The Creative Campus Is Growing a New Kind of Home

I have walked the Goddard College campus in every season—snow crunching underfoot, lilacs heavy with spring rain, the long golden light of autumn. I earned both my degrees here, but more than that, I grew up here. Goddard didn’t just teach me; it raised me. It taught me that education could be an act of liberation, that community could be a classroom, that creativity could be a way of life.

Now, years later, I have the privilege of bringing that same spirit to a new chapter on these grounds. This summer, Elevate Youth Services opened two new shelters for young adults ages 18–24 on the Creative Campus. Sixteen beds. Two houses. Endless possibility.

It’s more than housing. It’s a home base. A place to land after a long stretch of instability. A place to launch into the future. A place where young adults can take a deep breath, drop their shoulders, and start imagining what comes next.

Here, on land steeped in Goddard’s history of self-directed learning and community accountability, residents have access to more than just a safe bed. They’re connected to job training and employment support, education planning, mental health counseling, and the deep well of creativity that has always flowed through this campus. They share meals, swap stories, plant ideas, and learn what it means to live in relationship with others.

Goddard’s legacy has always been about trusting people—often young people—to chart their own path, and then surrounding them with the resources and relationships to make that possible. These shelters carry that legacy forward.

In rural Vermont, the act of opening doors to young adults who are unhoused or unstably housed is both practical and radical. It says: You belong here. You are part of our community. Your dreams matter. And when you pair housing with education, creativity, and connection, you’re not just ending homelessness for a night—you’re helping to grow whole lives.

The Creative Campus is still a place where people come to learn, create, and imagine a better world. Now, it’s also a place where young adults can begin to build that world for themselves—brick by brick, song by song, job by job, relationship by relationship.

I know firsthand how a place can shape you. Goddard shaped me into the person I am today. My hope is that these two houses will do the same for every young adult who walks through their doors—not just giving them shelter, but giving them roots, wings, and a community that believes in them.

Because when you give young people a place to land and a place to launch, they rise. And when they rise, we all do.