What We Choose To See

By Loralee Tester (Executive Director of the NEK Chamber of Commerce)

September in the Northeast Kingdom has always been a season of new starts. Kids head back to school, farm families finish putting up the last of the harvest, and businesses shift from the pace of summer into the pace of the year ahead. It is a month that invites us to look forward, which makes it a good time to ask what we see when we do.

For years, conversations about the future of rural Vermont have tended to begin with what we do not have — not enough workers, not enough young people, not enough housing, not enough population growth. Those challenges are real, and we should not pretend otherwise. But lately I have been thinking about how differently the Northeast Kingdom looks when we start the conversation from a place of abundance rather than scarcity, because we actually have a remarkable amount to work with.

We have manufacturers making sophisticated products that travel around the world, hospitals and health care organizations serving communities across a large rural geography, and construction companies, surveyors, electricians, plumbers, and tradespeople who cannot find enough people to meet demand. We have farms, financial institutions, nonprofits, outdoor recreation businesses, ski areas, hospitality businesses, technology companies, and entrepreneurs. We have jobs — and not just jobs, careers.

We also have extraordinary educational assets. Our high schools are doing innovative work, and career and technical education programs are preparing students for careers that are needed right here. Vermont State University has a presence in the region. Community College of Vermont is built around meeting students where they are. Employers are increasingly interested in internships, apprenticeships, work-based learning, and other ways of reaching students earlier. The pieces are here, and our work now is to connect them.

That has become one of the most exciting parts of the Chamber's workforce work over the past couple of years. We spend a lot of time talking with employers about what they need, and a lot of time talking with schools about what they are seeing in young people, and those are increasingly becoming the same conversation. Take a student interested in engineering who, before leaving high school, has already seen the manufacturing careers available right here in the Kingdom. Or a young person who loves being outside coming to recognize that outdoor recreation opens paths into hospitality, land management, trail building, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Or the student for whom college is not the right next step, moving directly into a skilled trade with a clear path toward stability and eventually business ownership. Or the college student who spends a summer here in an internship, lives in the Kingdom, builds relationships, and begins to imagine a life. These are not theoretical possibilities; they are conversations happening right now.

Rural communities have always survived by adapting. The Northeast Kingdom has never been a place where opportunity arrived fully formed — people here have made industries from forests and farmland, built businesses around our mountains and lakes, turned small towns into manufacturing centers, and created schools and institutions that have served generations of families. We have learned, again and again, how to do more with less and how to make something work because it needed to, and that same creativity is what this moment requires.

The pandemic changed our communities in ways we are still understanding, and for many young people it interrupted the ordinary ways they would have built confidence, connections, and a sense of belonging. But I also see a tremendous desire to reconnect. Young people want meaningful work and real relationships, and they want to belong to communities where they have a chance to shape what comes next. That should be enormously encouraging to us, because in a small region people can make a difference quickly. A young employee here is not one of thousands in an anonymous organization; they may be sitting across the table from the owner, helping solve a problem that changes how the company operates, serving on a committee, volunteering in their town, coaching a team, or starting a business within a few years of entering the workforce.

Those opportunities do not always reveal themselves automatically, though, and that is where the rest of us come in. Our responsibility is not simply to tell the next generation they should stay in the Northeast Kingdom; we have to give them reasons to believe they can build a life here. That means introducing them to employers, opening doors to internships and job shadows, helping them understand the range of careers available, and inviting them into rooms where decisions are being made.

Those of us who have spent decades building businesses, institutions, and organizations also need to think seriously about mentorship. Every community has people who carry extraordinary knowledge — how a business was built, why an institution works the way it does, who to call when something goes wrong, what mistakes to avoid — and the greatest value of that knowledge may come from giving it away. The next generation does not need previous generations to step aside; they need them to become mentors, connectors, and champions, willing to say, "I know someone you should meet," or "Come with me to this meeting," or "I made that mistake once; here is what I learned."

That is part of the thinking behind Leadership NEK, which is not simply a leadership class but a way of helping people understand this region as a whole. Participants travel throughout the Kingdom, meet the people running businesses and institutions, learn about the challenges facing our communities, and build relationships with one another. The future of the Northeast Kingdom will not be built by one organization, one town, or one sector; it will be built by people who understand how the pieces fit together — how education shapes workforce, workforce shapes housing, housing shapes economic development, and all of it shapes the strength of the communities we live in.

That is why I believe this is such an important moment. We can continue to define ourselves primarily by our challenges, or we can recognize the assets already around us and ask a different question: what can we build from here? Stronger pathways between schools and employers, earlier exposure to careers, college students welcomed into our communities through internships, employees growing into leaders, entrepreneurs supported, retiring leaders passing along what they know. None of that means ignoring the challenges. It means believing we have the capacity to solve them.

Perhaps that is the most important thing we can pass along to the generation coming behind us: that the future of a region is not something that simply happens to it. It is something we build together. We have the schools, the employers, the ideas, and the people. Most importantly, we have a generation of young people who will inherit whatever we create next, and our job is to open the doors and make the introductions.

— Loralee Tester is Executive Director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, serving Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties.