Voices From the Edge (podcast episode 6) "Housed. But Still Not Out of the Woods"
Since last September, this series has walked with neighbors whose lives Vermont’s progressive reputation would prefer not to see. Jerome sleeping in a gazebo on the Middlebury town green. Jessica working full time while her family shared a single motel room. Matt and Elizabeth holding each other through a Vermont winter in a car.
Green Mountain Justice walked alongside them. And they got housed.
That matters. It matters enormously. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
But proximity has a way of teaching you things you didn’t expect to learn. And what we kept learning, long after the lease was signed and the door was locked, is that housing is not the finish line we told ourselves it was. The woods don’t end at the door. The systems that sorted these neighbors to the margins follow them inside. The daily weight of living in poverty in Vermont — the cliff effects, the healthcare gaps, the racial hostility, the thin social networks, the benefits that punish you for doing better — none of that paused because the address changed.
This summarizing episode is a check-in. You’ll hear from Jessica, Jerome, and Matt in their own words, on an ordinary day, before anything has gone wrong. Listen to what ordinary costs them.
Then we’ll talk honestly about what we’ve learned. About what it means to be housed but still in the margins. About what Vermont’s 320 percent increase in homelessness tells us about the systems we keep funding. About H.772 and H.938 and what courage actually looks like in Montpelier right now. And about what we believe works, when we’re willing to stop outsourcing our obligations and show up for our neighbors ourselves.
This is the summarizing episode of Voices from the Edge. It is not a tidy ending. It was never going to be.
