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Photo: Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. Photo: Baldwin Photography.
by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine
If Vermont has a problem, Ellen Kahler probably has an action plan.
While everyone seems to know what’s wrong with the Vermont economy — jobs going begging, an aging population, the high cost of housing if you can still find housing, homelessness for those who can’t, low wages, limited childcare, an opioid problem — not many have spent their careers finding long-range solutions.
Kahler, the executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund (VSJF), has.
Kahler works so far under the radar that very few people in the general population know her name. But she’s been recognized often for her considerable accomplishments.
She won the Con Hogan Award for Creative, Entrepreneurial & Community Leadership from the Vermont Community Foundation in 2015, the Arthur Gibb Award for Individual Leadership from the VT Natural Resources Council, also in 2015, the Jan Eastman Excellence in Leadership Award from the Snelling Center for Government in 2010.
Photo: Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, winner of the Con Hogan Award for Creative, Entrepreneurial & Community Leadership from the Vermont Community Foundation in 2015. Left to right: Con Hogan, Ellen Kahler, Stuart Comstock-Gay (former President of the VCF). Photo courtesy VSJF.
She sits on the boards of the Working Lands Enterprise Fund, the Vermont Workforce Development Board, and Energy Action Network. She currently serves also on the Governor’s Commission on the Future of Vermont Agriculture.
Kahler’s mandate — which is the mandate of the VSJF — is to collaborate on programs that “accelerate economic development in agriculture and food system, forest product, waste management, renewable energy, and environmental technology sectors.”
Those are a lot of sectors and a lot of mandates, and they illustrate why Kahler, a cheerfully driven policy wonk who loves to make things happen, has developed working relationships with people in every vital area of the Vermont economy.
Her vision is built around the very idea of relationships — knitting together people from different organizations with varying portfolios into groups dedicated to solving specific Vermont problems.
“It’s only through trusted relationships that you can really achieve systems level change, I believe,” Kahler told me. “If you have a lot of fear and distrust of other people, you’re not going to come together to try to make things better for other people. You need that basis of trusted relationships. So, we spend a lot of time building those relationships.”
Kahler has been called “the mother of the Farm to Plate movement,” “a force of nature,” “tireless,” “a born leader” and “a classic community organizer.”
Given the number of emails and the density of the messages I’ve received from her since I began writing this story, I’d add “relentless.”
People who work on projects with her — and this includes legislators, directors of nonprofits, sawmill owners and academics, among others — eagerly stand in line to praise her.
Senate Majority Leader Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor), who has worked with Kahler on several workforce development bills, calls her “one of the most effective economic developers in the state.”
“She has her fingers in many different pots,” Clarkson said. “It’s hard to identify just one area, because she has been instrumental for so many years in helping steer so many different aspects of our economy in just great ways. Whether it’s the food industries or forest products industries, she adds value and serves her primary mission, which is to nurture sustainable development in our economy. And she does it, I would say, very effectively.”
One of Kahler’s gifts is the ability to see the big picture, Clarkson said.
“She sees all the parties,” Clarkson continued. “She knows who delivers services, who provides the education, who oversees the apprenticeships and internships. She sees the state players, the nonprofit players, the individual sector players. Her drive has always been to better coordinate that and make it possible for us as a state to do a better job delivering seamless education and workforce development opportunities for Vermonters.”
Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer worked with Kahler when she was leading the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington.
Together in 2000 they published the Vermont Job Gap Study and introduced the idea of a livable wage to Vermont.
He calls her “a rare bird.”
“She is a visionary, but she is very practical.” Hoffer told me in an email. “She is a systems thinker. She has great people skills. She understands process and gets things done (not all smart people can say that). I think the world of her and we’re lucky to have her at the Sustainable Jobs Fund.”
Frank Cioffi, president of the Greater Burlington Industrial Corp, is one of her biggest fans.
He says, “Vermont is a better place because of Ellen Kahler.”
“She is one of the most innovative and creative Vermont thinkers I know,” Cioffi said. “She is such a remarkable entrepreneur and organization leader. Ellen is the Master Ninja of process development. I greatly admire and respect Ellen and deeply appreciate all she has done, and continues to do, for our state. Ellen’s hard work and passionate commitment to define the concept of sustainability relating to jobs has blazed the trail in Vermont.”
