Dear Friends,

The annual spring conference for Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility was held on Tuesday this week and some of the most exciting businesses in Vermont gathered to hear both of our US Senators, Leahy and Sanders, address the group and then split into concurrent sessions.

I lead a panel on defining the “new Vermont economy” by discussing forward-thinking public policies for the next decades. I had experts on renewable energy, transportation, telecommunications and jobs on the panel. On Monday, VBSR gave our prestigious Terry Ehrich Award to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s on a wonderful sunset cruise on Lake Champlain.

This next week is the Vermont Business and Industry Expo and while we normally have a small booth, we decided this year to actually have a pavilion (which is really just a big booth) and invited a number of our vendor partners to join us for this expo.

Canon, Belkin, Adobe, 3M, NetGear, Promise Technology, Apple Government, XtremeMac, LaCie, Pearson, VMware and Chill Pill Audio are joining us for this important Vermont show. On Wednesday morning, the Deane C. Davis, outstanding Vermont Business of the Year is announced and we are very proud to be one of the three finalists for this award. The winner is always a surprise and we will not know until the time of the award when the Governor announces the company that has won.