Hi I'm Eric Ford for Made Here.

The Freedom and Unity Young Filmmakers contest is an event for middle and high school students in Vermont.

This showcase of short films features winners from the 2023 contest.

This year, there are four short films from three different students exploring poverty, life in rural Vermont, the impact of music and a personal profile.

You can watch the Freedom and Unity Young Filmmakers Contest Showcase and other great Made Here films streaming on vermontpublic.org and through the PBS app.

Enjoy the films and thanks for watching.

Poverty is definitely a problem in Vermont.

My name is the Reverend Joan Duvall.

I'm the minister of the Unitarian Church, familiar with my work as the minister here at the church.

I definitely meet a lot of people who are struggling with not having enough financial resources to cover their basic needs.

Do you think poverty is a problem in Vermont?

Yeah, majorly.

I didn't get it like firsthand myself until after adulthood, until after turning 18.

My parents were very, very middle class, at least for the overall fabric of America.

You know, however you want to say it.

But when I turned 18, because of my disability, I have autism.

They forced me onto the government welfare system for autism, like a lot of autism was are on that program.

And that is when I fully became aware of it because I was one of those people myself at that point.

What's your name?

I am Emily Lapord.

I am originally from North Hills, Vermont.

I've been working as part of a national movement called the Poor People's Campaign a national call for moral revival right here in Vermont.

We have a Vermont Poor People's Campaign calling for a change, like a big change, just a sea change from the local level all the way up to the national level, to recognize that there are still, you know, more than 140 million people in this country who live in poverty or, you know, low income, low wealth.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

What does poverty look like to you?

You know, it looks like people who need to find shelter literally on the steps of our church building.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is people needing a meal and a place to sleep, especially when it's cold.

And, you know, it looks like around the corner from here, a community fridge that offers free food to people who are food insecure.

People measure poverty by income level, but you can also just measure people's ability to have housing and food and to be safe.

It looks like, you know, people who are dealing with health issues that they have to ignore for weeks and years because they can't afford, you know, appropriate health care.

It looks like our our church community and other faith communities in the area preparing and distributing meals every week.

And the people who line up for those meals because, again, they can't, you know, can't afford to make ends meet.

It looks like showing up at the Hilltop Inn at the top of Hospital Hill to offer worship services to folks who can't find permanent housing.

Do you think poverty in Vermont is an issue?

I also absolutely do and absolutely.

I think there is a lot of jobs available right now that are not paying a lot of money.

It's it's always been a problem and it isn't being properly addressed.

And I think if you look at the cost of living in the state compared to your average salary that you're going to find now, it doesn't add up.

You can't make it with.

So we are in the basement level of the Trinity Methodist Church in Montpelier at the Montpelier Food Pantry, run by Just Basics.

They chose the name Just Basics, because they wanted the organization to be a social justice organization that fought poverty and really made sure focused on the basics housing, transportation, safety, food.

Right.

So people have the basic needs met in order to be able to thrive.

And so I think of poverty in those terms of if your very basic needs are not being met, then that's when you start talking about poverty.

I think that cost of living has gone up tremendously since the pandemic started and people are just getting priced out of housing.

They're getting we have our demand for the food pantry has skyrocketed since the since the pandemic started and especially in the last four months, we have hit record highs in terms of total visits in the month.

We've never before had more than a thousand visits in a month, and we've had that almost consistently since.

Well, it seems like we're breaking a record every month.

We're having this is the room where all of the produce is put.

Now, since we're not in regular time.

All the produces in their fridges.

But during a normal day.

This would all be full of produce on here.

And we have non-perishables over there and we have a beef and pork freezer over here.

And then in this room is our other.

We have two food rooms, we have an eggs fridge, we have a chicken fridge and various sections of food here.

You know, poverty is I think it's something that we sort of talk about, like it's inevitable.

Like it's just something that will never change.

That's always going to be there.

And I don't think that has to be the case.

My name is Mary Heller Osgood.

I'm a retired teacher and I live in Putney.

