Vermont Folklife builds programs around community concerns and their partners’ expertise. They root their 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, Vermont Folklife recognizes 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.