CRAFTSBURY — In this tiny Orleans County town — population 1,343 — the annual block party hosted by the general store got so crowded over the years that organizers decided to advertise it late last summer to keep it a “hidden gem,” said co-owner Jana Smart.
“Our community was showing up — literally everyone — but then they were telling their friend in Greensboro, and then they were telling their friend in Hyde Park,” and it would balloon to more than 1,200 attendees, she said.
The party, which features free food from the store, local bands and a warm-weather sledding hill from the nearby Craftsbury Outdoor Center, is also the town’s main “crossover” event, when far-flung neighbors on dirt roads reunite and catch up.
“The block party is like the one thing you can count on in the year, where you’d be like, ‘I’ll just see everyone I know,’ you know?” she said.
Those connections may provide more than just a temporary reprieve from isolation. In Vermont and around the country, new research shows that who you know — and who you spend time with — can play a huge role in where you end up in life.
Data from 21 billion Facebook friendships reveals that the more people you’re friends with in a higher social class, the more likely you are to end up in a higher class than you grew up in, according to an analysis from Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit based out of Harvard University.
The problem is that those friendships are relatively rare. People with low income are far less likely to become friends with people with high income than with peers in their same social class, and vice versa. The study found that certain regions were far more likely to foster those types of connections than others.
Vermont has a relatively high degree of “economic connectedness,” which is the share of high-income friends among low-income Vermonters, according to the data.
But that average tells only part of the story. People in Vermont with low income are more likely than the national average to interact with people whose incomes are higher than theirs, particularly in Chittenden County, but those interactions often don’t translate to real connections. Low-income Vermonters are less likely to befriend people in higher economic classes among the people they interact with, according to the data.
Brian Lowe, executive director of the Vermont Council on Rural Development, said the notion that social connections would drive class mobility is not surprising.
“Those things do seem to matter in the potential for landing a really good job or meeting somebody who kind of changes your professional life trajectory,” he said.
But how does Vermont, known for its rural communities and aging population, maintain a high degree of connectedness? Cheryl Morse, a researcher at the University of Vermont who studies geography and social cohesion, said the state has several advantages in creating cross-class communities, such as regional high schools that bring together students from multiple towns.
Morse still keeps in touch with friends of “various income brackets” from when they attended Woodstock Union High School. One of those friends, who came from a low-income background and started dating a girl from a wealthier background, became the first in his family to go to college and is now a corporate leader.
“I always wondered if that pathway became visible to him because of the friendships that he made in high school, because that pathway was not one that anyone in his family had ever taken before,” she said. “You can see those connections may have been the thing, in addition to his own motivation and drive, that pulled those pieces together.”
But Morse acknowledged that people who attain that level of mobility are breaking the mold.
Ben Doyle, president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, said “systemic things” in many locales can prevent neighbors from interacting or lead to communities with more homogenized income levels.
“Even just basic zoning, minimum lot size — things like that maybe aren't designed to be exclusionary, but on a functional level, kind of prevent people from a variety of incomes” from getting to know one another, he said.
The Opportunity Insights researchers didn’t study friendships by other demographics, but there’s reason to believe their findings would apply to cross-racial friendships, too. National polls have shown that 40% of white people and 25% of people of color have no friends of a different race from their own.
If social connections are so important to getting opportunities, how do people form those connections? And how can Vermont communities encourage relationships across a broad range of backgrounds?
VTDigger spoke to members of two organizations that have a reputation for creating those kinds of friendships — one in Burlington, the state’s most urban community, and another in the tiny town of Craftsbury.
‘A depository for human experience’
On a Thursday morning in mid-October, the first thing you hear as you step into the general store in Craftsbury is Michael Jackson.
Employees dance through the stacks as they put away the weekly shipment, the only one the store gets. It’s just one way that a small-town general store operates differently from its larger supermarket counterparts, said owners Emily Maclure and Jana Smart.
The store, known to locals as The Genny, stocks food and household goods, sells a daily rotation of hot meals, and runs a food bank out of a side room. It has also hosted community meals and the yearly townwide get together in July, Maclure said.
The throughline for all those activities is building a local community, something Maclure said has been a goal of theirs since taking over the store 10 years ago.
Craftsbury is a blend of farmers, Sterling College students and people who “stumbled” their way into the community, as Smart describes herself. With residents scattered across the town’s dirt roads, it’s not uncommon for neighbors to use The Genny as a central meeting place.
“We were laughing this morning, because there was a group of women all in the very center, like the most high-traffic part of the store, in conversation about something really personal and intimate,” Smart said. “That happens all day long — you know, people crossing paths.”
Lowe said community stores are often some of the last places left for people in rural communities to meet each other face-to-face as other institutions have declined.
“If you rewound 50 years ago, I could tell you Grange halls, VFW halls, a lot of fraternal organization-type entities, and schools” were places where people interacted across different backgrounds, Lowe said. “I think those things have changed. … Maybe there's less engaged membership, on average, than there was in the past.”
Talking with newcomers to rural towns, Lowe hears people ask, “How do I connect with new people who moved here? There's not a town paper anymore. (The) community store’s gone? How do I know what's happening?”
Maclure, Smart and co-owner Kit Basom have worked to revive the general store in a neighboring town, Albany, after a fire destroyed it in 2013. Maclure said the store, The Genny Albany, had a slower pace than the Craftsbury branch, which lost its seating area after the owners expanded their takeout business during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Preservation Trust contributed to rebuilding the Albany location. Doyle said the trust’s work, which focuses on the preservation of historic buildings, often expands into bringing together the people who use those spaces.
With the Albany general store, “that's not like a historically significant building in and of itself. But it is significant in that it was a centerpiece of a village, a built landscape in the village,” he said.