Pat Moulton, who recently left her job as president of Vermont Technical College to become the director of workforce development for the new Vermont State University, is working with Kahler on revamping higher education in agriculture.
“She’s got that planning brain, which has clearly morphed into the implementer brain,” Moulton said. “These are often unusual traits to have in the same person.”
Moulton said Kahler’s success with the Farm to Plate program reaches further than Vermont.
“I would say it reaches everywhere, because Vermont has been such a leader in that whole Farm to Plate movement, whether it’s restaurants, schools or farms,” Moulton said. “Ellen is hard to resist. She’s hard to ignore. She’s somebody you want to be collaborating with.”
Kahler is “tenacious, thoughtful and caring,” Moulton said.
Photo: Ellen Kahler testified to a joint hearing of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees in January 2016 as the 2015 Farm to Plate Annual Report was released. Photo courtesy VSJF.
“Her mission is food security and agricultural security,” Moulton said. “She wants us to do more than just talk the talk around diversified agriculture here in Vermont. She’s helping us walk the walk. She’s extraordinarily well organized. She’s one of those women that just gets it done.”
One of Kahler’s focuses is the forest products industry.
Forester Charlie Hancock met Kahler when he joined the state’s Working Lands Enterprise Board in 2018. He is now the vice chair of that board.
“I’ve gotten to know Ellen as being very warm, always having a smile on her face, always ready to engage on any question or opportunity that comes up,” Hancock told me. “She is incredibly dedicated. Every time she shows up to a meeting, or in a conversation, or in an email, she’s engaged, she’s deep in the work, and she’s dedicated to it. You can see that she believes in the mission of what we’re doing.”
Hancock admires Kahler’s widespread networking abilities.
“She’s incredibly knowledgeable,” he said. “She knows all the players. She often knows exactly who to call, who to talk to, what’s happening with them, and the story behind what they’re doing. Her knowledge, just what she’s able to keep in her head about what’s happening in the working lands economy, is truly amazing. So she’s just an incredibly great resource for the board and the state and for Vermont as a whole.”
Mary Anne Sheahan, the executive director of the Vermont Talent Pipeline Management, based out of the Vermont Business Roundtable, calls Kahler “a neutral convener.”
“Frequently, she’s in a position where she’s not angling for money,” Sheahan said. “She’s not angling for herself. She’s pulling together the resources that it makes sense to have a discussion or conversation with. I went to an event she coordinated about forestry. She pulls together people from education and government and business to talk about what exists out there so that people could learn from each other. I definitely think she’s a systems thinker, but really, she’s looking at the human side of things.”
Kahler grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, NY. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon and her mother was both a nurse and a homemaker. She has three younger brothers.
The family home, built on land that once was farmland, was about 20 to 30 minutes from downtown Buffalo.
“There were still a lot of diversified vegetable farms around that we would get fresh produce from,” she said. “But it was definitely a suburban neighborhood with a lot of kids around. During the summer, we spent a lot of time outside, playing in the yard. We participated in sports after school. I played French horn for eight years growing up. We did a lot of skiing on the weekends in western New York. There are a number of — well, I would call them more like ski hills than ski mountains — there. So it was a full family life. Being the eldest and having three siblings meant I helped my mom and my dad with my brothers.”
Kahler’s parents were very supportive.
“My parents always believed in us and our ability to be anybody we wanted to be as we grew up,” she said. “So I feel very grateful that they had confidence in my ability to be a good productive human being in society. When I came up, through being the oldest, my father was just starting off in his practice. And so, we were frugal but didn’t go without, so to speak. We didn’t have lavish vacations, but we drove to Florida. All six of us in the car, to be able to have an Easter vacation on the beach someplace. So it was modest, but happy.”
Kahler had an entrepreneurial streak that she developed while still in grade school.
“I was always interested in skiing, so I started a little ski tuning business,” she said. “I made copies of a flyer to put in people’s mailboxes, and then I would wax and sharpen the edges of the neighbors’ skis during the winter.”
She also did a lot of landscaping for her neighbors.
