09/30/2026
Rally to Save Rural Vermont
Vermont should be a place where ordinary people can still afford to live, work, build, raise families, own land, start businesses, farm, and participate meaningfully in decisions about the communities we call home.
Rural Vermont is a way of making a living with the land, using its resources to create something more beautiful, more useful, and more sustaining than land left alone.
Rural Vermont is the $5.4 billion a year our dairy economy delivers and the $2.1 billion a year generated by our forest products industry. It is hayfields maintained at great effort. Sugarhouses running at 2 a.m. on the labor of people who also work days. Sawyers and truckers connecting landowners to markets ever farther away. A cheese room winning international awards despite the obstacles the state puts in its way. Critically, Rural Vermont should still be a place where its people should be able to affordably age on the land they love and our kids can learn, grow, and choose to stay because Vermont offers opportunity.
It’s now widely recognized that choices made in Montpelier have harmed rural Vermont. For the last few decades, the rules and costs have piled up faster than rural people can absorb them: one restriction, one fee, one program at a time, often written by people who rarely live under the rules they create or pay the costs that follow. Whether Vermont can support the next generation of rural working- and middle-class families depends upon whether Montpelier gets the message and reverses course.
On Saturday, October 10, rural Vermonters will show up in great numbers at the State House to begin a new era together. Rural Vermont Rising, a volunteer movement organized in 14 chapters across the state, is standing alongside dairy producers, the forest products industry, farm groups, and other civic organizations committed to a vibrant, economically-viable rural future.
We're coming to Montpelier with a positive, practical vision for rural Vermont, and with a plan to deliver it. In the midst of a sustained crisis for our farmers, those who steward our forests, small businesses, landowners, and our families, we expect state government to listen and respond with energy and focus in the coming biennium.
Join us on October 10 at noon on the State House lawn.
