Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro – Meet The Candidates

by bgcbrattleboro | Town News

The Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro is hosting a “Meet The Candidates” Forum to talk about the important issues facing our town. The event will be on February 16 from 6:00-7:30pm. Each candidate will answer questions on a variety of topics affecting Brattleboro and share their vision on how to move Brattleboro forward. The public will also have the opportunity to ask questions. All candidates have been invited. The event will be moderated. 

The Club is hosting this event to highlight public and youth engagement in the political process. All Brattleboro residents and interested parties – voters and youth –  are invited to attend this Forum. The Club is actively involved in the town, collaborating with many organizations, and continually working to improve downtown and beyond. The Club welcomes the candidates and looks forward to a robust discussion. ASL interpreter available.

Selectboard Meeting Notes: A Dream

by cgrotke | Town News

Hi all. It’s a selectboard meeting night and usually I’d willingly volunteer to sit through the 3-4 hour thing and type up everything everyone has to say. It’s a bit hard for me to do tonight, though. I’m tired, slightly injured, and would rather tell you about a dream I had about the selectboard. It’s a good one!

I’m tired because I just got back from a weekend in Buffalo, cleaning out the family home of 80+ years. It was built by my grandparents, was the first place I was taken after being born, the site of many a Christmas and visit,  as well as family weddings, births, Thanksgiving dinners and more. 

U.S. Health Care Continues to Have The Worst Outcomes

by RDavis | Health

It shouldn’t be a revelation to anyone who has used the U.S. health care non-system that we have the worst health outcomes of any high-income nation. The health care statistics about the U.S. delivery of health care are alarming, but that has been the case for many decades and the situation shows no sign of changing anytime soon.

If we cut to the chase, the reason that we spend more per person on health care, that we have the lowest life expectancy at birth, that we have the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions and that we have the highest maternal and infant mortality rate among high-incomes countries is because of the profit motive.

icymi: Commentary of Mine in the VT Legislative Record

by Norsehorse | Activism

Although I have since discontinued engaging in activism and advocacy (save for continuing to focus on access to public restrooms and related matters for a few more months or so), in case you missed it and it is of interest, I just stumbled upon this commentary of mine that is in the legislative record concerning attitudes regarding people living houseless (i.e., unhoused aka homeless), fyi:

Medicaid & Health Resource Info–Drop-in Hours

by ESchwartz | Health

In Dec. 2022, Congress voted to eliminate the extra federal funding and requirement that states keep people on Medicaid. Vermont will be starting Medicaid redeterminations on April 1. According to the Urban Institute’s projections, up to 29,000 Vermont Medicaid recipients could be affected.

The Vermont Workers’ Center is hosting an informational session in the Meeting Room at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on Feb. 8 between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.

NEGINA on “Here We Are”

by Wendy O'Connell | Arts

NEGINA shares stories of the hardships of leaving her home and family in Afghanistan and becoming a refugee, and talks about her peace-building work as an ArtLord, one mural at a time.

Next Stage Arts Presents a Dance Party Featuring the Music of Blues Guitarist Duke Robillard and His Band on 2/24

by hahrenholz | Entertainment

Join Next Stage for a dance party featuring the music of blues guitarist Duke Robillard and his band, on Friday, February 24 at 7:30 pm at Next Stage Arts, 15 Kimball Hill, in Putney.

Whether it’s a song, a style, an idiom or an image, Duke Robillard will render it with mastery, power, nuance and an unerring grasp of its essence.

Brattleboro and VT COVID-19 Regional Dashboard Summary – February 2023

by cgrotke | Health

Here’s the February 2023 dashboard summary. We continue semi-regular COVID-19 dashboard numbers from the Vermont Department of Health, and MA and NH counties that surround Brattleboro, as long as they continue providing them.  Scroll down the new comments for the latest.

Vermont and MA have very limited looks at what are going on these days, with weekly snapshots. NH attempts daily updates but doesn’t always give new totals, and didn’t update at all at the end of January.

Brattleboro 2023 Selectboard and School Board Candidates

by cgrotke | Politics

Selectboard and school board candidates in Brattleboro have collected their signatures and campaigns are getting underway.

For the Selectboard 3 year seat, Dick DeGray will be running against Liz McLoughlin. Voters can elect one.

For the Selectboard 1 year seat, Spoon Agave, Peter Case, Jessica Gelter, Franz Reichsman and Samuel Stevens have all declared themselves as candidates. Voters can elect two.

A Trillion Trees with Fred Pearce

by BrattleboroLitFest | Books

On Friday, February 10, at 5:00 pm, the Brattleboro Literary Festival will feature A Literary Cocktail Hour with UK author and environmentalist Fred Pearce to discuss his book, A Trillion Trees.The online event is free and open to the public. Register here: https://bit.ly/LitCocktail27

The term ”trillion trees” has recently entered the public use — shorthand for the policy proposal to literally plant one trillion trees across the planet to solve the climate change problem. While the idea has some serious support, Pearce is not entirely sold. It is not that he is anti-tree; quite the contrary. But some of the large top-down reforestation projects are failing because governments aren’t taking their cue from nature. 

BCTV Schedules Week of January 30, 2023

by BCTVProg | Media

BCTV Channel 1079 Weekly Listing for 1/30/23

Monday, January 30, 2023

6:30 am Vermont State House – Vermont Housing Finance Agency Updates 1/13/2023

7:15 am River Valleys Unified School District – RVUSD Bd Mtg 1/23/23

8:00 am The David Pakman Show – The David Pakman Show – Weekly Broadcast

9:00 am Energy Week with George Harvey – This Week’s Energy News

Hospital At Home A Flawed Model

by RDavis | Health

There has been a movement over the past few years to energize the concept of providing some degree of hospital level care at home. Medicare has been modifying its rules to pay for projects that move in this direction and some policymakers are touting this concept as a welcome addition to the health care system.

The Hospital at Home program is quite simply a bad idea. Why would we want to beef up the hospital system of care when it is clear that we should be putting the majority of our health care dollars into prevention, not into patching things up after they go bad?

Hospital care should be the care of last resort. When things break and diseases take hold hospitals do a good job of fixing things. But hospital type care should not be a model for how a health care system moves forward into the future.