Partner Profile - Mary Simons
The recently launched Vermont Community Fellows Program is a partnership between Vermont Folklife and Conversations from the Open Road. CFTOR founder Mary Simons has worked with Vermont Folklife for over a decade, the relationship evolving from thought partners, to collaborators on a wide variety of projects. We are thrilled to be partnering with Mary on the Vermont Community Fellows Program, where she will be mentoring primarily student fellows over the next two years.
About Mary Simons and Conversations from the Open Road:
Building on experience teaching students ranging from middle school to college, in both public and independent institutions, Mary founded the traveling youth storytelling and digital media crew, Conversations From the Open Road in 2013. The program’s goal is to help students learn in a more collaborative, holistic and relational way. Mary is passionate about bringing young folks out of the classroom and into the wider world. The goal is to give them opportunities to listen to and learn from people on the frontlines of the struggles and intersecting issues affecting local communities. For two weeks, students participating in CFTOR are part of an expansive, immersive exploration, interviewing many people and participating in local cultural events reflecting the guiding questions and community. Once students return, they spend months crafting their own short piece of media to express a thread of the whole. The students then present their collection of media at local film festivals and community dialogues.
Mary has led over twenty-five 2-week road trips with small groups of high school and college crews to places including Oregon, New Mexico, Oklahoma, New Orleans, Detroit, and Minnesota, exploring questions about how we understand substance-use disorder, native sovereignty, the particular and local realities of how our climate is changing, the impacts of coal mining in West Virginia, fracking in Oklahoma, and wind energy in Vermont. Find media from these projects and more on the CFTOR website.