“I had a lot of elderly neighbors, and I would cut their grass and plant their annual flowers and trim their bushes and things like that,” she said. “So those were things that I did before I could really be in the workforce. My first real workforce job was when Wegman’s Supermarket opened up one of their first stores in the Buffalo area in my town. I worked in the bakery. Fairly quickly, they promoted me to night manager, which basically meant that I cleaned up and shut down the bakery for the day. That was during high school.”
She saved her earnings so as to have spending money in college.
She chose Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where she began as a business major.
“After a year of that, I switched to political science,” she said. “I got activated in the anti-nuclear arms movement that was going on back in the mid-1980s. I became very active on that issue, and around Central American solidarity, because the war in Nicaragua was raging. So, my degree was ultimately in political science.”
Social change was a natural interest.
“My parents always instilled in us a sense of community and giving back,” she said. “My mother was very active, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with supporting the refugee community in Buffalo. Most people don’t know this, but about a quarter of all of the refugees and asylum seekers in the United States pass through Buffalo to go to Canada. So if you were somebody from El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Guatemala, and you are trying to make a better life for yourself, get out of your country and seek asylum, often you would make your way to Buffalo. From there, you would ask for political asylum in Canada. But you couldn’t get into Canada until you actually had your court date. So there was a whole community of people in the Buffalo area who provided legal support, financial support, driving people to medical appointments and such. And my mom was very active with that.”
Kahler was spurred to activism by the threat of nuclear war with Russia.
“My activism really was spurred by Dr. Helen Caldicott, who back in the day was a pediatrician from Australia,” Kahler said. “She was worried about the very real potential of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. She traveled all over the world giving talks about it. And you know, back in the mid ’80s, before the Berlin Wall came down, it felt much more real and likely. So, something in me got sparked. I got very engaged in trying to help educate others, primarily my other fellow college students, in the dangers of nuclear war.”
It was her early interest in skiing as well as her experience with social activism that drew Kahler to Vermont after Bucknell.
“During high school, we had taken family trips to Vermont to go skiing,” she said. “And I always really loved Vermont and my experiences here. So when I learned that there was a Peace and Justice Center in Burlington, and that they had paid staff, I decided to move to Vermont.”
She moved to Burlington in September of 1989 and became a volunteer at the Peace and Justice Center. She took a side job running a little bookstore affiliated with the center, and also worked at a bakery part time.
When, in June of 1990, the executive director position opened, she applied, got the job, and started building her network. She stayed in that position until May of 2002.
“We did a lot of work to raise awareness about racial justice,” she said. “We started a racial justice and equity project in 1994, because there was an increase in the number of people of color that were moving to Vermont. They were really struggling with access to appropriate health care, housing, jobs, etc. And we started the livable wage campaign. So starting in 1996, until I left in 2002, I was very active on the topics of economic justice.”
Kahler worked with Vermont State Auditor Hoffer, who was then an independent consultant, on the Vermont Job Gap Study, a multi-year effort (1996 – 2002) to define what it costs to live in Vermont.
Hoffer created the methodology for the study.
“I was the data guy, and she was the one who took the reports on the road and educated people,” Hoffer said. “The study introduced the livable wage to the discourse on wages in Vermont. We also dealt with labor market issues that were not part of the public debate back then. I thought we were a strong and effective team.”
Working across five family sizes, they calculated what a livable wage would be — one that would enable a person or family, if they were working full time, to cover their basic needs, like bills and taxes — without the need for public assistance.
“At the time, the only public discourse was around the minimum wage – which uses a methodology developed a very long time ago and which back then was very mis-aligned with what it actually cost to live in Vermont,” Kahler said. “The idea was not to legislate a livable wage level for all family sizes — that’s not even legal to do — but rather to use the study to educate and inform employers on what they would need to be paying in wages and benefits in order for their full-time employees to not also qualify for some form of public assistance, like housing subsidies, rental assistance, childcare subsidies, food stamps, or heating assistance.”
The study showed what it really costs to live in Vermont.
“If you’re working full time, you’re paying your bills, you’re sort of playing by societal rules, you should be able to support yourself,” Kahler said. “And back then, as now, there’s an awful lot of people working full time who still qualify for public assistance because their earnings are not what they should be for what it costs to live here. So that whole livable wage conversation got started.”
