Grantees

The Teen Center offers space for local youth to build community with free events, summer camps, and after school drop-in, providing free food to foster an inclusive environment. While many youths gravitate toward indoor activities such as art and video games, they have requested a Gaga Ball Pit. Gaga Ball is a fast-paced dodgeball variation where players strike others below the knee with a ball to get one another “out” and players must keep the ball inside the pit. The Gaga Pit would encourage outdoor play, enhancing teens' health, well-being, conflict resolution skills, and social connections. It would also be accessible for all Middlebury residents to enjoy competitive outdoor fun.

Young Writers Project (YWP) is an independent youth arts organization that began in 2006 in Burlington, VT, with a mission to inspire, mentor, publish, and promote young writers and artists. All programming is free. YWP has a vibrant online community of some 4,000 teens, mostly from Vermont. The Tomorrow Project is YWP's new civic engagement program in which teens create, publish, and exhibit their powerful writing and visual art on the issues of today – with hope and solutions for tomorrow. Youth, ages 13-19, connect with each other and their Vermont communities around issues such as democracy, human rights, and climate change.

Produce a film based on the acclaimed Voices Project theater production that toured Vermont in 2007. The film will be based on the lives of Vermont teens.

The Waitsfield Children’s Center provides a play based curriculum that is developmentally stimulating, and provide endless hands-on learning opportunities. We are a non-profit licensed center based childcare program, providing daily care for children age’s birth through preschool. Regularly incorporate nature, art, music, movement, science, early math, pre-reading, and pre-writing skills into our play based activities. We are creating a mud kitchen on our playground, incorporating it to our new gardens, providing an opportunity for children to develop their fine motor skills outside, in an area that is often focused on gross motor skills.

TAP is a theatre arts program that serves 40 youth and adults with cognitive, social and physical disabilities along with 4-5 non-disabled peers. Year-round theatre skill-based activities enhance communications, self-expression and self-esteem.

Offers theatre-based activities specifically designed to allow youth with cognitive and physical disabilites the opportunity for self expression. The unique "reverse mainstream" model insures the students with disabilities the chance to dictate the pace and create a dominate atmosphere of inclusion.

Provide therapeutic child care option and parent education opportunities that support the healthy social and emotional development of chldren

Reinbow Riding Center has been providing therapeutic horsemanship lessons to individuals and groups of children age 3 to teenagers from schools, military families, and referrals for over 15 years. It is a safety requirement that during those lessons all participants must wear safety helmets while at the Center and especially while working with the horses, a focal point of their lessons, and often the key to opening their hearts and minds to new experiences, learning, attitudes and behaviors. Each helmet has an expiration date on its effectiveness. At the end of each year, Reinbow personnel checks the inventory and discards those that have reached that expiration. While we generally rotate them on a regular basis so there are only a few that expire each year, following Covid, our program was in great demand by local schools and we had to buy quite a few more helmets to accommodate the increase of participants. Those helmets reached their expiration date at the end of 2024.