It is with great pleasure that we share with you: our doors are open! Our heartfelt gratitude goes to all the Founding Donors, the Founding Team, hardworking contractors, our dedicated Board, and everyone on the state level who supported the idea, the mission, and the manifestation of Riverflow Community.
Four talented, vibrant, fun-loving Friends now call Riverflow home. Each Friend is settling into Willow House (the first therapeutic community home) and life is filled with the warmth of emergent community and extended family. In under a year, our 8-bedroom home was renovated with warmth, beauty, energy efficiency, life safety, and accessibility in mind. Simultaneously, we formed our nonprofit, wrote grant applications, developed policy and organizational structures, designed programming, brought on an inspired, qualified staff team, received charitable donations, and built relationships with our surrounding communities through volunteer days, news outlets, and on-site tours. We could not have done this without the profound and unwavering generosity of those who joined the Founding Donors Circle or the advocates from DAIL, VLITE, VHIP, and the Camphill Foundation who believed in our mission. Every gift and every grant came at a moment when we needed courage to keep moving forward. To all of you who stepped in to support the creation of this much-needed initiative, please know that our doors would not have opened without you.
We are just at the beginning, and we will continue to need your support: as donors, as community volunteers, as local partners. Keep an eye out for details about our Open House coming in the Spring!
It was a hot day in early spring when a small group of Vermont parents settled in to share their dreams of a bright and meaningful future for their children, who had so far not found a place in Vermont to live a dignified adult life. Holding tight to their belief that everyone is both valuable and needed, they started dreaming of an intentional community that would honor the wholeness of every human being. Some of these parents had prior experience with Camphill, having seen their children grow and thrive in this model.
This same group of parents had been working for several years to encourage Vermont to expand housing options for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), beyond the only option available in the state - adult foster care. Elizabeth Campbell, propelled by grief at the loss of her husband to cancer and driven by concern for her son’s future, founded the Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative (DDHI), a state-wide parent advocacy group. Given the immensely diverse needs of those seeking stable care and homes in Vermont, these families believed it was time to act to bring about long-awaited, expanded living options for their adult children. Through the hard work and persistence of DDHI, the state of Vermont created Act 186, a pilot planning grant for groups interested in establishing alternative models of long-term housing for adults with IDDs in the state.
Inspired to find a community that would not just include but celebrate their children with high support needs, two Vermont families collaborated to fill out the Act 186 planning grant application, hoping this could make their vision of a joy-filled, inclusive community, located within a 35-minute drive of downtown Burlington, a reality. They reached out to Hannah Schwartz, an intentional community consultant with a lifetime of experience in the field, to support their initiative. She was encouraging about the project and enthusiastic about their mission.
The grant went through and the planning commenced: Riverflow Community was born and off to a whirlwind start. Planning meetings, visioning, calling, collaborating - the founding team grew to include a new family, the Langens, and three members with Camphill experience. The vibrancy of our group, the mission to expand options for individuals with significant support needs, and the wish to celebrate being human together through meaningful, lifelong friendships carried us along.
The team worked hard to identify the scope of the community and parameters of the property we would need. This is when the magic happened. On the very same day that the team learned we had been awarded the planning grant, Elizabeth decided she would take a new biking route and fell in love with the area. That night she went online, exploring various homes for sale in Monkton. To her amazement, she found an uncannily ideal home located at 57 Cedar Lane on 30 beautiful acres. She immediately called team member Amy Caffry, who met her at the property the next day. Amy also fell fast for 57 Cedar Lane, but they agreed it was important to explore other properties. The house had not been lived in for six years, had been neglected, and would need a lot of work to become a warm and lively community home.
The search for the right property continued, but nothing struck the team like 57 Cedar Lane, which had many of the qualities we were looking for. We filed our 501(c)(3) application, put together a Board of Directors, formulated bylaws, and scraped the money together to get the Cedar Ln. property off the market. We held a Strategic Planning retreat, confirmed our mission and vision, and set priorities for the first few years. We worked hard and consulted with many contractors to understand the scope of renovations needed to get the 8-bedroom house out of its sleeping state and bring it up to compliance with Therapeutic Community Residence (TCR) regulations and accessibility codes. Within 8 months, renovations, updates, life safety features, and new system installations were complete, Riverflow Community was staffed, and the four founding Friends moved in!
