Green Mountain Justice: Voices From the Edge

They made it inside. Jerome, Jessica, Matt, and Liz all have a door that locks. In this final episode of Voices from the Edge, we check in on their lives and sit with what we've learned. Getting housed matters. It is not enough. The cliff effects, the healthcare gaps, the racial hostility, the broken promises — none of that paused because the address changed. This is the culminating episode of...

Kicked out at 14. Sleeping in cemeteries. Building snow caves to survive Vermont winters. Heidi's childhood should never have happened. But the systems meant to protect her failed. And the consequences follow her still. Now a mother of three, Heidi has built the family she never had. Her children know they are loved, fed, safe, and welcome. But she carries the weight of what she survived. &#34...

This is a story about light emerging from darkness. Ralph grew up in Louisiana foster care. No parents. Separated from his brother. No one ever showed him what a father's love looks like. By every measure, the light should have gone out long ago. And yet. When his son fell ill with stage four cancer, Ralph followed him a thousand miles north. He slept in his truck in the parking lot of an Ivy...

Thirty-eight years ago, a teenage girl grabbed a boy and kissed him. There were fireworks. They've been together ever since. Matt and Elizabeth Hunt have held onto each other through everything—raising children, losing nearly everything, living in their car, camping outside in Vermont winters, navigating Elizabeth's serious illness while Matt does everything he can to care for her. Through...

In Vermont, we often talk about our values of freedom and unity, but for too many of our neighbors, these remain distant promises rather than lived realities. Today we're speaking with Jerome Hazelwood, a Black veteran whose journey through homelessness reveals the intersection of systemic racism, healthcare failures, and housing insecurity that shapes daily life for many BIPOC Vermonters. For...

Jessica works long hours serving customers more than full-time every week and volunteers as an EMT in her rural Addison County community. Yet for nearly two years, she and her three children lived in a single motel room—trapped in Vermont's broken housing system that created an impossible catch-22: she earned too much to qualify for assistance but too little to afford rent anywhere. Every day,...