I went to kindergarten at a school, at the public school, and then I went to the Putney Central School one year, and then I went to the grammar school and then I went to finish school.

We would just walk there, ski there through the woods to go to school.

My name is Noah Hoskins.

I'm a history teacher at the public school.

I also run this farm, the bunker farm, with my family.

I think that that much like the school, there is no usual day on the farm at different times a year.

Things are really, really dramatically different.

And that's sort of what makes the those two different parts of my life work together.

My wife runs the greenhouse nursery part of the farm, and my brother in law runs the maple sugaring part of the farm.

So I help them and help them keep everything running and going smoothly.

But but that means that everything's always a little bit different every day, depending on what's happening.

I think in those days, life was really free.

One of my stories is riding a horse with a friend and I asked her, Why do you have a toothbrush in your pocket?

She said, Oh, in case I end up at your house.

So, I mean, we would just go and I don't think people worried much.

It was great.

It was great.

It's a great place to grow up.

I think that the the core parts of it are similar to now skiing in the wintertime and swimming in the summertime.

And all the good the good things that go with the in Vermont as a kid with the different seasons.

And, you know, I grew up on a small farm and that was great.

Lots of animals and people around all the time and lots of stuff going on.

And I always learning new things.

I think the hardest part of all is living in the same place was probably when I was in my twenties because it's a time where a lot of people are really focused on, you know, building new communities and new friendships and largely urban areas.

A lot of people from here moved away, and I was interested in working in agriculture, and that doesn't happen in Brooklyn.

So I think that there was a sense that there was a lot of energy happening in those places.

But I also was learning a lot as a of wonderful things and hanging out with some pretty amazing people, doing some pretty amazing, very real and tangible things in the countryside.

But when I went to Putney School, I would say boys and girls were treated pretty equally and we all dressed the same.

Everybody dressed the same.

Everybody wore Levi's turtlenecks or something or flannel shirt.

Except for the people who didn't wash.

But you know plenty of those.

But it was really simple that way.

And when I went to college, I realized there was an expectation for men and women to be more different.

And that I don't think that me I felt I experienced that I happened to go the first year there was coeducation and I wasn't used to not being treated equally.

Oh, people just come up to you and say, Coed, go home.

Quite a few worse things than that.

But there were a lot of students that didn't want that to happen, and I think that was hard for all.

But my savior there was that I was on the ski team and we had a great group of like my name is John Cauldwell, how I came to Putney.

Well, I came with my family and I was in the seventh grade at the time.

So when I came up here, I started at the school in the eighth grade where the school was amazing.

I was in a very small class.

That's where I met my future wife.

We met together and in the eighth grade it was more rough and ready.

Then there was more physicality.

I did a survey here about ten years ago and if you consider all the afternoon time that you students have, more time is spent indoors than outdoors.

So that's a huge change from a from a school.

You know, I probably started skiing when I was five or something and I remember I didn't get my first cross-country ski kit.

I was six.

There weren't really people that really have cross-country skis.

I mean, some grown up and no kids at school.

We ski to school.

And, you know, I had some pretty good skiers in my class, like Tommy Caldwell.

Even Johnny Caldwell was incredibly good at getting families involved in skiing, really push skiing and put me in the public club was a really central part of skiing in the country.

The best skiers in the country were here.

He was very inclusive, very encouraging.

He imported skis so people could get skis.

So I think without Johnny, we probably wouldn't have ended up skiing.

Well, the biggest thing, I suppose, that happened to me was they had everybody skied.

So I started skiing and caught on pretty well and got to be a pretty good skier.

And then I went to Dartmouth College, got lucky and made the Olympic team in 1951.

I graduated 50 and then after that I came back here and taught and taught math and did a lot of coaching soccer, baseball, skiing, of course, track and all that kind of stuff.

The day of the cross-country and the day of the jumping, I couldn't I had bad shoulders, bad arms.

I couldn't button my shirt up.

I had to get my roommate to button my shirt.

So I finished 20, 26 results, say 26.

If you look carefully at the results, you'll see that only 26 people finish.

So I lose 26 out of 26 and it was my strategy and coaching.

