MARLBORO FOUNDATION

The Marlboro Foundation Story

As more jobs involve commuting and telecommuting, as local colleges close, as schools consolidate, and as climate change shifts demographics and livelihoods and ecosystems, we believe rural communities like ours are at risk of losing threads of community connection, transmission of local knowledge, vibrant community engagement, creative liveliness, ecological wisdom, rootedness and resiliency. We came together after the closure of Marlboro College in 2020, as professors and local educators with deep relationships to the College, to discuss what a community as a whole loses when a college closes and how we could continue to feed and nurture the educational landscape of our local region. 

We formed the Marlboro Foundation in order to support a robust variety of educational programs and spaces that nourish connection and enrich the lives of community members, school children, high school and college-age students, elders and BIPOC communities. We aim to provide opportunities for people of all ages, and from all places, to connect with the land, the environment and the arts in imaginative, nurturing and invigorating ways. 

In order to meet that mission, the Marlboro Foundation will provide fiscal sponsorship to various organizations, projects and events that provide inspiring, inclusive and diverse educational programming in Marlboro and the surrounding bioregion in Southeastern Vermont.