From Dreaming to Doing: How the Sustainability Lens Game Is Helping Marlboro, Vermont, Imagine Its Future
How can a small rural community turn local ideas into sustainable economic development? In Marlboro, Vermont, residents are using the Sustainability Lens Game to find out.
What could your community look like ten years from now? What resources are hiding in plain sight? And how can residents, businesses, and local organizations work together to turn promising ideas into real opportunities?
These were the questions explored on October 24, 2026, when 20 residents and community partners gathered at the Marlboro Community Center in Vermont for an interactive development workshop titled "What Could Marlboro Be in the Next 10 Years?"
Sponsored by the Marlboro Energy Committee, the event used the Sustainability Lens Game (SLG) as a collaborative framework to help participants explore community needs, identify underutilized resources, and imagine financially and environmentally sustainable development opportunities.
The theme was simple: DREAM. PLAN. DO.
The workshop was filmed by Brattleboro Community Television (BCTV).
And the results
demonstrate how a game-based approach can help communities move from conversations about challenges to creative thinking about solutions.
Why Use a Game for Community Economic Development?
Traditional community planning often begins with a list of problems: limited budgets, aging infrastructure, declining services, housing shortages, or a lack of local businesses.
The Sustainability Lens Game encourages participants to approach these challenges differently.
Instead of asking only what is missing, the game helps groups recognize existing assets, explore opportunities, identify stakeholders, and consider how different parts of a sustainable business or community model fit together.
For the Marlboro workshop, the game's collaborative tools were adapted to explore three interconnected areas of the Business Model Canvas:
People and Community Connections: Who does Marlboro serve? What do residents, families, businesses, and visitors need? How can relationships be strengthened?
Resources, Activities, and Partnerships: What buildings, natural resources, local expertise, organizations, and partnerships could support new opportunities?
Costs and Revenue: What would promising initiatives cost? How could they generate income, attract investment, or create long-term economic and social value?
Working in small groups, participants brainstormed ideas, discussed opportunities, and used colored dots to identify proposals they found most promising.
This approach helped connect creative thinking with the practical questions necessary for sustainable development.
What Did Marlboro Imagine for 2036?
The workshop generated a diverse collection of community development ideas. Although participants worked in separate groups, several common themes emerged...
1. Community Connections: A General Store, Tavern, and Gathering Places
One of the strongest areas of interest was creating more opportunities for residents to connect. Participants envisioned a community general store offering everyday essentials, a local tavern or café, and welcoming gathering spaces where neighbors could meet throughout the year. Other proposals included community festivals, a Hogback Day celebration, children's activities, local history programs, and improved connections between younger and older generations. These ideas reflect an important principle of sustainable development: Strong communities are built through relationships, not simply infrastructure.
A general store, for example, could be more than a retail business. It could become a community gathering place, a marketplace for local producers, and a source of economic activity.
2. Resources and Partnerships: Finding Opportunities in What Already Exists
Marlboro has significant resources, including forests, farmland, recreational areas, historic buildings, local businesses, and a community of knowledgeable residents.
The Sustainability Lens Game helped participants explore how these resources might be connected in new ways.
Popular proposals included:
A community food hub, cooperative farm, and local food initiatives.
A sustainable building research center and business incubator using local wood and forest resources.
New uses for the former Marlboro school and college campus.
Improved energy, transportation, and housing infrastructure.
Partnerships with energy providers, local businesses, and regional development organizations.
Sustainable innovation does not always require creating something entirely new. Sometimes innovations begin by recognizing and reconnecting resources that already exist.
3. Financial Sustainability: Turning Community Ideas into Viable Projects
Creative ideas are only the beginning. Long-term success also requires understanding costs, revenue opportunities, investment, and community benefits.
A third group explored potential economic development initiatives, including:
A Community Maker and Business Hub: Transforming the former school into a cooperative space for artisans, entrepreneurs, workshops, markets, and small businesses.
A Nordic Spa and Wellness Destination: Building on Marlboro's natural beauty and recreational resources to create a wellness-based visitor economy.