In 1999, the Legislature picked up the idea and did a summer study on the concept of a basic needs budget and a livable wage. The work led to a series of minimum wage increases.
“And ultimately, every two years now the joint fiscal office publishes an update of the basic needs budget and livable wages for Vermont, so that it can be used by state agencies in their thinking about their policies and their program design,” Kahler said. “And it’s used by the Legislature to think about policy, program design and where they might want to make investments to support people.”
The minimum wage may have increased, but that doesn’t mean the problem was solved.
“This kind of work is never done,” Kahler said. “It’s incremental progress. I would say that now the whole concept of a livable wage is part of our societal lexicon, and that wasn’t the case back in the late ’90s. Now there’s a greater awareness that it’s an important thing.”
Kahler left the Peace and Justice Center in May of 2002 and went to the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
“I did a one year mid-career program and got a Master’s of Public Administration,” she said. “I needed to take a break and think about what I wanted to do next in my career.”
At Harvard she took a varied number of courses.
“What I gained from that year away was that I really do care about economic justice and the way that the economy functions or doesn’t function well, and who gains from the economy and who loses from the economy,” she said.
When she came back to Vermont, Kahler started the Peer-to-Peer Collaborative out of the Vermont Business Roundtable, which provided office space and some administrative support.
Kahler’s idea was that if she could strengthen businesses and help them become profitable enough, they could pay their employees well and provide them with good benefits.
Employees would not need public assistance. And Vermont could rebuild its middle class.
“For two years, we worked with a number of companies who wanted to pay livable wages, but were still struggling to figure out how,” Kahler said. “I recruited a number of entrepreneurs who had been successful in running — and in some cases selling — their businesses. They worked with me as we worked with a variety of clients to support their efforts to become more profitable as companies so that they could then afford to pay better wages and benefits to their employees.”
Lawrence Miller, a former secretary of the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, and now the founder of Five Vine Consulting, was one of the entrepreneurs recruited by Kahler.
“I met Ellen back in 2004,” Miller told me. “I had just sold the Otter Creek Brewery, which I had started. And she was looking for people with some business experience to do peer coaching.”
The businesses Miller coached were small but ready to grow.
“Usually, these were businesses that are getting to the point where they’re starting to assemble a management team, or they’re taking a big growth step like a new building, or expanding a production line or something major,” Miller said. “That’s usually when we got involved. It’s about bringing practical experience to strategic planning and implementing strategic plans. It’s sort of behaving like an advisory board on training wheels, in some respects.”
Kahler worked with the new owner of a southern Vermont lumber mill, for example.
“The owner had been working with his brother in the business, and his brother was getting out of the business,” Kahler said. “He needed to step up into the role of being the CEO. He had a lot of questions about how best to structure things, how to work with his employees, how to be more profitable, how to think about making investments in new equipment. We had a group of three other executive-level people and me who would work with him to make improvements. The business got quite successful and now it’s even been passed to the next generation.”
Leaders need to grow, whether they’re leading private businesses or nonprofit organizations, Kahler said.
“If they don’t, they can really hold back their company,” Kahler said. “And if they hold back the success of their company, meaning the profitability of their company, then that means there’s less funding available for paying their employees.”
Building on her Vermont experiences and relationships, in November of 2005 Kahler became the executive director of the nonprofit Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. It has a staff of 12 and a yearly budget of $2 million.
“We’re not a job shop,” Kahler said. “You can’t call me up and say, ‘Hey, what jobs are out there that I should apply for?’ That’s not what we do. We’re about strengthening an economic sector, like food and agriculture and energy, so that those businesses can thrive and be more profitable, so that they can then create the jobs and pay better wages. We’re a facilitator of a process, rather than being the organization that creates the jobs or plugs people into jobs.”
The organization, which was created by an act of the Vermont Legislature, was then 10 years old.
It was “still trying to get its sea legs,” as Kahler put it, when, in 2009, the Legislature passed the Vermont Farm to Plate Investment Program and tasked the VSJF to administrate it.
“They decided they did not want to give it to the Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets to do,” Kahler said. “They also did not want to give it to any known farm or food advocacy organization, as they wanted the strategic plan to represent the needs of all forms of agriculture, conventional and organic; all sizes of farm and food businesses, both commodity and value-added; and all stages of farm and food business needs, start-up through to mature, presented in a neutral way.”
