What We Are Building Together
Last week, Creative Campus Director Kris Gruen and Board Chair Barbara Vacarr joined leaders from across Vermont at the VCRD Community Leadership Summit in Castleton. Kris led a workshop on creativity as a leadership practice, while Barbara served as a panelist discussing leadership through change and uncertainty. Both conversations reflect the importance of creativity, collaboration, and new possibilities for places like the former Goddard campus.
Barbara, also former president of Goddard College, explores these ideas further in her recent Times Argus op-ed, What We Are Building Together. As she writes, “The campus is the place. The commons is what we are building.”
We're pleased to share her piece below, the first of more reflections to come.
"Something remarkable is happening on the former Goddard College campus in Plainfield.
And because this is a time of both possibility and understandable confusion, we want our neighbors across Central Vermont to understand what The Creative Campus at Goddard is — and what it is not.
When Goddard College closed in 2024, it wasn’t simply an educational institution that disappeared. A place woven into the cultural, economic and civic life of this region for generations suddenly lost the institution that had held it together.
The buildings remained. The land remained. The theater, kitchens, classrooms, residences, gardens and gathering places remained.
But the organism that had connected them was gone.
What happens next to a place like this?
That is the question The Creative Campus at Goddard was created to explore.
Our vision is to cultivate a living commons: a place where people come together to live, create and learn; where artists and educators, young people and elders, entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations encounter one another; and where cultural, educational, economic and community life can grow in relationship to this extraordinary place.
We are not trying to recreate Goddard College. We are asking what can emerge from the values and possibilities that animated this place while creating something responsive to the needs of Vermont today.
And it is already happening.
The campus is home to nonprofit organizations and educational programs. People are living there. Concerts, theater, retreats, conferences, celebrations and community gatherings are taking place. Artists and performers are returning. Visitors are staying on campus. New educational initiatives are emerging.
At the same time, we are very much a startup — building an organization while operating programs, developing earned revenue, raising philanthropic support, creating partnerships and learning what this new commons needs to become.
There is also an important distinction the community deserves to understand:
The Creative Campus at Goddard does not own the former Goddard College campus.
The property is privately owned. The Creative Campus is an independent nonprofit that leases portions of the property and is working to steward its educational, artistic, cultural and community dimensions.
Other businesses and organizations on the campus have their own relationships and agreements with the property owner. TCC does not negotiate those leases, determine their terms, or maintain those spaces.
From the outside, all of this can understandably look like one enterprise called “the Goddard campus.” It isn’t.
And the transition has not been seamless.
Some organizations and businesses have come and gone. Some experiments have flourished; others have not. There have been frustrations and disappointments alongside extraordinary creativity and commitment. We don’t want to minimize those experiences, nor do we want to claim authority or responsibility we don’t have.
What we can be accountable for is the kind of organization we are building and the relationships we ourselves create.
We believe a commons must be built through trust, reciprocity, transparency and genuine relationship with the people and communities it serves.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that this is difficult.
The death of an institution and the birth of something new are both painful processes.
There is grief in losing what was and uncertainty in creating what does not yet fully exist. Old structures disappear before new ones are strong enough to replace them. People take risks. Some stay. Some leave. Expectations collide with realities.
The former Goddard campus is living in that uncomfortable space now.
But something larger is at stake.
College campuses are extraordinary regional resources. They contain housing, theaters, kitchens, classrooms, studios, land, infrastructure and gathering spaces created over generations through tuition, philanthropy, public investment and community commitment.
When the institution disappears, should all of that simply become real estate?
We believe communities deserve another possibility.
Our longer-term aspiration is that the core educational, artistic, cultural and community assets of this campus can ultimately be held in some form of collective, nonprofit or public-benefit stewardship — not simply for one organization, but for the communities and municipalities throughout this region whose lives are touched by this place.
That is what we mean by a commons.
The campus is the place. The commons is what we are building.
And a commons needs an economy.
Retreats, lodging, performances, conferences, celebrations and other earned-revenue activities help make the larger mission possible. Philanthropy and public investment can support what a purely commercial model cannot. Community participation helps ensure that the place remains connected to the people it is intended to serve.
We are learning how to weave those pieces together, and we won’t get everything right.
But one outcome of Goddard’s closure could have been for this extraordinary place to fragment into unrelated private properties, gradually losing its connection to the cultural and civic life of the region.
We believe another future is possible.
And we are already building it.
The Creative Campus at Goddard is an invitation to imagine what can happen when the end of an institution is not treated only as a loss but as an opportunity to ask: What is worth carrying forward? What needs to be released? And what new forms of community might now become possible?"
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