BRATTLEBORO — While most Vermonters think of this town’s Strolling of the Heifers as a simple parade, locals know it as a fundraising steamroller that pays for a downtown headquarters and nearly $700,000 annual budget for year-round programs supporting farming and socioeconomic well-being.
But now that Covid-19 has canceled this month’s march, the nonprofit’s organizers are wondering what else they may have to put out to pasture.
“We’ve lost a lot of sponsorship dollars not having the parade,” executive director Lissa Harris says. “The pandemic has forced us to look at how we can make ourselves more sustainable.”
The organization thought it faced its worst headlines a year ago when nearly a dozen climate change demonstrators, seeking to capture the attention of a crowd of thousands and a live Vermont PBS television audience, blocked the march with a 25-foot-long “Declare Climate Emergency” banner.
“We have something unplanned-looking here,” Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, a broadcast host, told viewers before negotiating for 15 minutes with protesters who ultimately were carried off by police.
In contrast, this year’s event is limited to the annual Slow Living Summit, now taking place online and featuring such keynote speakers as Ripton author and activist Bill McKibben.
“There’s something to be said, even without a pandemic, for learning how to do more via things like low-carbon Zoom,” McKibben said at the conference’s start.
The first Strolling of the Heifers in 2002 featured a handful of farmers prodding cows up Main Street, spurring television’s “Good Morning America” and newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times to juxtapose images of Spain’s “Running of the Bulls” with jaywalking Holsteins.
Since then, the event has added several four-season programs, including farm-to-table apprenticeships in the fields of baking, butchering and cheese-making and a Windham Grows small business hatchery to help startup and early-stage employers with development support.
“Our job is to add value to the food that comes out of the earth to make it healthy and make jobs in the community,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said at the 2017 kickoff of the latter initiative, which has received grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Economic Development Administration.
With its 2013 purchase of downtown’s cornerstone River Garden building as a year-round headquarters, the organization has focused on growing the economy — specifically, agricultural production, processing and distribution that annually have generated $4 billion and 13% of all Vermont jobs.
But parade sponsorships have paid for much of the services and staffing.
“This has been a model that has worked for us until now,” Harris says. “Once we knew the writing was on the wall because of the pandemic, we’ve been forced to look at our programming.”
Several sponsors said they couldn’t contribute to a parade this year but would fund Windham Grows consulting for area food producers.
“The issues facing our farmers have become more nuanced,” Harris says. “This is a great time to explore some more sophisticated advocacy efforts and partnerships. More than ever we need to help these businesses recover and become resilient.”
The organization sees its current summit as a way to expand online.
“Now it can be accessed from anywhere in the world,” Harris says.
But maintaining the Main Street building presents a big challenge. The nonprofit took over a $175,000 mortgage from what’s now the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance after that group couldn’t afford the upkeep.
“Post-Covid, we’re going to look different,” Harris says. “Without losing the spirit of the stroll, we’re trying to figure out how we can create a more sustainable strategy moving forward. We don’t have an answer yet, but we have to think creatively.”
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