Since the VSJF’s governing statute is tasked with finding ways to advance the farm and food sector, and had some history doing it, they asked Kahler if the VSJF could manage the program.
“In essence, I raised my hand and said ‘Sure! We’ll do it!’” Kahler said.
Vermont agriculture was then in crisis. Dairy farms were closing at a rapid rate, and people were saying that Vermont agriculture was dead.
“But at the same time, there was this real interest in the Farm-to-School program,” Kahler said. “Farmers’ markets were really becoming prominent. Community Supported Agriculture was growing, with people signing up to get food directly from the farms in their communities. All this positive energy was going on. Vermont Fresh Network was really starting to get a lot of restaurants on board with sourcing local ingredients. More and more local products were showing up at food co-ops. So there was this dichotomy. Yes, dairy agriculture seems to be declining. But this other, more diversified agriculture was growing. So there was confusion about what’s happening.”
The Legislature asked the VSJF to create a 10-year strategic plan for strengthening Vermont’s food system.
“We talked to over 1,500 Vermonters and we developed this plan and we released it in January 2011,” Kahler said.
Farm to Plate — which essentially tries to increase the amount of locally grown food served at restaurants and in school cafeterias — is now Vermont’s statewide food system plan.
Its mission is to “increase economic development and jobs in the farm and food sector, improve soils, water, and resiliency of the working landscape in the face of climate change, and improve access to healthy local foods for all Vermonters.”
One measure of the plan’s success is that over the last 10 years, Vermont has gone from consuming 5 percent of local production locally to consuming 16.1 percent.
The plan has been approved by three different governors from two different political parties.
“The first plan was released right as Governor Shumlin was coming into office,” Kahler said. “So, for instance, the plan was signed into law by Governor Douglas and then given to Governor Shumlin and his team. And when Governor Scott came in, he also embraced it and the Legislature in 2019 re-authorized it. So we’ve had three governors be supportive of this effort, and we can keep moving forward with strengthening the food system.”
Soon after the first plan was published, Kahler created the Farm to Plate Network.
“It is over 350 different organizations — over 600 people — all working together,” Kahler said. “Because no one organization can improve the food system on its own or fix the bottlenecks in the food system on their own. No one policy can do that. No one organization can do that. No one agency can do that. It’s much bigger than all of that. And so our approach is to build trusted relationships amongst stakeholders for this larger effort of collectively improving a whole economic sector so it benefits everybody. And we see more Vermont-made products getting into Vermont stores, into Vermont schools, into Vermont hospitals, into Vermont restaurants.”
Kahler thinks Farm to Plate is the perfect example of how networking can help the state turn on a dime during a disaster.
Photo: House Agriculture Committee Chair Carolyn Partridge speaks at the Farm to Plate Strategic Plan press conference at the Statehouse in January, 2011 to release the first 10-year strategic plan to strengthen Vermont’s food system. Others in the photo L to R: former Lt Gov Phil Scott, former VAAFM Secretary Chuck Ross, former ACCD Secretary Lawrence Miller, former Speaker of the House Shap Smith, former House Commerce Committee Chair Bill Botzow, Ellen Kahler. Photo courtesy VSJF.
“I think we saw the fruit of our relationship-building work during the pandemic,” Kahler said. “When everything started to shut down, and so many people were laid off, so many families for the first time were food insecure. We were able to pull together all of the key organizations to work together and seamlessly start moving towards implementing new initiatives to help feed people. Many people in state government and the funding communities definitely said that, had we not had the Farm to Plate network initiative in place for 10 years, we wouldn’t have been able to respond as quickly and as effectively as we did.”
To take an example, look at the Everyone Eats program, where people could pick up free meals made by local restaurants. It solved two problems at the same time. People could feed their families, and restaurants could continue to survive during the pandemic.
“The whole Vermont Everyone Eats program, in many ways, was supported by the fact that we already have this network of people all across the state, who then got mobilized in a very specific way,” Kahler said. “They came together at the regional level to distribute food in large part because many of these relationships already existed, or because people had the understanding of why it’s important to create these relationships in the first place.”
