Our New Name
Smart Growth Vermont
Forging growth and conservation solutions
for Vermont communities and rural countryside
September 13, 2007 marked a milestone in the organization's history as our new name, Smart Growth Vermont, was unveiled at our second annual Smart Growth Awards Celebration. As our focus and work evolved from raising public awareness about the causes and effects of sprawling development patterns to providing the tools and assistance communities need to foster smart growth, we felt that a new name was needed to clearly communicate this message and better reflect our mission.
Whether we're talking about keeping businesses and jobs in our downtowns, supporting local farms or providing housing opportunities for all Vermonters, how we use and develop our land will determine whether the state maintains its essential character. Smart growth provides a framework for creating land use policies that respect our traditional landscape.
Smart Growth Vermont is committed to working with local and state leaders to forge innovative solutions to the growth and development challenges facing the state. We hope you will join us in this effort.
History
In the mid-1990s, retired bank President and outgoing Chair of the Vermont Environmental Board John Ewing realized that Vermont's rural landscape and traditional town-centers were being lost to sprawling, unplanned development. He saw an urgent need for an organization that would bring together diverse, and at times opposing, interests to discuss how Vermont could have a strong economy and housing options while protecting the farm and forestland that define the state's working landscape.
John brought together diverse stakeholders to define exactly how sprawl is harming our state and to explore how Vermont can grow in a manner that respects our heritage and unique sense of place. With strong support from Lyman Orton and Noel Fritzinger, he founded the Vermont Forum on Sprawl in 1997 as a project of the Orton Family Foundation. The organization became an independent non-profit in 2001.
Under the leadership of John Ewing and Elizabeth Humstone, the Forum’s first full-time executive director, the Vermont Forum on Sprawl successfully raised public awareness about the financial and cultural costs of sprawl, provided alternative development models and promoted state policies that protect and nurture our downtowns and village centers. The organization quickly established itself as the state's only organization that looks at the future of Vermont from both a conservation and development perspective.
Since John established the organization, our focus has evolved from raising public awareness and the causes and impacts of sprawl to providing the tools and assistance that enables state and community leaders to address Vermont's land use challenges. Our new name, Smart Growth Vermont, more accurately reflects this approach.