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One key campaign manager looking for work is Amy Shollenberger, who ran Doug Racine’s campaign.

With scant resources but an army of union supporters and volunteers, Shollenberger fully applied her grassroots organizing skills.

If a job doesn’t turn up within the party, however, Shollenberger says she’ll focus on ramping up her consulting biz, Action Circles, whose slogan is “building movements with action and hope.”

Five years ago, when we moved to Vermont, you couldn’t buy chicken raised and slaughtered on a local farm at the farmers’ market, and it certainly couldn’t be served in a restaurant. Finding farm-fresh raw milk was nearly impossible since the farms couldn’t advertise, and when you did find a farm that sold it chances were that you would have a hard time getting any of the measly 25 quarts a day that the farms were allowed to sell. Few people other than organic farmers knew about harmful effects of GMO crops in our state, and growing hemp – an eco-friendly food and fiber crop – was illegal.

But the tide is turning, and while many people and organizations have been a part of these regulatory changes, Rural Vermont, under the leadership of Amy Shollenberger, has been a consistent force in every one of these agricultural victories.

And, how can we begin thinking about ourselves as producers rather than consumers? I believe that this is the cultural shift that needs to happen. As long as we think about ourselves as consumers – people who use up resources – we will not succeed in achieving independence from the tyranny of the corporate-industrial food system. We must take responsibility at all levels and work to create a new system that adds health and value to our bodies, our soils, and our communities.