In 2019, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund was reauthorized by the Vermont state legislature to create a Vermont Agriculture and Food System Strategic Plan 2021-2030, which was completed and published last year.
Another economic sector Kahler and the VSJF are deeply involved with is generally called “working lands.”
In reality, all land is working land, said forester Charlie Hancock.
Photo: Consulting forester Charlie Hancock. Photo by Erica Houskeeper.
“A wetland is working to preserve water quality, or sequester carbon or do things like that,” he said. “But from a human interaction, if you want to put it that way, the Working Lands Enterprise Board helps support the agricultural working lands and the forest economy.”
The Working Lands Enterprise Board is a state entity created by statute in 2012. Its head is the secretary of agriculture or his/her delegate. It works to support working lands and enterprises through the awarding of grants. Kahler, as head of the VSJF, has served as a non-voting member on the board since its inception; Hancock currently serves as vice-chair.
“My position was written into the legislation because of our role managing Vermont Farm to Plate, but also because of the work we have done over the years in the forest products industry,” Kahler said. “The legislators who crafted the legislation felt that it would be helpful to have some whole, industry-level knowledge that would not be term-limited.”
The board works by making critical investments.
“We award grants to businesses, so a one-time award of a certain amount of money to say, get a new tractor or do some infrastructure improvements on a farm or a firewood processor for a logging operation,” Hancock said. “There are other scales of investments in different years. It depends on how much money we get.”
There are also financing opportunities.
“We can use funds to leverage greater opportunity,” Hancock said. “So every year, there’s a strategic thought partnership that happens on the board around how we can take the money that we’re getting from the state — through either general annual budget allocation or through one-time investments such as this past year with ARPA dollars and COVID dollars. The board wrestles with the idea of what we see on the horizon. What issue can we work on? What has potential? And how do we act in our capacity to support them? That’s where I got to know Ellen really well, through this kind of thought partnership of how do we really catalyze growth and sustainability and strengthen Vermont’s working lands economies.”
There are many actors in the working lands economy, including primary producers such as farms, but also the distributors of the produce, and the markets themselves. Cheesemakers fall into this category, but so do loggers and furniture makers. These jobs represent a large part of the Vermont economy and cannot be outsourced overseas.
The working lands project is modeled after the Farm to Plate Network, Kahler said.
“The forest products industry folks wanted something similar in terms of having a strategic plan,” Kahler said. “And my organization has been involved in the forest products industry since the very beginning, back in the 1990s. So we formed a forestry committee and we commissioned work done by a consulting firm. And they created a life plan, of sorts. One of the things that it called for was to create a forest industry network, and to pull the whole supply chain of actors together in a way that would strengthen the forest industry, because it has been very much on the decline.”
Many Vermont loggers, for example, have lost their jobs because their customers — the pulp sawmills in Maine — have closed down.
“So there’s been a real challenge to the low grade wood market,” Kahler said. “And so there was a real desire to pull the industry together and collaborate more for everyone’s benefit.”
In June, they held their third Forest Industry Network Summit at Burke Mountain Resort.
“They had 160 folks from across the industry come to spend a day and a half together,” Kahler said. “People hadn’t physically seen each other for many years because of the pandemic, so the energy and the excitement was really palpable. People were very enthusiastic about being together. They learned a lot from the panelists and workshops that we had. And now there’s going to be a big initiative coming out of the Vermont Forest, Parks, and Recreation Department, as part of the workforce bill that got passed.”
One way the VSJF supports working lands is by shinning a light on the vast array of products and businesses around the state.
“Every month we publish an article that highlights a really interesting thing that’s happening in the forest products industry,” Kahler said. “A particular company, for instance. And VermontBiz almost always picks up those stories and runs them. We have featured people that make instruments, or people that make chairs, or people that run sawmills that have renewable energy co-generation happening to power their kilns. We’ve highlighted a sawmill owner who’s also really into hiking the Long Trail. We try to find interesting stories to raise awareness in Vermonters about the complexity of the forest products sector and all the different types of products that result from having forests.”
Kahler said one important activity has been combating the growing idea that trees should never be cut down.
