Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning, founded in 1996, is a nonprofit cultural organization providing lectures, workshops, moderated discussions, and other enriching educational experiences. Green Mountain Academy’s dynamic in-person and online offerings span a wide variety of programs for adults that are scholarly and practical, local and global, historical and current, and academic and hands-on.

Like Vermont itself, Green Mountain Academy is independent, open, welcoming, civic-minded, pioneering, and small yet determined. From pickleball to presidential politics, Green Mountain Academy programs cultivate patrons’ diverse interests, skills and educational appetites. Over the years, Green Mountain Academy has hosted playwrights, chefs, historians, economists, political scientists, novelists, journalists, painters, linguists, filmmakers, photographers, scientists, activists, musicians, archeologists, naturalists, actors, singers, adventurers, poets, and elected officials — among others.

Green Mountain Academy fosters strong ties with colleges and universities whose faculty generously bring their expertise to our patrons. Many Green Mountain Academy lecturers represent institutions from throughout New England and the Northeast, including Dartmouth College, Norwich University, Middlebury College, Williams College, Bennington College, University of Vermont, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Skidmore College, and Union College.

Rita Silverman, a university English professor and Green Mountain Academy’s founding director, established the organization in 1996 as a partnership between Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester. Its goal was to provide adults with intellectually stimulating, inexpensive non-credit courses taught by college professors. In 2001, the organization’s volunteer board of directors voted to establish Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning as an independent nonprofit organization and to broaden its programming and reach beyond its academic roots.

In its 30-year history, Green Mountain Academy has conducted thousands of programs and reached tens of thousands of patrons from the Dorset-Manchester area and from throughout Southern Vermont and communities in New York State. During the global pandemic in 2020, Green Mountain Academy moved its programming online, continuing to fulfill patrons’ desire for cultural enrichment while expanding its reach unbound by geography. Moving forward, Green Mountain Academy plans to hold in-person programs while continuing to offer some virtual programming.