Year-Round Housing: Exploring cooperative housing, community land trusts, and conversion of existing facilities into permanent residences.
A Cultural Destination: Expanding opportunities connected to Marlboro's music, arts, and cultural heritage.
Participants discussed preliminary investment estimates and possible revenue opportunities. These were early brainstorming concepts rather than researched financial projections.
The discussion illustrated a key Sustainability Lens Game principle:
Economic viability, community well-being, and environmental responsibility should be considered together, rather than as separate goals.
The Sustainability Lens Game in Action: From Ideas to Action
What makes this approach different from a traditional community meeting?
The Sustainability Lens Game provides a structured way for participants to explore interconnected questions, build on one another's ideas, and begin identifying what would be needed to implement them. In Marlboro, the workshop demonstrated several benefits of game-based community planning:
Inclusive participation. Residents and community partners could contribute their knowledge without needing formal training in economic development or business planning.
Systems thinking. Participants explored how community needs, resources, partnerships, and financial sustainability influence one another.
Collaborative innovation. Ideas evolved through conversation, shared knowledge, and connections between participants.
Community ownership. Participants helped identify which proposals deserved further exploration rather than receiving a predetermined development plan.
Action-oriented learning. The process created a foundation for moving from broad ideas toward specific projects, partnerships, and implementation strategies.
The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Tamara Stenn, founder of the Sustainability Lens Game, an entrepreneurship professor at Suffolk University's Sawyer Business School, and a Marlboro resident involved in local economic development. For Stenn, the event provided an opportunity to bring a tool developed for sustainable entrepreneurship and organizational innovation into a community development setting.
The Next Phase: Turning Community Priorities into Development Projects
The October 24 workshop was the first step in a longer participatory planning process.
Through November 14, the workshop posters and results are on display at the Marlboro Community Center, where additional residents can review proposals, vote on their favorites, contribute new ideas, and participate in a community mapping activity. Once the public input period closes, the ideas will be reviewed to identify three priority development projects.
A community report will summarize the findings, describe the proposed opportunities, and invite residents and development partners to participate.
In early 2027 a follow-up Sustainability Lens Game session is planned to explore selected
projects in greater depth. These sessions will help participants:
Define each project's purpose and community value.
Identify potential users, customers, and stakeholders.
Map available resources, activities, and partnerships.
Explore costs, revenue opportunities, and funding.
Evaluate social, environmental, and economic impacts.
Develop practical action steps and identify project champions.
The objective is to move from a community vision to a set of focused, achievable initiatives with people committed to advancing them.
Could Your Community Benefit from the Sustainability Lens Game?
Marlboro's experience illustrates how the Sustainability Lens Game can be adapted beyond traditional business and classroom settings.
The same collaborative framework can support:
Community development organizations exploring local economic opportunities and revitalization.
Municipalities and planning committees engaging residents in participatory planning.
Nonprofits and social enterprises designing programs that create sustainable community value.
Economic development practitioners helping stakeholders identify resources, partnerships, and financially viable initiatives.
Educators and researchers teaching sustainable development, entrepreneurship, and systems thinking through experiential learning.
Businesses and organizations seeking innovative solutions to complex social and environmental challenges.
Whether the goal is developing a new business, strengthening a local economy, or addressing a complex community challenge, the Sustainability Lens Game helps participants explore possibilities from multiple perspectives and translate ideas into action.
An Invitation to Dream, Plan, and Do
The Marlboro workshop reminds us that sustainable development begins with people.
A community's greatest assets are not always its buildings, land, or financial resources. Often, they are the ideas, knowledge, creativity, and willingness of people to work together.
By creating a structured, welcoming space for collaboration, the Sustainability Lens Game can help make these assets visible and turn them into new opportunities.
Marlboro's journey toward 2036 is just beginning.
What could your community, organization, or business accomplish if everyone came together to dream, plan, and do?
The Sustainability Lens Game is a collaborative learning and innovation tool designed to help people explore sustainable business models, recognize opportunities, evaluate trade-offs, and develop solutions that create economic, social, and environmental value.
Dream. Plan. Do. Sustainable innovation starts with a conversation.
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