“It is an ill-advised movement that’s starting to gain momentum,” she said. “Vermont looks the way it does because we have working forests. And the best way to keep forests as forests, rather than housing developments, is to manage them sustainably so that they continue to produce products that we all need. Many of us have really beautiful wooden kitchen tables that come from Vermont, or we heat our wood stoves with wood that comes from Vermont, or we heat our homes with wood pellets that have to come from someplace. So we need to have working forests available to us.”
Kahler is not afraid to dream big, Hancock said.
“She’s not scared to look at something that might be really challenging,” Hancock said. If we say, ‘You know, we’re gonna need more millions to make this happen,’ Ellen will say, ‘Great, let’s go find it. Let’s go make it happen.’ She’s not daunted by challenges. She is a resource for the state of Vermont and the working lands economy. We wouldn’t be where we are today without Ellen.”
Another project Kahler has been working on over the last two years brings together experts and alumni to assist Vermont Technical College transform its agriculture education program and make it more representative and cutting-edge while training the next generation of farmers, food workers, and food entrepreneurs.
“Vermont’s food system needs Vermont Tech to be strong and turning out lots of graduates to fill a wide variety of jobs in our growing food system,” Kahler said.
Kahler has been closely working with former Vermont Tech President Pat Moulton.
“Way back, when former chancellor Jeb Spaulding announced that he was going to be closing the Northern Vermont University and closing the Randolph campus of Vermont Tech, Ellen contacted me,” Moulton told me. “She said, ‘Oh, my God! If we lose Vermont Tech’s Randolph campus, we lose Vermont Tech’s agriculture program! We can’t have that! If we wanted to help you plan a future for your agriculture program, would you be interested?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely!’”
So, Regina Beidler, Louise Calderwood, and Kahler — “I call them ‘My ag ladies,’” Moulton said —put together a steering committee to come up with a reboot of the agricultural program.
“It’s an ability to continue the dairy farm management program that we’ve had for years, but to add more diversification, broaden the scope, and attract more students,” Moulton said. “So that’s what she’s been working with me on for the last two plus years.”
Kahler is so focused on job creation that this year she managed to convince the Legislature that they need a kind of ‘mini-Kahler’ — someone to oversee all the aspects of workforce development, according to Senator Clarkson.
“She helped the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs appreciate the fact that what we needed was a higher level coordination of workforce development,” Clarkson said. “She helped make it clear to us that we really need someone who can orchestrate and make coordination seamless and more effective.”
Instead of “siloing” efforts, Kahler told the Legislature, the state should be integrating them.
“Whether that’s a plumbing apprenticeship, or a broadband installer,” Clarkson said. “Whatever it is, we have people who need to grow their skills, we have people who need skilled labor, and we have people providing the education for that. This year Ellen made it very clear that we really need someone to coordinate all those pieces and help us deliver the entire system more effectively. And as a result of that, we’ll have, hopefully, more effective workforce development.”
Peer-to-peer business counseling was so important to Kahler that she took it with her to the VSJB and attached it to climate change. It is now called DeltaClimeVT.
DeltaClimeVT is Vermont’s climate economy business accelerator program.
“We started up about five years ago,” Kahler said. “The ‘climate economy’ is the notion that given climate change, how can we adapt our economy and all the businesses in the economy to be connected in some way to the climate to create climate solutions? We decided that our contribution to that effort could be to start up a business accelerator. So DeltaClime is energy- and climate-related.”
Vermont has a mature energy sector — for example, cutting edge utilities and energy companies, solar energy companies, Efficiency Vermont, and the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation — but it lacks entrepreneurism.
“We developed this accelerator to, in essence, to try to strengthen the entrepreneurial environment, the startup environment in Vermont, for energy and climate related businesses,” Kahler said. “We want to develop the relationships between the utility companies and energy partners with entrepreneurs who wanted to start companies that could create products or services that would be of benefit to the utilities.”
DeltaClimeVT recruits start-ups internationally every year.
“We actually recruit in both the US and Canada, and as well as abroad,” Kahler said. “We select eight companies to go through this accelerator program. It’s very intensive. We partner with the Vermont utilities and a lot of energy organizations, energy companies, Efficiency Vermont, Vermont Gas Systems, for instance. They’re all financial sponsors of the program. And then we also raise foundation funds. And we hire a really national level, highly renowned organization to provide the curriculum for this accelerator.”
