Dear Shelburne Craft School Community,
I woke up this morning feeling bright with joy reflecting on our community partnerships. I feel I have learned an extraordinary amount about the human experience and our context within the Green Mountain State. I am so grateful; I am buzzing with happiness and need to share this gratitude with all of you.
When you align or overlap in mission and work together, outcomes feel woven in profoundly beautiful manners. Most of these partnerships were either created or renewed in the past three years greatly enriched and grown Shelburne Craft School both in student number and understanding of our world:
We just finished another series of CCS classes for folks with intellectual disabilities. The joy and creativity that has come on campus each week is like a buoy of hope and happiness. We taught painting, weaving and clay this session.
We wrapped up a series of classes at Harbor Place with individuals experiencing homelessness in photography, hand building, weaving and now will begin building a large, wheelchair accessible garden at their location through our Building Arts program.
Our veteran program through South Burlington Vet Center finished birdhouses projects yesterday evening with delightful copper roofs. These creative vets have built furniture, created stained glass, and made silver rings in recent history.
We will launch Forest to Furniture in the coming weeks with Shelburne Farms—whereby students learn about forest ecology, selecting wood felled at the farms and shaping it into beautiful benches. Additionally, we continue to harvest invasive trees to turn into bowls here at the farms. We have a retreat planned to dream and scheme at the farms in a couple weeks. So grateful for the farms support of our work.
Once again, we work with Age Well to bring in folks over 60 to weave their life stories in tapestry in the coming weeks.
Our 8th grade program started a few weeks ago and thrives with all 8th grade students from Shelburne Community School engaging in wide ranging craft experiences. This is our oldest partnership and dates 80 years.
Finally, as we build our international programming, we have found true friendship in Japan and Mexico—the ability to share a love of creating internationally has an unparalleled hope in the state of our complicated world.
I chose the image of Franz Marc Yellow Cow to symbolize how these partnerships make me feel—awakened, better understanding my own humanity and truly grateful to be a part of this community of artists, thinkers and doers.
With outrageous joy,
Heather, ED Shelburne Craft School
