THETFORD — The vibrant yellow and green front door on the otherwise quintessential New England white church in North Thetford is the first sign that the space is not exactly what it seems.

The new paint job reflects a recent change of ownership of the circa-1850 building on Route 5 near the North Thetford Post Office. The United Church of Thetford congregation donated the structure to the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust two years ago as a space for a community center that is especially for people of color.

The land trust team painted the door this fall, as they prepared for a fall festival at what is now known as the New Suns Community Center.

Doing so “felt like a rite of passage, almost,” Kenya Lazuli, 46, the land trust’s Reparations Program co-director who is leading the community center project, said in a November interview. “Like owning the space in a different way or occupying the space in a different way and sort of coming out to this community as: ‘We’re not a church but this space is still for everyone.’ ”

For Lazuli, who grew up in Corinth, left “as soon as I could” and returned 10 years ago to have her first child, the work of creating an “accessible and safe and welcoming” community space for people of color in Vermont is deeply personal.

“Growing up here as a person of color is also very intense, and even more so in the ‘80s and ‘90s. My brother and I were the only people of color in our whole school,” Lazuli said.

To find places where Lazuli and her brother could connect with other people of color, her parents often had to take them out of the state.

Less than 9% of Thetford’s 2,775 people are not white, including people who identify as Hispanic and Latino, according to the 2020 census. In Orange County as a whole, this number is below 6%.

The former church is the first property secured as part of the land trust’s Every Town project, which Lazuli started in 2020 to place a piece of land in permanent trust in every town in Vermont for BIPOC use and stewardship.

Based in Massachusetts and formed in 2020, the land trust is a BIPOC-led nonprofit organization focused on securing land access for BIPOC farmers and land stewards throughout the Northeast. The trust and its network also promote and practice regenerative farming, food access, ecosystem restoration, and other climate and cultural advancement goals.

Despite growing up in Vermont, Lazuli said people are always “surprised that someone like me could be from here and could live here.”

At the same time, “because Vermont is like a small town made up of small towns, it really mattered to folks that I’m from Vermont,” Lazuli said, which gave her an “unspoken” level of acceptance for her work.

“It was almost like I had permission to be here and to take up space in this way that I don’t think … would necessarily have been granted to another person of color who’s not from this area,” Lazuli said. “I’m also thrilled to be able to offer that to all the communities of color that live in this state, or live in this area, and that want to use this space.”

The fact that Shingai Njeri Kagunda, the reparations program coordinator at the land trust who moved to the United States from Kenya in 2019, is not from Vermont is what makes the work so important to her.

“If you’re coming here as a person of color for the first time and trying to live here, it’s really, really, really difficult without community,” Njeri Kagunda said.

When she first moved to the state, she said she worked as a creative writing teacher which she found to be a very negative and racist experience. She quit her teaching job and joined Lazuli at New Suns after the building was donated. She now runs the community center with Lazuli and serves as New Suns’ liberation librarian.

“Because I have been in a place that felt safer at work, I’ve been able to engage with my relationship with the land itself in a different way…” Njeri Kagunda said. “Vermont feels more like it’s for me than before.”

‘Wonderful to see’

Several years ago, the United Church of Thetford congregation of about 25 active members set out to divest itself of its two properties, the current New Suns building and a second church in Thetford Center.

As they were looking for recipients, “We weren’t interested in just giving it to someone who had no plans, no backing. We wanted the building used and we wanted it loved,” the Rev. Brigid Farrell said.

“We are an older congregation and even though we have an endowment, the decision was made that we’d rather use that endowment to help out local charities or people that need it … rather than have to always worry about the building and keeping it up,” Farrell said.

The community center is a maze of interconnected rooms and halls spread across two levels that descend down a hill, giving the feeling that it is larger on the inside. It includes two kitchens, the church sanctuary, a fellowship hall with a stage, and several other rooms.

The congregation vetted different groups and donated the Thetford Center building to the town in 2019. That building has sat unused since, which has been “extremely disappointing,” Farrell said.

In contrast, it has been exciting for the congregation to see the New Suns building being used throughout the week and bringing in young people and BIPOC to Thetford.

“That’s what New Suns is doing and that’s wonderful to see … It’s great to have them in our community. There are not very many people that are not white in Thetford so that’s good to see too,” Farrell said.

While New Suns prioritizes using the space for BIPOC and for programming related to the land trust’s mission, “it’s genuinely a community center,” Lazuli said. In the past two years, she said she cannot remember saying no to any requests to use the space.

“It’s for whoever’s here and whoever needs a space to gather and wants to utilize the resources that are being accumulated in the space,” Lazuli said.

