VTDigger Board of Trustees

Gaye Symington, President

Gaye Symington is a former political leader, nonprofit executive and president of the High Meadows Fund, a philanthropic fund associated with the Vermont Community Foundation, which she led from 2009 until her retirement in 2022. The fund promoted vibrant communities and economic enterprise and a healthy natural environment.

Gaye served in the Vermont House from 1997 to 2009, including one term as minority leader and two as Speaker of the House — becoming the second woman to lead the chamber. She won the Democratic nomination for governor in 2008.

She is a graduate of Williams College and has a masters in business administration from Cornell University. Gaye lives in Jericho with her husband, Chuck Lacy, and two cats, Earl and Sheila.

Meg Smith, Vice President

Meg Smith began her career as a press secretary for a Congressional candidate in Connecticut in the early 1980s, then led her own PR firm in Westport, CT. After relocating to Vermont, she served as PR Director for Gardener’s Supply, gaining national media attention for the company. Meg’s passion for organic gardening and small-scale agriculture led her to a nearly 12-year tenure on the Intervale Center board, and she founded a Vermont-based PR firm, working extensively with nonprofits like Good News Garage and The Charlotte News.

In 2014, she became director of the Vermont Women’s Fund, part of the Vermont Community Foundation. Over ten years, she doubled the endowment to over $6M, expanded the donor base, and led two major initiatives: Change The Story, promoting gender equity, and This Way UP, tracking women-owned businesses in Vermont. Since retiring in 2024, Meg has been involved in new projects, including her role as Campaign Finance Chair for Congresswoman Becca Balint’s reelection.

Rob Woolmington, Vice President

Rob Woolmington is a lawyer based in Manchester. He focuses his practice on environmental, energy and conservation matters. Rob was formerly a reporter, photographer and editor for the Bennington Banner. He served as the first chair of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and has chaired the Vermont Community Foundation and the Castanea Foundation. Rob designed and developed a website for the village of North Bennington, where he has served for 26 years as the founding president of a community foundation.

Eric Hanson, Treasurer

Eric Hanson founded Hanson & Doremus Investment Management in 1995 and focuses on portfolio strategy, portfolio management, and client interaction.

Eric has managed money in Burlington, Vermont since 1971, first with Howard Bank, then Fraser Management Associates. Eric has also lectured at The University of Vermont and Saint Michael’s College and wrote a column on Personal Finance in The Burlington Free Press for ten years. Eric holds a BA from St. Lawrence University, where he is Trustee Emeritus. He is also a CFA® Charterholder and a CFP® Certificant.

Eric lives in Greensboro with his wife Xin Yang. He has served in the past as Board Chair of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, The Champlain Valley Area Agency on Aging (Age Well), The Vermont Nature Conservancy and the Wake Robin Continuing Care Retirement Community. He presently serves on the Selectboard in Greensboro.

Greg Craig

Greg Craig is a lawyer who has served as White House Counsel under President Barack Obama and assistant to the president and special counsel in the White House of President Bill Clinton. He also served as a senior advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Greg’s father was a former chancellor of state college systems in both Vermont and California. Greg considers his home state to be Vermont and his home base to be in Addison County where three generations of Vermonters preceded him, living in Middlebury and Ripton. He co-managed the Vermont campaign for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972, as well as the 1976 Vermont republican gubernatorial campaign for his father, William Craig, who lost in the primary to Richard Snelling.

Both of Greg’s parents went to Middlebury College, two of his three brothers and two of his five children went to the University of Vermont, and his youngest brother, Sandy, a doctor living in Montpelier, has practiced medicine in Vermont for almost forty years. Greg is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. Prior to his government service he worked for the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly, and after leaving the White House he worked in the Washington office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He and his wife divide time between their homes in Washington and in Ripton, VT.

Garrett Graff

Internationally bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist historian Garrett M. Graff has covered politics, technology, and national security for two decades. The former editor of POLITICO Magazine and Washingtonian, he was a longtime WIRED and CNN contributor, a Washington Post columnist, and written for publications ranging from Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Mother Jones. He now writes the popular “Doomsday Scenario” newsletter and hosts the highly acclaimed history podcast, Long Shadow, which has received an Edward R. Murrow Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Excellence in Journalism Award, and a Sigma Delta Chi Award, as well as a Peabody nomination.

He’s the author of ten books, including Watergate: A New History and Raven Rock, and is best known for his three landmark volumes of oral history, all New York Times bestsellers: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, and, most recently, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, about the making of the atomic bomb. A Vermont native and third-generation journalist, he lives in Burlington.

Christine Graham

Christine was born in Brooklyn NY, arrived in Vermont in 1967 to attend Bennington College, and since then has never left. Most of her work life has been as a consultant, coach, and trainer for nonprofit organizations through her firm CPG Enterprises, and along the way she has also raised goats and children, co-founded and managed the Sage City Symphony, dreamed up and started several Vermont organizations including the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, and worked at Bennington College, WBTN, the Nature Conservancy and the Vermont Institute for Science, Math and Technology. She earned her Masters in Organization and Management at Antioch New England.

Christine was involved in the early initiatives of Preservation Trust Vermont (PTV), and in 2021 rejoined the board. She also is a founding and current board member of the Fund for North Bennington where some of her volunteer effort is in managing the Left Bank, an1865 bank and now community center in the historic district of North Bennington. She divides her time between Burlington and North Bennington, living with her partner Mike Rosen and visiting her real Vermonter sons in Pittsburgh and Oregon.

