The way of life of a community or group.
Tradition, Innovation, and Culture
Vermont Folklife’s mission is to deepen our understanding of each other by engaging with communities across the state to document and share everyday expressions of tradition, innovation, and culture.
Vermont Folklife builds programs around community concerns and our partners’ expertise. We root our work with educators, students, traditional artists and musicians, researchers, and non-profit professionals in the process of collaborative ethnographic inquiry, seeking to understand experience from the perspective of the people to whom an experience belongs.
Through techniques such as interviewing, cultural documentation and media production, we recognize every individual in Vermont as valuable and significant, as an expert in their own arenas of activity, as creative, smart, and capable. No one is on the margins; no one is dismissible.
Explore Vermont Folklife
-
![]()
Trad Camp
-
![]()
Mostly Costly Journey
-
![]()
Pride 1983
-
![]()
Vermont Untapped Podcast
-
![]()
Column: Did You Know?
Learn from (and with) your Community
Founded in 1984, the Vermont Folklife Center is a nationally-recognized education and cultural research nonprofit that uses ethnography—the study of cultural experience through interviewing, participation and observation—to strengthen the understanding of the cultural and social fabric of Vermont's diverse communities.
We bring these methods, ethics and our rich archival collections to the public in a variety of ways:
Community workshops on interviewing and media-making.
Training and resources for educators and students.
Advising community members engaging in their own cultural research and documentation.
Support for traditional artists and musicians in sustaining cultural practices.
Laying strong foundations for future generations of traditional musicians.