This has meant that in addition to New Suns’ own programming, they have “inherited” some groups, such as the Thetford Elder Network, the Historical Society and the church congregation, which still holds a weekly Sunday service in the sanctuary.

For New Suns programs, most groups are asked to contribute a donation to “help keep the lights on.”

The land trust is funded through donations from individuals and organizations, including farms, businesses and other nonprofits. In 2023, nearly 70% of the land trust’s funding came through grants.

‘Rage and joy and healing’

Since the 2022 donation, the New Suns team has slowly made the building their own, and developed the center’s programming, resources and presence in the community.

They’ve converted parts of the building to a Liberation Library, a tool library and a pottery studio, and a new food shelf sits outside.

Over two years, New Suns has hosted pottery classes, community meals, book clubs, fundraisers, reading groups, flea markets and educational talks. While some programs feature large groups, participation varies widely depending on the type of event; a recent crafting class was capped at 10 participants, for example.

The first space the team “reclaimed” was a sunny meeting room that they turned into a Liberation Library using grant funding.

The room has bright orange walls, colorfully patterned furniture, and one floor-to-ceiling shelf of books themed around liberation and BIPOC experience. They are the kind of books that are “not generally found in a library around here,” Lazuli said. The team hopes to acquire many more volumes in the future.

“I find when we have groups of color come in here, they’re thrilled to see a library that speaks to their experience and speaks to their interests and their rage and joy and healing,” she added.

The space is designated as a library, but, like the rest of the building, it has played many roles. In February, it was transformed into a theater to host the Black Futures Film Festival, one of Njeri Kagunda’s favorite events.

A group of more than 70 people of all ages gathered in the library to watch Black-made films from different decades, Njeri Kagunda said.

“You had really interesting discussions that were inter-generational between Black community in the space and it was really wholesome, because you don’t get a lot of intergenerational conversations like that,” Njeri Kagunda said.

The tool library fills one large room, with shelves stocked with equipment from hammers and screwdrivers to work belts and power saws. The team recently finished cataloging all the equipment so the library can get up and running.

“The impetus for the tool library is, A, for being able to teach workshops and classes and support folks in their learning journey with building and farming and gardening,” Lazuli said. “But I also was a member of a tool library before I moved back to Vermont, and that’s how I learned a lot of carpentry by borrowing tools I couldn’t afford to buy and experimenting.”

While they don’t see the tools being accessible 24/7, New Suns plans to host open hours where people can come and check out equipment. The ultimate goal is to make it mobile so it can be taken to different classes, workshops and building projects.

One constantly accessible resource at New Suns is the food shelf, which sits on the outside of the building.

Built this fall by a traveling crew of about 20 farmers, the food shelf resembles a small shed. In the summer, it will be stocked with a community supported agriculture share from Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford. In the winter, the New Suns team hopes the shelf will be stocked with non-perishables and other goods.

Even in the spaces that remain in their former form, the community center has hosted non-traditional events, such as roller skating in the fellowship hall and poetry readings in the sanctuary. They also regularly use New Suns’ two kitchens to hold community dinners and host discussions throughout the building.

“Each different event holds a different personality, almost, depending on the group and the intention of the group and how much they make it their own,” Lazuli said.

While many events use one room or happen over a short period of time, the New Suns Fall Festival this September, for which the building got its new paint job and sign, stood out to Lazuli as a uniquely “dynamic” use of the space and as a “sweet” and “wholesome” celebration.

The event featured food trucks and vendors, a bartering and trading night market with local artists, and dancing and roller skating in the fellowship hall. One of the standout features for both organizers was live reggae music in the church hall. “Not bluegrass, which is abundant here,” Lazuli joked.

‘We can do all the things’

Though the community center has seen a lot of growth in two years, Lazuli and Njeri Kagunda plan to do more with the space. They envision that their brightly painted front door will eventually be one part of a building that is colorful both inside and out. They also picture a food forest — or garden that integrates different food-producing plants and trees in a way that mimics nature — in the property’s small outdoor space.

“The goal is to plant it up. It makes the space more alive too. It makes it more wild, but also, more a part of the land rather than just a lawn and a building,” Lazuli said

As the community center continues to grow, they expect that it will be a model for other projects in and outside of the land trust. Already, other churches have asked the New Suns team to come talk about how they can do the same with their space.

“If this project and this building and this work that we’re doing can act as a model for other communities, great, and also there’s so many ways to do this. Like this could have been emergency housing… or farm worker housing, it could have been so many things,” Lazuli said. “Let’s not limit our imaginations, because we can do all the things.”

Clare Shanahan can be reached at cshanahan@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.