Across Vermont, nonprofit organizations provide essential services, strengthen local economies, steward natural resources, support arts and culture, care for our neighbors, and help communities navigate challenges large and small. They show up as libraries, hospitals, churches, trail systems, and museums. When a family needs childcare, a senior needs meals and companionship, a young person needs mentoring, a community faces flooding, or a neighbor experiences homelessness, nonprofits are often among the first to respond and the last to leave.  

Their work touches nearly every Vermonter, whether we realize it or not.  

Yet, nonprofits are frequently viewed as “do-gooders” rather than what they truly are: critical community infrastructure. 

Just as roads connect people to opportunities, nonprofits connect people to the resources and support they need to thrive. Just as we invest in maintaining bridges and public buildings, we should recognize the importance of investing in the organizations that strengthen the social fabric holding our communities together. 

What makes Vermont’s nonprofit sector especially powerful is that it powered by people: skilled professionals, dedicated volunteers, committed board members, and countless community partners working together to address some of Vermont’s most pressing challenges and building a better future. These are our neighbors: they are employers, educators, service providers, advocates, innovators, and community problem-solvers who live in the communities they serve, understand local needs, and develop local solutions. 

Much of this work happens quietly. The programs, partnerships, technical assistance, advocacy, and relationship-building that strengthen communities often occur behind the scenes. The work may be invisible, but the impact is not. 

We see it in stronger local economies. We see it in healthier families and more resilient communities. We see it in the cultural institutions that bring people together, the trails and natural areas that enhance quality of life, the childcare centers that support working parents, and the organizations that ensure help is available when people need it most. 

The benefits extend far beyond any single nonprofit’s mission. Nonprofits collaborate with businesses, municipalities, schools, healthcare providers, and state agencies to create solutions that no one sector could achieve alone. They leverage public and private resources, engage thousands of volunteers, and generate lasting returns for communities across Vermont. 

At Common Good Vermont, we have the privilege of seeing this impact every day. As the statewide association for nonprofits, we work to strengthen the sector through professional development, shared resources, advocacy, and connections that help organizations build capacity and increase their impact. Our role is to support the people and organizations that are doing the essential work of serving Vermonters, but we can’t do it alone. 

Strong nonprofits require the same thing that all critical infrastructure requires: sustained public investment. Funding that supports not only programs but also the people, technology, facilities, and operational capacity needed to deliver lasting impact. Policies that recognize nonprofits as essential partners. And a broader understanding that nonprofit organizations are not extras or luxuries. They are necessities. 

As we mark National Nonprofit Day on August 17, let’s celebrate the organizations and individuals working every day to make Vermont stronger. More importantly, let’s recognize nonprofits for what they are: a vital part of the infrastructure that makes our state work. And let’s commit to supporting them accordingly, because when Vermont needs them, nonprofits get it done. 

To learn more about Vermont’s nonprofit sector, visit commongoodvt.org. We also invite nonprofit leaders, staff, board members, volunteers, funders, and community partners to join us at the 2026 Vermont Nonprofit Summit on November 10th, where we will come together to learn, collaborate, and build an even stronger future for Vermont’s nonprofit community. 

Every day, we bring together community members, leaders, municipalities, businesses, nonprofits, educators, providers, state agencies, and economic development organizations to better understand what our region needs most. The NEK Collaborative’s role is not to replace the incredible work already happening across the region, but to connect it, celebrate it, and strengthen it. We help organizations find common ground, align around shared priorities, and work together so that limited resources are invested strategically rather than duplicated. That work is especially important in a rural region like ours, where organizations often wear many hats and stretch every dollar. Collaboration isn’t just a nice idea, it’s how we make meaningful progress. When partners work together, they can accomplish far more than any one organization could on its own. 

Over the past year, we’ve seen that collaboration in action. Through the annual NEK Together Conference, regional leaders come together to identify shared priorities and begin building coordinated action plans around the issues that matter most. We’re looking forward to hosting this year’s in Island Pond, November 4th (register NOW!). These priorities are communicated with USDA Rural Development and all levels of decision makers, even taking them to Montpelier for NEK Day at the Statehouse, where leaders engage directly with policymakers. We also launched specific sector convenings, such as the Housing Hubbub, that bring together the housing gamut to tackle one of our greatest barriers to growth. Housing is too complex for any single organization to solve. By creating space for relationships, information sharing, and coordinated action, we’re helping build the partnerships needed for lasting solutions. This was proven when the NEK Collaborative joined forces with the Vermont State Housing Authority, in partnership with the State of Vermont, to bring awareness to the MHIP (Mobile Home Infill Program), addressing housing affordability and development challenges, exacerbated by recent flooding, building up to 40 new homes in the NEK. Through this program, participating mobile home park owners and manufactured home communities are improving lots and fast-tracking the placement of NEW, high-quality, affordable homes, expanding opportunities for stable, attainable homeownership. An NEK Housing Tour was hosted to view homes and learn about eligibility, the homebuying process, favorable loan terms, down payment assistance, reduced mortgage rates, and closing cost discounts. 

Behind the scenes, the NEK Collaborative works to ensure the region’s priorities are reflected in regional and statewide planning efforts. For example, we helped shape Northern Vermont’s Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy for the US Economic Development Administration, necessary for further federal resources, and advocated successfully alongside USDA Rural Development and Vermont’s congressional delegation to release delayed REAP Zone funding, which brings $1M+ federal funds into the region annually. 