Sue Halpern

Sue Halpern is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, where she directs the program in narrative journalism.

She is the author of seven books, including the best-selling “A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home” and “Four Wings and a Prayer,” which was made into an Emmy-nominated film. She was a columnist for Mother Jones, Ms., and Smithsonian Magazine, and has written on science, technology, and politics for the Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic, as well as for The New York Review of Books, where she is a regular contributor. Halpern founded and edited NYRBLit, the electronic-publishing imprint of New York Review of Books. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Echoing Green Fellowships, and earned a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

She lives in Ripton with her husband, the author and journalist Bill McKibben.

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. The magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, she covers politics, culture, and national security. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent.

Jane is the author of the 2016 book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” and the 2008 book “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.” She is the co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas” and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.” All four of her books have been New York Times best-sellers.

Jane began her career in Vermont as a reporter with the Weathersfield Weekly, the Black River Tribune and the Rutland Herald. She has won numerous awards for her writing.

Jane is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and in 2019 was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Middlebury College.

Paul Millman

Paul Millman retired in 2020 as CEO and President of Chroma Technology, an employee-owned manufacturing company in Bellows Falls, VT. He attended Antioch College and is a graduate of the New School, and the Antioch New England Graduate School. He is an emeritus member of the Advisory Board of the College of Education and Social Service at UVM. He was formerly Chair of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, a director of the Vermont Business Roundtable, and a board member of the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. In 2016 VBSR awarded him with the Terry Ehrich Award for Socially Responsible Business, and in 2022 he received Antioch College’s Arthur E. Morgan Award for Service to the Community.

David Morrissey

David Morrissey is the director of finance and administration at Hula. He enjoys working on financial and operational systems that resource mission-critical work after spending most of his career to date in the nonprofit sector.

Prior to joining Hula, David spent 15+ years at the Vermont Community Foundation as a member of the Finance and Operations team in evolving roles but always in support of the programmatic efforts and community investments being made throughout Vermont.

He recently spent two years with the Vermont Land Trust’s Finance and Operations
team supporting statewide conservation and stewardship efforts. His work focused on financing the transition of land to the next generation of farmers, conserving
ecologically critical forestland, and helping donors and communities preserve the places where they live and play.

David lives in Salisbury with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs. Outside of work, David is an avid hiker having hiked the Long Trail in 2021 and is an Adirondack 46er, completing his last peak in the fall of 2023.

Louis Porter

Louis Porter is General Manager of Washington Electric Coop, a 100% renewable-powered, non-profit, electric cooperative with almost 12,000 members across the rural portions of 41 Vermont towns.

Previously he served as Fish and Wildlife Commissioner for seven years, first under Governor Peter Shumlin and then Governor Phil Scott. He also served as Secretary of Civil and Military Affairs for two years. Prior to his leadership roles in state government, Louis was the Lake Champlain LakeKeeper for the Conservation Law Foundation for two years.

His understanding of what it takes to produce high quality fact-based journalism stems from his six years with the Rutland Herald/ Times Argus Vermont Press Bureau, first as a reporter and then as Bureau Chief, and his five years as a reporter for the Stamford Advocate in the early 2000s.

Louis has both a Bachelor of Science (zoology) and Bachelor of Arts (comparative history) from the University of Washington in Seattle. Louis grew up in the village of Adamant in Calais where he now lives with his wife and daughters, and spends as much time outside as possible.

Louisa Schibli

Louisa Schibli is a partner at Vermont Works Management Co, an alternative investment firm supporting Vermont’s job & economic development. She is a co-founder of Milk Money Vermont, an online equity crowd-funding platform connecting all Vermonters with opportunities to invest in Vermont businesses. In 2017, Milk Money won Vermont Businesses For Social Responsibility’s (VBSR) Innovation and Inspiration Award. Louisa successfully guided Milk Money through the acquisition by The Vermont Innovation Commons where she continues to pursue ways to grow the Community Capital movement and ways the Milk Money platform can support this effort. Passionate about the people and businesses of Vermont, in particular female founded/led businesses, Louisa led the charge to bring iFundWomen to Vermont as an alternative source of funding. She’s also a founding member of the Vermont Women’s Investor Network (WIN) and currently serves on the boards of the Flexible Capital Fund, LaunchVT and Mercy Connections. Louisa spent more than 12 years on the board of The Charlotte News, Vermont’s oldest non-profit community newspaper.

Heidi Tringe

Heidi Tringe is a Partner and leads the Multistate practice at MMR, LLC, a Montpelier government relations and public affairs firm. She joined MMR in 2010 after more than 15 years in public service at the federal and state level. Heidi was a member of the Senior Staff of Vermont Governor Jim Douglas where she led the Administration’s work with the National Governors Association, the Coalition of Northeastern Governors, the White House and federal agencies, and Vermont’s Congressional delegation.

Before returning to her home state of Vermont, Heidi served as Director of Legislative Affairs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as Communications Director for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and held a number of positions in the office of the late U.S. Senator Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.).

Heidi currently serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, was a member of the Vermont Commission on Women and was a lead fundraiser for the Montpelier ArtSynergy Project. She is co-founder of ElevateHer Vermont, a grassroots women’s networking and leadership organization. She volunteers at Montpelier High School in Montpelier and at the Old Meeting House church in East Montpelier. Heidi received her B.A. cum laude from Amherst College in 1996.