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Vermont is in the midst of a baby boom, but it’s not a trend anyone is celebrating.

Linda Ryan, who runs the Samaritan House, an emergency shelter in St. Albans, had a homeless woman referred to her on Christmas Day who had just given birth to her second child. Kendy Skidmore, director of the Bennington Coalition for the Homeless, says she’s had newborns at her shelter, too five in the last six years, with another one due any day now.... Read more

In 1984, Jonathan Leopold, the city of Burlington’s chief administrative officer, began setting aside a small amount of money each year so city councilors could commission studies or hire professionals to better understand proposals presented to them by city administrators.... Read more

“Is there any nostalgia more powerful than the exile’s passion for the food of home?” That was the question U.K. Guardian writer Alex Renton asked back in April on his blog Word of Mouth. He went on, “Koreans dream of kimchi, East Africans write poems about ugali; Brits abroad get Marmite DHL-ed to them.”

Another blog noshtalgia.blogspot.com is... Read more

On January 21, about 200 people gathered at Burlington City Hall for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. The keynote speaker was Lajiri Van Ness-Otunnu, who was nearing the end of a two-and-a-half-year stint with NeighborKeepers, a nonprofit anti-poverty group.... Read more

Vermont is a small, out-of-the-way place, and if recent discussions about its future are any indication, its residents often wonder if their way of life is compatible with the rest of the country’s. No other state proudly trumpets the fact that a sitting president refuses to visit; none has argued so passionately for secession — a movement that surely embodies collective concern about whether the United States of America can live up to its good name. ... Read more

As part of its “50 Years on the Hill” anniversary celebration last weekend, Champlain College threw open the doors of its historic buildings to all comers. I worried I’d be getting a watered-down admissions tour, but Champlain cut out the droning guides and simply gave the community an all-access pass to explore.... Read more

Never let it be said that the Church Street Marketplace doesn’t have it all: food, fashion, books, housewares, live music and, now, on-demand drug testing.... Read more

"Facing Facts" is a new feature that appears each week in Local Matters, the local news section of Seven Days.

As a homebirth midwife, Katherine Bramhall has brought many babies into the world. But for her next delivery, she is asking for help.

In mid-May, Bramhall launched “A Million Mothers,” a $1 million campaign to fund construction of a new health clinic on the island of Bali. Bramhall’s goal is to collect one dollar from each of one million mothers before September, when she will return to Bali to buy land for an earthquake-proof building, a youth center, a community garden and housing for clinic staff.... Read more

More than two years after it was convened to help guide the city-owned cable operation, an advisory group for Burlington Telecom is still struggling to understand its role, according to the annual report it recently submitted to the Burlington City Council.

In the report, the Burlington Telecommunications Advisory Committee expresses frustration with BT’s tendency to “hold back” detailed information about its operations since the departure of former general manager Tim Nulty late last year.... Read more