National Nonprofit Day is an opportunity to recognize that nonprofits are far more than charitable organizations. They are community builders, problem-solvers, employers, advocates, educators, and trusted partners. They respond to immediate needs while also planning for the future. They strengthen local economies, improve quality of life, and help communities become more resilient. 

Here in the Northeast Kingdom, nonprofits are not only supporting collaboration, they’re also preserving our working lands, supporting entrepreneurs, creating housing opportunities, expanding access to childcare and healthcare, protecting our natural resources, strengthening our arts, culture, and recreation, and responding when disasters strike. Time and again, they are among the first to step forward and the last to leave. 

The NEK Collaborative is proud to be one part of this remarkable nonprofit ecosystem. We’re helping build the trust, partnerships, and shared vision that allow other organizations to succeed together. When we reduce duplication, share knowledge, celebrate each other’s successes, and align around common goals, every organization becomes stronger and so does our region. 

As we celebrate National Nonprofit Day on August 17, I hope we recognize not only the organizations serving our communities, but also the staff, volunteers, board members, partners, and neighbors whose dedication makes this work possible. The challenges facing rural Vermont are too great for any one organization or person to solve alone. But together we are building a more resilient and vibrant Northeast Kingdom. 

The AIDS Project of Southern Vermont began in 1988 as a grassroots effort to support people living with HIV/AIDS through a volunteer buddy program. Nearly four decades later, our mission has evolved alongside the changing needs of our community. Today, we provide HIV testing, connections to health care, case management, benefits advocacy, housing assistance, and access to free food and personal care items. These services help people remain healthy, housed, and connected. We also now provide comprehensive prevention of HIV through our harm reduction program, reaching people most at risk for HIV transmission. 

One of the most persistent misconceptions we encounter is that HIV is a problem of the past. Medical advances have transformed HIV from a fatal diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition for many people, but that has not made the need disappear. The AIDS Project continues to serve nearly 100 people living with HIV across southern Vermont, many of whom have been living with the virus since the 1990s. 

While medications have changed, some challenges have not. Stigma remains real. Navigating health care, maintaining stable housing, accessing nutritious food, and understanding complex benefits systems can still be overwhelming. Our work is about much more than medical care. It is about helping people live with dignity, stability, and hope. 

Our story is also part of a much larger story. Across Vermont and throughout the country, nonprofits respond to needs that no single government agency, business, or institution can address alone. We strengthen communities by building relationships, creating trust, and finding practical solutions to complex problems. We collaborate with hospitals, health care providers, state agencies, businesses, volunteers, and donors because lasting change is always a collective effort. 

The strength of the nonprofit sector lies not only in compassion but in results. Every day, nonprofits improve health, strengthen families, expand opportunity, protect vulnerable neighbors, and build more resilient communities. We make the invisible visible by reaching people who might otherwise fall through the cracks. 

As we mark National Nonprofit Day, I hope we move beyond celebrating organizations and recognize the essential role they play in our communities. Nonprofits are not an extra layer of support, they are part of the foundation that keeps communities healthy, connected, and resilient. 

The next time you see the work of a nonprofit, remember that behind every service is a neighbor helping another neighbor. That is how stronger communities are built, not through grand gestures, but through showing up, day after day, when it matters most. 

A program coordinator who does the job of two-and-a-half people, at a salary that wouldn’t cover rent in the community they serve.  

A board that means well but doesn’t know what its job is, so it either rubber-stamps everything or micromanages the wrong things. 

Meanwhile, the building gets a new wing and the program offerings increase. The need is real, the donors are generous, and the organization says yes, yes, and yes again, through all manner of crises, shortages, and storms. That’s what nonprofits do.  

The result is predictable. Executive director burnout and turnover that costs organizations institutional knowledge. Staff who leave because caring about the mission is not enough to live on. Boards who want to help but don’t have the tools to govern well. Strategic drift because the organization is not built for where it’s trying to go.  

The money to fix these problems barely exists, and nonprofits are incentivized not to spend money on them in the first place. Many state-funded contracts cap what nonprofits can spend on admin, treating planning, HR, and financial systems as overhead rather than critical infrastructure. Donors often reward the organizations that spend the least on all of it, mistaking a low overhead ratio for good financial stewardship. Program dollars are everywhere because donors and funders can see exactly what it buys in the form of meals served, kids tutored, and beds filled. Capacity building is a harder sell because its return is invisible until an organization collapses. The Vermont Community Foundation generously offers a nonprofit capacity building grant of $5,000, but even they note, “this amount is typically not enough to cover the full cost of providing these services.” We collectively fund the mission, but starve the very machinery that keeps it running. 

Vermonters who care about a nonprofit’s mission should care just as much about whether that organization has the systems, leadership pipeline, and organizational health to deliver on that mission for the next twenty years. That means treating capacity-building support as core to the investment. It means boards taking their governance role seriously enough to ask hard questions about sustainability, not just program growth and outcomes. It means the rest of us pushing back on the instinct to praise an organization for running lean when what we’re really describing is an organization––and its people––running on fumes. 

Vermont’s nonprofits get it done. But “getting it done” has a cost. Right now, our nonprofit sector is shouldering that cost one burned-out executive director and one unfilled position at a time. On National Nonprofit Day, before we celebrate what nonprofits accomplish with so little, let’s make sure they have enough. Imagine what they could accomplish, and sustain, for Vermont.