Chittenden County

For more information on the Chittenden Solid Waste District and current procedures and meeting dates, please visit cswd.net/about-cswd/cswd-board-of-commissioners.

From Gary De Carolis:

Five words that describe Rod: Compassionate, optimistic, lucky, accepting, futuristic

Copeland was born in Garnett, Kansas, a small town of 3,000 people. He was the youngest of 3 children. His brother was three years older and his sister 10 years older. Copeland's parents were devoted Southern Baptists, so he was raised in that vein. He experienced a very normal childhood and adolescense, doing well in school, having many friends, and participating in sports and school activities. He went one year to a small Baptist College in Kansas before joining the Peace Corps to serve as a volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. His Peace Corps experience dramatically changed his life. After the Peace Corps, Copeland attended a State Teacher’s College in Kansas. While there, he met his wife to be Glenna. They met working as paraprofessionals in a school for children with significant developmental disabilities. They both received degrees in special education, and Copeland went on to get a Masters Degree in School Psychology. Shortly after they were married they moved to Kansas City where the couple lived and worked in predominantly black neighborhoods. While there, Copeland entered graduate school and received his PhD in Developmental Psychology. During that period he ran research and training grants in the inner city.

Copeland left the University of Kansas for a position as an associate professor of psychology at Southwest Missouri State University. A year and a half later he was fortunate to get a position with the State of Vermont as Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. Later he took a job with the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, holding various leadership positions culminating with a five year stint as the Commissioner of the Department of Developmental and Mental Health Services. Prior to his retirement in 2007 Copeland served as the Director of the HIV Aides program in the Vermont Department of Health.

For the past enjoyable 16 years of retirement Glenna and Rod have enjoyed traveling and now spend their winters in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and their Summers in Vermont.

From the organizers:

Many of us are looking to help. Let’s build solidarity -- and energy for climate action! There's a lot to do -- taking care of one another, cleaning up, building back stronger, disrupting the climate crisis. We need one another, and we need to be in touch.

Organizers include Senator Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senate; Councilor Jane Stromberg, Climate Activist, Formerly Burlington City Council; and Isaac Evans-Frantz, Humanitarian & Coalition Builder, Brattleboro Town Meeting Representative.

From the organizer:

Vermonters and The Blockade Board’s Backdoor War

In June 1861, the United States Navy Department convened a small working group in Washington DC to rapidly put in place an ambitious strategy to guide a total blockade of the Confederacy: 3,500 miles of coastline and 180 ports. This small group of four individuals, known as the “blockade board,” set in motion plans for a series of amphibious landings, from North Carolina to Louisiana in support of the expanding United States naval blockade, which UVM adjunct associate professor of history, Rolf Diamant, calls the “backdoor war.” The intended and unintended consequences of this backdoor war contributed to the hollowing out of the Confederacy’s slave-labor based economy, the acceleration of emancipation, the final defeat of the rebellion, and an end to slavery. Spearheading the amphibious landings in the Gulf were Vermonters fighting with the 7th and 8th Regiments. As they advanced deep into the Mississippi Delta, a region with one of the highest concentrations of enslaved people in the South, Vermont soldiers interacted with thousands of self-emancipated African Americans both as refugees, and later as soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. Diamant will explain how Vermonters played a consequential but little understood role in this social revolution; first arming and training freedmen; then accepting commissions to lead black troops into battle; and finally in service with the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction.

Rolf Diamant is a UVM adjunct associate professor and former superintendent of five national parks. He is co-author with Ethan Carr of the new book Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (LALH – 2022), and co editor and contributing author of A Thinking Person’s Guide to America’s National Parks (Braziller —2016.). He has lectured on the causes and consequences of the American Civil War including on the protection of Yosemite Valley (1864) in the wider context of war-related legislation and reforms. Rolf served as a gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission (2011-2015.)