Glover native Sarah Waring joins the Vermont Community Foundation

NEWPORT — The Vermont Community Foundation recently announced that Sarah Waring has been hired as its vice president for grants and community investments and will join the Foundation at the end of December.

Waring, who was born and raised in Glover, will step into her new role as the Foundation continues to expand its efforts to close Vermont’s opportunity gap—the divide in access to education, jobs, health, and community vitality that keeps many Vermonters from getting ahead in life.

Earlier this year, the Foundation declared its belief that the opportunity gap was the single greatest challenge to the health and vitality of the state, and focused its staff-directed discretionary programs and its mission-related investments on closing the gap.

It also changed its grantmaking processes to emphasize deeper engagement between the Foundation’s staff and the communities it serves.

Waring’s career has been focused on community development and natural resource management, using collaborative and whole systems approaches.

She was director of programs for the Farm and Wilderness Foundation in Plymouth, program director at the Vermont Council on Rural Development, socioeconomics program manager at the Sonoran Institute in Bozeman, Montana, and a social science coordinator for the Bureau of Land Management in Washington, D.C.

Since 2013, she has been the Executive Director at the Center for an Agricultural Economy, an innovative nonprofit focused on building a just and regenerative local food system and working in economic and community development arenas in the Northeast Kingdom.

“It’s an honor to be joining the Community Foundation,” said Waring. “I am incredibly excited about the challenges ahead, particularly in how philanthropy and giving can play a critical role in systems change and be used to work directly with communities to understand and address the opportunity gap.”

Waring has served on numerous boards, steering committees, and councils.

She earned her B.A. from Haverford College and her Masters of Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland. She lives in East Montpelier with her family.

“Sarah has a proven track record of working statewide, regionally, and locally on successful efforts that use community momentum to do great things,” says Foundation President & CEO Dan Smith. “She’ll be a critical part of our work to ensure that philanthropy is responsive to the needs and hopes of Vermonters who feel the opportunity gap most strongly.”