Vermont Folklife Center AFS Infrastructure Report

Abstract

In Spring of 2012 the Board of Trustees of the Vermont Folklife Center (VFC) appoitned Gregory Sharrow and Andy Kolovos to the positions of Co- Executive Directors of the organization. As they explored their new responsiblities, Kolovos and Sharrow hoped to create a more lateral and democratic internal organization for VFC with the goal of broadening out decision making and sharing executive responsiblities among all VFC staff. What followed were several years of ad-hoc experimentation that produced many organizational sucessess as well as a hightened sense of staff cohesion and engagement. However, as VFC sought to hire new staff members it became clear that the adhoc processes of the past would need to be rendered more transparent, be better structured, and more formalized. To this end VFC staff members began to search for models of decentralized organizational systems they could use to inform the establishment of a new organizational structure for VFC.