We are a Vermont non-profit that runs on three things: curiosity, critical thinking, and community action. Ask the better question, reason it through honestly, then go do a small thing locally. That's the method.
Most of what people need most isn't scarce. It just isn't organized yet.
A room where neighbors can gather. A book in a child's hands before kindergarten. A way to say the true thing without fear. Land held for the people who tend it. None of it requires an invention — it requires people curious enough to ask, honest enough to check, and stubborn enough to show up on a Tuesday.
Curiosity is the cheapest resource available and sometimes the most underused. Every project here started as a plain question. Why does this village have no place to gather? Why do families pay for the books that produce citizens? Curiosity is also why we do things differently: if the standard answer were working, someone would have noticed by now.
As more of the world hands its thinking to machines, the human ability to read closely, follow an argument and change your mind on evidence becomes rarer — and worth more, not less. It begins with a child who learns to love reading, and it continues in rooms where people can disagree well. We build both.
A question you never act on is entertainment. Action looks unglamorous: lights on in an empty building, a book in a kid's hands, a note to a legislator, a wall someone helps you paint. We measure ourselves in rooms opened and doors unlocked, not in impressions.
The Newport Daily Express covered our plans for the old bank on Main Street.
A wide wooden floor under arched windows — dance, yoga, live music, film nights, gatherings.
Desks to work from, and a place to say hello and trade ideas with whoever is at the next table.
Good coffee and a curated market of handmade, local goods, with shelf space for area makers and growers.
A three-story former bank in the middle of the village, becoming a cafe and market for local growers and makers, a co-working floor with incubation programs, and a restored top-floor ballroom for dance, yoga, music, film and gatherings.
A grassroots campaign for universal early literacy: a free book every month for every child under five, funded by government investment rather than by families. It works in both the United States and Canada: enter your zip or postal code and the site opens a ready-to-send message to the officials who fund it — no donations, nothing sold, about two minutes. Run in collaboration with Greater Barton Arts, a Northeast Kingdom Imagination Library affiliate.
booksacrossthecountry.com ↗Honest, anonymous feedback and more authentic communication. When a name is attached, people tend to say what is safe rather than what is true — so Feedback Loop lets someone speak candidly to the person, team or organization that needs to hear it, with the respondent in full control of how identifiable they are. Feedback becomes a conversation instead of a scoreboard.
trustloop.me ↗140 acres of fields, woods, wetlands, streams and river in the Northeast Kingdom, with a connecting parcel in Canada — a former dairy farm with a farmhouse and a big old barn. We're establishing a small homestead community there: all ages, part-time or full-time, paid work and shared duties, with the long-term aim that the project owns the land rather than any single person.
canad.us ↗Founder & Executive Director, Curioso Corp
Michael has spent a good part of his working life around non-profits and community focused activities, mostly learning as he goes. In Brooklyn he started LaunchPad, a free, arts-based community gathering space in Crown Heights: a workspace by day, and by night a venue for film screenings, kids' craft workshops, gallery shows, classes and collaborative projects, open to anyone at no cost. He also founded the Brooklyn Yoga Collective, a non-profit, teacher-run studio offering a wide range of styles on a $7–15 sliding scale so that a practice that costs $25 elsewhere stayed within reach of the neighborhood.
Alongside that community work runs a career in technology and entrepreneurial investing — building and advising software products, and backing early-stage founders. That combination is the whole thesis of Curioso Corp: the discipline and speed of a startup, pointed at things that should never have been products in the first place.
He is not a stranger to community projects — including their pitfalls. He'll tell you he has some ideas and a lot of questions, which is rather the point.
Three people who make things and finish them. They sit on the board of Curioso Corp, where they help inspire and navigate where all of this goes next.
Mercedez Singleton is a Texas-based artist and surface designer whose work sits between fine art and fashion. Trained in photography and textile design, she brings a photographer's sense of timing to water marbling: pigment floated on thickened water, then lifted as a one-of-a-kind mono-print onto silk, leather or paper. Since launching her namesake line of hand-marbled accessories and home goods in 2016, she has taken on limited-edition collaborations with fashion and interiors brands and custom commissions for homes and commercial spaces.
She also teaches — marbling workshops and art parties built on the belief that everyone has creative potential and that cultivating it is worth the trouble. That is the same conviction this organization runs on.
Ryan writes essays, narrative non-fiction and fiction — published in Deadfoot Collective, Climbing Magazine, The Outdoor Journal, Almost Real Things, Underground Voices and elsewhere, on subjects from rivers and hogs to jiu jitsu and the plain strangeness of being a person. He is a careful noticer, which is a rarer and more useful skill than it sounds.
He is also working on critical first-response tools for remote regions of Africa: the unglamorous, consequential problem of getting the right information and the right help to places the systems were never built to reach. He keeps us honest that community action isn't a metaphor — if a thing has to work far from a road with nobody coming to help, it had better actually work.
Reg is a multi-instrumentalist and storyteller — a percussionist at heart, also a vocalist and looper artist — who builds solo musical-storytelling shows where a story is played as much as it is told. She performs alongside DJs on dancefloors and at ecstatic dances and festivals, facilitates sound journeys, and runs creativity workshops built on voice, improvisation and performing on the spot. She is also a professional horticulturist and speaks five languages, which tells you something about how many directions her curiosity runs.
Her current project turns her live musical tale Le Cycle Éternel into an illustrated children's book with its own soundtrack — a story about nature, cycles and love that a child can read and listen to at once. Her working ingredients are spontaneity and presence, and she brings both to the question of how our rooms and our projects should actually feel.
If any of this resonates, get in touch — whether you want to teach something in the ballroom, sell at the market, help with the literacy campaign, spend a season on the land, or just come by and be curious out loud with us.
We are especially interested in people building apps that deepen human-to-human connection — software whose success is measured by what happens after you close it. Designers, developers, researchers, funders: let's compare notes and build something together.
info@curiosocorp.org →
The Newport Daily Express reported the purchase of the former Howard / TD Bank building on Main Street in Barton Village, and a vision for a community space as a step toward building and improving community relations. In an interview, the plans for all three floors were outlined.
The first floor is planned as a cafe and market featuring products and produce from area businesses, with room for a makers market where smaller enterprises can make candles, soap and other homemade products and sell them on site. The second floor is intended for co-working space and entrepreneurial incubation programs. The third floor holds an old ballroom, to be used for dance, yoga, music, movies and community gatherings.
This is our summary rather than a reprint. For the full article, quotes and further detail, please read it at the source — local journalism is worth supporting.