Doyle grew up in Sutton in the Northeast Kingdom, where the general store was in the basement and didn’t have a lot of stuff, but everyone went there to buy “whatever they needed quickly.”
“I can remember, as a kid, that's how I met my neighbors,” he said.
His parents had moved to Vermont from New York City, where he also lived later in life. But in New York, he said, his friends were mostly people like him — adults in the same career field.
In his hometown, where he was part of a graduating class of eight kids, “you’re going to interact with people” regardless of how similar they are to you. “You were engaged in other people's lives in a way that, when I lived in New York City, I did not,” he said.
Doyle said getting to know people unlike you could be critical to developing a more balanced view of the world. He’s concerned about the retreat to online spaces where you can choose to interact within a single bubble.
But in-person interactions are often stymied by the realities of inequality in Vermont, he said, such as its lack of affordable places to live and lack of access to high-quality job opportunities.
“Are there ways in which we could invite people to come to Vermont?” Doyle asked. “I don't know. But I would say part of it has to start with those friendships, right? It's much harder to fight the affordable housing projects in your community, if you're friends and know the people who are going to live there.”
At The Genny, Maclure said it was important to the shopkeepers to make “everyone feel welcome” by ensuring residents could afford their food. They invested in a new point-of-sale system to allow locals to use 3SquaresVT benefits and Women, Infants and Children benefits at their store.
As the years have gone by, Maclure has watched the residents she’s gotten to know grow up and experience life changes, such as becoming parents. They’ve also lost several Genny regulars who have died in the past few months.
“It’s a gift to be able to deliver some meals out to folks that we love,” she said. “Like, ‘oh, wow, this person has been coming here forever, and we know that they're sick.’ We get the opportunity to serve them in ways like that.”
Smart said The Genny was like “a depository for the human experience.”
“Everything that you can do, it happens in and around the store,” she said.
Making connections in Vermont's biggest city
For people of color in Vermont, sometimes making connections means building each other up outside of majority-white workplaces.
Belan Antensaye, a board member of the Vermont Professionals of Color Network, said she agreed with Morse’s assessment of the importance of high school connections.
Going to Essex High School, where her family came from “the lower end of the economic ladder,” Antensaye said she got access to a very good school with the resources and opportunities she needed to succeed.
She landed at Cornell University for college, where she interacted with many people from “higher economic backgrounds” — sometimes to her surprise.
“I went to Cornell University, and I remember that some data came out. And it was like 50% of Cornell students pay for tuition fully and don't receive any financial aid,” she said.
Tuition at the time was about $74,000 per year. “It really showed the economic gap within a school like that,” Antensaye said.
Another research project from Opportunity Insights in 2017 showed that people from lower-income backgrounds who attended colleges, particularly elite colleges such as Ivy League universities, were more likely to end up in a higher class than they grew up in.
But few lower-income students attend those schools, the research shows. At the time of the study, about 64% of Cornell students came from the top 20% of households by income, and the median household income was over $151,000 a year.
The income breakdown was similar at Vermont’s largest university, the University of Vermont, where the median family income was $121,500 and 55% of students came from the top 20% of household earners.
About 29% of UVM students from the lowest income group went on to join the highest income group later in life, about average for selective public colleges, according to the data.
Middlebury College students’ families had a median income of over $244,000, and about three-quarters come from the top 20% of household earners, the data shows. Only 2.7% of students came from the bottom 20% of households, but those students were far more likely than the national average to end up in the top 20% of earners later in life.
Antensaye now works as the co-founder of the Vermont Health Equity Initiative, based in Burlington. She noted that Burlington and Winooski are two of the most racially diverse communities in the state, a situation that often leads to economic diversity, but there are “clear neighborhood distinctions” where different races congregate.
“I think most of the people that are of a higher economic bracket than I am, I've only met them through my professional experience in my work environment,” she said.
But whether in school or in the workplace, she said, it sometimes “gets clique-y,” which can further reduce the chances that people from different backgrounds become friends.
“And then to maintain a friendship across these areas is also hard, because the more you become friends with someone, the closer you become, the more those life parts impact how you can be friends — whether you go out to eat and do those things, where you don't, or where you live,” she said.
Like Doyle, she is concerned that Burlington’s high cost of living creates barriers for people from lower-income backgrounds to interact with other people or get opportunities.
“If that's where all of a lot of this connection can happen in Burlington, cross-economic connection or racial connection, then if you can't afford to even be here to access that, then you're kind of out of it,” she said.
The Burlington-based Vermont Professionals of Color Network aims to counter those trends. The network creates “intergenerational connections” between people of color working in Vermont, Antensaye said, which helps to close economic gaps.
“There's a focus on mentorship a little bit, but even more so bringing everyone up along with you,” she said. “I've met older people of color who've been professionals in this world for a long time, and can kind of help me navigate it in the Vermont-specific context.”
Antensaye said providing Vermonters of color access to new job opportunities through networking can get people ahead on the economic ladder. The network also helps foster conversations about feeling included in the workplace. “Being the only person of color in a professional workspace, there's a lot of isolation or othering,” she said.
Any kind of “professionals” can join, whether they’re more “white collar” or “blue collar,” Antensaye said. “We're removing some of these traditional, or more white, standards of what it means to be a professional,” she said.
Another aspect of the group’s work is connecting small business owners with resources like grants to increase their capacity or technical support, she said. The network also has a membership portal and a directory of businesses owned by Vermonters who are Black Indigenous or people of color.
“All of that connectedness, I guess, comes from building out a stronger network of people of color in Vermont more broadly, but all of that connectedness increases the chances of having connectedness across economic brackets, too,” she said.