Champlain Valley Hub

Partnering with perennial thinkers and doers

In the Perennial Turn course taught at Middlebury College students engage in a form of Community-Connected Learning by establishing dialogic practices with local organizations and individuals for the purposes of expanding and applying what they are learning in the classroom. For partners in the community the students' inquiry and connection deepens their sense of purpose and refreshes their focus as they explore with the students what it means to live and work perennially. These community members and organizations are engaged and passionate about their work and most are in a constant state of innovation and design responding to the needs of their communities in these complex times. Considering perennial ideals and seeing how their practices connect with the classroom as well as other partners has fostered meaningful and lasting community since 2018. Students explore and uncover a common passion for what it is to be perennial and find fertile ground for connection that expands the depth and breadth of what it means to be, live, and work perennially. The nurturance of these cultural and human-connected New Perennials ideas and concepts in relationship make mutuality and inter-dependence visible between the classroom and on/in the ground practices living at the threshold of real and often radical change. Students and our partners deepen their understanding of New Perennial and illimunate areas of expansion allowing this network to emerges and make space to respond to the cultural change these times demand.

Our community partners are most easily identifiable within one of five Spheres: Food Systems, Education, Healing Arts, Creative Arts, and Sacred Practices. These spheres are not siloed. They allow for overlap and connection as we strengthen community systems becoming an invisible mycelial network like those of the forest.

Below is an ever- expanding list of partners in the Champlain Valley that that have been part of our Community-Connected Learning in the classroom and beyond. In some way they each bring New Perennials out to their communities.