I don't know if I had a strategy.

I, I started to get a lot of students coming out for skiing.

And if there's anything that I hate, it's drills.

So I said, Well, we'll get rid of some of these kids.

My God, the.

About two days later, some kids would come up to me and say, Hey, Johnny, can we come out for the ski team?

We hear it's a lot of fun.

Is sir.

Oh, well, I. I blew that one because they wanted to come out and do drills and that's how we got 55 or 60 kids.

I think that that it's very easy to romanticize rural living.

And we're seeing a lot of that right now with COVID stuff, with a lot of people from the cities being like, Oh, the country is so great, we can like do this and that.

But I think that there were times were where it was a challenging place to live for people.

I think that with, you know, the decline of smaller farming, I think that there's a real, uh, there's real challenges.

And in rural communities, you know, in the Midwest and, and that certainly was evident in the time I was in Ohio.

But that's part of living in a rural area, is a desire to see something more to to to experiment with different things.

I think for me, as I said, I was very, very interested in food.

I was very, very interested in the role that that food played in communities and people's lives.

I was very interested in communities in general and how communities survive and and one of the things that communities need to survive is continuity.

So I felt very committed to staying in this area and being part of the community I grew up in and working in systems that help sustain those communities.

And I think agriculture and education both fall into that same basket.

And what I can tell you is that in many of my conversations with people who have spent their lives in urban areas, there's a longing for something else.

We had a friend 20 years ago get married.

She married, got married on the hill.

Her family lived right over there and she married somebody from New Jersey.

And I sat next to one of his aunts or somebody at the wedding, and she went, What on earth do people do here?

I said, Well, we work and live.

And she said, she she just couldn't she just couldn't understand how somebody could actually live here.

I think wherever you are, you find you find something to do.

That's all I know.

You know all I know.

Music is a fantastic tool to be able to connect with people who you have never met and may never even hear of in your entire life.

And it's an excellent way to explore and process emotions, as well as sharing just ideas with the world.

And so what does music mean to you?

Cake or The Decemberists?

Warehouse by the Dave MATTHEWS Band.

The Arcadian Wild.

People can have a very wide variety of music taste, some which includes overly bombastic harmonies of sound jazz as opposed to this.

But that's not to say that either of these tastes are more correct or worse than the other.

This is just to say there's a lot of variation in music, and this is just Western music that I personally have come across.

And music can serve as something to bridge the gap between two people.

A The beginning of a relationship with someone whose music taste I didn't generally like and I because I really love music, listening to it and thinking about it, I asked this person to share with me their favorite music, knowing I probably wouldn't like it.

And this person shared with me their music, their favorite music, and I listened to it and I think that it really affected my feelings for this person and my entire view on the music itself changed.

So they informed each other the emotions that I had for this person and the, the, the way I felt about the music.

It is interesting how we use music to reinforce and validate our emotions, even though it may seem odd because you think about it.

Why do depressing songs exist?

Why do breakup songs exist?

Why is that whole genre of this thing happened and now I feel x-y-z about it exists.

It's because it's something that we all need.

We need to feel validated in our emotions.

And what better way to do that than here expressed through a song that we love?

Say you went through a bad breakup and now you can listen to how, oh, you're ex deserve you anyway.

And even though you may not believe it at the time, you can help validate your emotions and push you through to move on.

Even if the fundamental message of the song can be bad, it doesn't change the fact that it helps our emotions in terms of listening to it.

If I'm dealing with some some bad stuff going on or something that just something very bad has happened to me in my life or something like that, I will like to there's like specific songs that I like to listen to that can help me just calm down, get through it.

And there have been several situations where that was very helpful.

And again, like I said, I've been playing cello for a large amount of my life and it's just it's affected it greatly and has changed a lot of things for me.

Music is complicated and the reason you love it may be the reason someone else hates it.

You may love to just listen to the sounds and not read into it.

And I may love to read into the deeper meanings, but that doesn't mean that we have to hate the music, and that doesn't mean that the music itself is bad.

I just means that we enjoy it.

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