up. Or we were going to hit some wall, or it was going to stop working, or people were going to turn against us, or whatever the fears were.

PP: There's definitely a movie version where the town eventually turns against you.

RF: I mean, I assume that's how my particular story ends.

PP: I don't think so! I just felt like, if I was trying to make a film about it.

RF: Women like me often end up on the stake. [laughs]

[A staffer who helped cook the dinner stops by to say goodbye with her toddler, who has consumed a great deal of pasta, adding before she goes: “And now we're going to go home and do the pigs and chickens. I’m going to come back tomorrow afternoon, and we’re going to bust out a bunch of cookies for the party.”]

PP: This newsletter arose partly out of the fact that things have been really terrible and weird in DC over the last year and a half. Obviously, some of it is stuff that’s happening nationwide. But the job loss there has been nuts, and the job effects even for people who still have their job. Have you seen any major change for this community, from where you sit? Does it feel like things have gotten harder in terms of affordability?

RF: I think that is an endless road that we're on, is it getting harder in terms of affordability. And I mean, I was observing that when I first moved here, 20, 25 years ago. It was that thing where the next generation can't afford to keep the house that they inherited, with the same sort of financial structure.

PP: Yeah, and the economics are so different. So many of the dairy farms around here have been transformed into other things.

RF: Yeah, and you can inherit a farm, but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to keep it up. And so I think that that's an ongoing road that's not about coming out of Covid or this one particular moment. There are moments where it seems like it's speeding up, but I don't know that that's true right now. It does seem like it's constantly going in that direction, though. 

PP: So you haven't necessarily noticed a distinct change. In DC, it’s been a very tense time not only because of the job loss, but there's this other element—like, ICE is a presence there, and there's people who are being made to feel unwelcome, or have had to leave. I’m wondering whether you see that in this community, too.

RF: You can see it on a micro scale, because the communities are smaller. So a local vote will have a flavor of national politics and that political tension, even if we're not talking directly about national political issues. But I don't feel like, oh my God, here's the national mood that's trickled down into our community and it's poisoning the water. I think that there have always been these kinds of tensions and challenges in this community.

There's been different versions of the newcomer, and the interloper. And different ways people have kind of tried to colonize the community. It's my current obsession, the way in which this community and I think a lot of communities like this one in rural places deflect or resist gentrification. And there's a kind of a New England stoic and nonconfrontational way of, like...hardening off.

It's fascinating when you see it as an actual stance against gentrification. I mean, there's definitely fear, there's racism. All of the misunderstandings that are possible between people certainly exist here. It's a very white place. You know, when somebody shows up who looks different or who has a different last name or who's not recognizable as coming from the place in any way, you might experience, as I have, some interesting commentary and questions that could be perceived as offensive.

Sometimes I find them offensive; mostly I find them to be a kind of a clumsy curiosity. But more often I find that what's happening is a gentle resistance to change.

And I think the reason I moved here is because I detected a still living culture, and it was something that I wanted to experience in my life as a young person. I had lived abroad a lot as a young kid and as a young adult, and I had not found that feeling of a living traditional culture in America that I had found abroad.

PP: So that was actually appealing.

RF: Very appealing. And I found it in the Northeast Kingdom. And I was like, oh, there's still a piece of ancient, traditional, agrarian culture that is actually alive in people here and in their accent and in their way of talking, their way of communicating, their shared knowledge and history. There's like a freaking anthropology class in every town about who's related to who and how the town came to be and what the values are and how they're connected to the actual landscape. And I just was like, I could sink into this and study it forever. 

PP: It seems like that tension—from here, from away—is a central tension that you guys deal with. Are you trying to integrate those things? Are you trying to create bridges across them? How do you think of your role?

RF: I think of myself as being, like, a curious person. Basically, an experimental person existing and demonstrating that freely and boldly. And just being like, here I am! I'm not going to pretend to be somebody else, and I'm not going to pretend that I'm from here. But also there's a line between pretending I'm from here and being disrespectful of the place. And I try to walk that with grace.

PP: When you think of all the different projects and functions of the Civic Standard, what do you feel like has been most successful? What have people responded to most, or what has really helped?

RF: I think the deeply collaborative projects—the theater work has been the most impactful. Doing a show is so labor-intensive for such a brief little pop of a moment and requires such intense collaboration amongst people. And amongst organizations, like, several of those really great shows were a collaboration with the American Legion, and that collaboration was a new thing for both of our organizations.

And then the small-touch stuff that is not known, like a kid who was helped to do some specific thing. We don't really advertise that, because it’s private. But those are deep impacts. And I feel the threads of those things. There are people who are willing to give us a chance, and come to a show, because their nephew was helped to get into diesel mechanic school, right? So everything is feeding everything.

PP: Do you have any advice for other people who are trying to start something that has this kind of multidimensionality to it, but that also works for their specific communities? This is obviously incredibly tailored to this place.

RF: That's exactly it. It's just to pay attention. I pay attention.

We do get asked that quite a lot. There are requests from far and wide, and they're fascinating because they're in such different environments. And then you often never hear from people again, so you don't know what happened. You sent all this information out, with a person, with a group. Sometimes I can see what they're doing because we follow each other or whatever, but often it's just a person who's like, really grappling with the thing, or trying to work within their particular organization. And then I wonder what happened, because I think that the project, by nature, has to then completely change.

Your whole brain and thinking and strategy are just changing constantly if you're actually engaging with your community. Otherwise, you're doing a fixed thing and trying to deliver it to your community over and over again, which is what I find a lot of people are doing. They're like, I have this idea and it's such a nice idea and I want to give it to you. And people are like, I don't want it! It's not a thing that you can predesign and then deliver.

It's a conversation, you know what I mean? The times when it feels the hardest to me is when we do have a fixed idea and we try and make people interact with it, but we sort of already know how we want it to go. Then you're just selling a product, essentially. But if you're like, ah, it's just a conversation, then let's see what happens.

Further to my ice cream inflation complaints of a few weeks ago: really what I am looking for is for a teenager at a window in a gas station to sell me a perfect little $2 maple creemee, like this one in Waterbury, Vermont. Now this is neighborhood ice cream, and I just wish it were in my neighborhood.

A question for you all: What stories are you hearing about people forging their way through this strange moment? Do you have a piece to contribute, a Q&A to suggest, or just someone you think I should talk to? If so, please get in touch. And if you haven’t yet, consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to expound in the comments on your Fourths of July and the best models of community near you. Thanks for reading, and see you next time.