The utilities attached to the program can get a head start with a newly developed product; they can create a pilot program to test it.
“And if it works, that might help to expand the reach of those products and get them into the marketplace faster,” Kahler said.
Kahler has many new ideas bubbling on her stove. One of them is trying to improve the care and genetics of dairy cows so that when their milking days are over, they will bring a higher price on the meat market.
Another is trying to find new products for low-grade wood, perhaps by turning it into clothing.
“In Europe and other parts of the US, there are manufacturing plants that turn wood into materials that can ultimately get turned into clothing,” Kahler said. “We have a fiber background in Vermont, right? We have a lot of sheep. We have a lot of yarns. Our job is to explore these opportunities and see who are the entrepreneurs that might be interested in starting or growing businesses to take advantage of those market opportunities.”
Photo: Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. Photo: Baldwin Photography
Vermont is currently trying to increase its workforce in a major way. It tries to attract immigrants and more people of color who live in other parts of the country.
But the more people are attracted, the more they bump up against the severe affordable housing shortage.
“All these systems are connected,” Kahler said. “You don’t have a housing system, and a workforce system and an education system, and a health care system all in isolation, right?”
The state is in an affordable housing crisis right now.
“In order to build affordable housing, you need carpenters, plumbers and electricians in sufficient quantities,” Kahler said. “But a housing developer cannot create, start up and fund a workforce development program for one project alone.”
Bringing together organizations who provide apprenticeships and specialized training can help solve the problem.
“If you know that there are three organizations who provide apprenticeships and specialized training, and you, as the business owner, say, ‘Hey, I’m going to have 10 openings for carpenters in the next two years, and for three more plumbers and two electricians due to retirements coming up,’ then a workforce development program could say, ‘Alright, if those are the needs of one company, how many other companies are in a similar boat?” Kahler said. “So then the workforce development program people can create opportunities to reach out to young people, or to people who want to change careers, and say, ‘Hey, these jobs are going to exist. Go through this training program and we can help you get those jobs.’ That’s an example of two different communities of stakeholders collaborating for mutual benefit.”
Kahler believes she has one of the best jobs in the state; she has no plans to leave the VSJF.
“I would like, over the next 10 years, to be part of a conversation around how to improve our economy in the state in a way that benefits more people and builds a stronger middle class,” Kahler said. “And that does so within the realities of climate change so we’re reducing our energy footprint by eating closer to home, where we’re rebuilding or strengthening our communities, and where we’re increasing our ability to be engaged in our communities more and in supporting one another more.”
The United States, as Kahler points out, has spent the last 40 years being centered on individualism and the personal accumulation of wealth, with no interest in empathy or community. As a result, the country is struggling with culture wars and a lack of civility. It is all connected to the fact that so many Americans are living slightly above, on, or below the poverty line.
“They are also living in a lot of fear, or are not employed in ways that are meaningful to them as human beings,” Kahler said. “And so, as a result, we have this turmoil in our country. And then you add on racism and hundreds and hundreds of years of history of white supremacy. All of that combined has created this very dark time in our country.”
Ultimately, people cannot survive as individuals, Kahler said.
“Your individual well-being is connected to societal well-being, and societal well-being is connected to how well all the individuals within that society are doing,” she said. “I want to spend the rest of my lifetime — however long I have on this planet — to working on shifting the dynamics so we become more balanced and connected and are mutually supportive. I feel like a lot of the tools and approaches that we take at the Jobs Fund over the years can be very helpful.”
Vermont has always been seen as a beacon of light for the rest of the country, Kahler said.
“And if we can do it here, we can provide a real example for how others can do it in other places,” she said. “I think people in this country who get what’s been going on are looking for some vision. They’re looking for an alternative that is positive, that is less anxious, less stressful, less fear-inducing. They’re looking for something that is more hopeful and future-oriented and positive. And I think that we in Vermont can offer another path forward for humanity that is more equitable, is fair, is supportive, is kind. And I want to be part of making that happen.”
Joyce Marcel is a journalist in southern Vermont. In 2017, she was named the best business magazine profile writer in the country by the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. She is married to Randy Holhut, the news editor/acting operations manager of The Commons, a weekly newspaper in Brattleboro.
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