Green Mountain Center for Sustainability Notes for February 2024

Submitted by Laird Christensen and Eleanor Tison, Co-Directors

It’s always a treat for the folks at the Sustainability Center when we receive a visit from our Green Mountain College alumni! We recently welcomed Dan Sullivan from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who came by with his daughter, Moss, to see what we are up to in Prescott. “Dan, Dan, the Garlic Man” was one of the first graduates of our MS in Environmental Studies program in 2008, and he left his mark on the Poultney community by bringing boxes or organic garlic to each Graduate Residency. He worked for the Rodale Institute back then, and had some terrific connections. The garlic we grew from those early cloves of Music and Ukranian Red were shared with other students, staff, and neighbors around the region and is still adding some zing to meals in Rutland County and beyond. (Laird has recently planted the latest generation of those cloves in Blacksburg, Virginia!)

Of course, some former GMC students and staff have settled in the Prescott area, including Annie Baker. She began her studies in Poultney, where she worked with Ryan Ihrke in the Green Mountain College Sustainability Office, and then moved to Prescott to complete her BA in 2020. As our first Sustainability Coordinator, Annie helped inspire much of the work of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College. Most recently, she was hired as Manager of the Community Compost Project of the Prescott Farmers Market. We’re very proud of our alumni!

Eleanor Tison and her staff continue their good work developing the gardens and compost systems on the Prescott College Campus, and she invites you to follow their work on Instagram. The Advisory Council of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability recently met to begin planning events and activities for the coming year, and we’re always interested in hearing what we can do for you. If you’d like to help support our work, we appreciate any assistance you can offer. We’ve included a button for gifts on the Green Mountain Center website. You can even specify what you’d like your contribution to go toward when filling out the form.

And don’t forget: we love sharing news from our GMC alumni, and so we hope you will reach out and let us know where the path from Poultney has led you. It’s as easy as sending a message to [email protected].