From Laura McCaffrey of Vermont Afterschool:
In late fall/early winter of 2022, Vermont Afterschool's Vermont Youth Project (VYP) awarded Cabot youth $40,000 to increase community spaces for young people ages 11 to 22. Now it's time for youth to vote for their favorite options!
Who has been working on this project?
Before Laura McCaffrey of Vermont Afterschool started on this project, Anthony Christiano's humanities class worked on mapping youth spaces in town and surveying youth in Cabot School. Laura McCaffrey brought together a number of young people to form the Cabot Youth Council, including homeschooled youth and youth attending Cabot School. Since last spring, 28 Cabot young people have attended at least one of the Cabot Youth Council meetings to work on this project, with an average of 10-15 regularly attending meetings, which is a great number for a town the size of Cabot. The Cabot Youth Council worked on proposals based on the survey data, and they worked with community partners to develop proposals.
A huge thanks!
A huge thanks to community partners who worked on proposals or provided other support to the Cabot Youth Council–Cameron North, Cabot School (especially Sonia Scherr, Anthony Christiano, Amelia Blume, Jonny Flood, and Rebecca Tatischeff), Elizabeth Vitale, everyone in the town clerk's office (who let the youth council use the Willey Building meeting space), Neighbors in Action, Dean Deasy, Stef Burtt, Amanda Otto, and Kathleen Hoyne.
Who can vote?
Cabot youth! (Ages 10-22. The young folks who vote should be Cabot residents, and they can attend any school or they can be homeschooled/unschooled.)
What are youth voting for?
When youth open the voting form, they'll see descriptions of each project. (The descriptions are a bit long, so I'm not going to post them here. Go to the link or the flier, which is at the end of all this.)
How to vote?
We are doing ranked voting. Youth should vote in order of what they like best. #1 is what a voter wants the most, then #2, and then #3. #4 is the one a voter least wants. If there's a choice a young person doesn't want, they shouldn't vote for it at all.
Please keep in mind—The grant is $40,000 total, and three of the four options require $22,000. This means that depending on how the vote goes, the second and/or third ranked projects may receive less funding (less than $22,000). The amount they receive will be based on how much of the $40,000 is left after the project that receives the highest vote total receives all the funding requested.
We'll keep the voting form open through Monday, Feb 19th. After that, the voting form will no longer accept votes.
The link to the voting form and the project descriptions: https://www.cognitoforms.com/vermontafterschool/cabotvypvotingform
If you have any questions or concerns, please send these to laura@vermontafterschool.org
Happy voting week!
May 22, 2024, 10:30 to 11:15 AM
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