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Vermont is in the midst of a baby boom, but it’s not a trend anyone is celebrating.

Linda Ryan, who runs the Samaritan House, an emergency shelter in St. Albans, had a homeless woman referred to her on Christmas Day who had just given birth to her second child. Kendy Skidmore, director of the Bennington Coalition for the Homeless, says she’s had newborns at her shelter, too five in the last six years, with another one due any day now.... Read more

On January 21, about 200 people gathered at Burlington City Hall for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. The keynote speaker was Lajiri Van Ness-Otunnu, who was nearing the end of a two-and-a-half-year stint with NeighborKeepers, a nonprofit anti-poverty group.... Read more

The late Heath Ledger still dominates the cover of People, but on page 88 of the current issue, Burlington’s Hal Colston is the star of the magazine’s “Heroes Among Us” feature. He’s tucked between an article on the formerly anorexic Miss America and a page of colorful gowns spotted at the SAG Awards. Tall, handsome and clad in casual navy shirt and slacks, the 54-year-old founder of Good News Garage does not look out of place among the hot celebs (I peg Morgan Freeman to play him if filmmakers come calling.)... Read more

VERMONT — A national nonprofit group that recently began accepting used clothing and shoes at yellow drop boxes throughout Vermont has some people asking whether the group is siphoning donations away from other, well-established local charities, or actually benefiting the poor people it claims to help.... Read more

35.5 million: Number of Americans who went hungry in 2006.

2.5 million: Increase over 2005 in the number of Americans who went hungry.

1 in 10: Number of American households now considered “food-insecure.”

60: Percentage of USDA’s spending that goes to food stamps and other public nutrition programs.

1 in 5: Number of Americans affected by those programs.

66,200: Annual number of Vermonters who receive emergency food assistance.

8.8: Percentage of Vermont households considered food-insecure from 1996 to 1998.... Read more

MONTPELIER — Low-income Vermonters may be worse off this winter as a result of a perfect summer storm of cuts delivered by the federal government. First, the Bush administration announced tougher eligibility requirements for children who benefit from its federally subsidized health insurance program. Next came reductions in funding to special-education students enrolled in Medicaid.... Read more

At the end of April, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski joined a "Food Stamp Challenge." For a full week, he and his wife sustained themselves on just $3 per person per day. Although critics dismissed the move as a publicity stunt, an article in The Oregonian suggests Kulongoski's motive was to "raise awareness about the difficulty of feeding a family on a food-stamp budget." What did the governor eat?... Read more

As a kid growing up in Montréal, Duncan McDougall loved books, particularly sailing and adventure stories. "I remember vividly the day I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," he says. "I sat on my bed and read it cover to cover. I had to beg my mom to go and get some chocolate. It was so powerful, that book."... Read more

The story is strange but true: A Vermont girl finds success as a congressional page and college freshman, then gets married at 19, has three children by 25 - and suddenly finds herself single and homeless, raising her family in a car. And that's before she wrote it all down and sold the memoir to a major publisher. She now has a house and an underground hit.... Read more

VERMONT -- This summer, kids at Barre's Aldrich Library are getting the royal treatment. The season's programming theme is "Realms of Reading," and it includes such fairy-tale fare as crafting dragons or ogres, storytellers Tim Jennings and Leanne Ponder, films, a magician and a medieval fair. And, of course, actual books.... Read more