About
Across Roads Center of the Arts is dedicated to the facilitation, presentation, collaboration, and education of arts in the Waterbury Vermont region.
VISION
Across Roads Center for the Arts believes strongly that celebrating and cultivating the creative impulse in all sectors, and across all boundaries helps to enrich our quality of life, our economy, and our sustainability for the future.
WHO IS ACROSS ROADS CENTER FOR THE ARTS?
Across Roads Center for the Arts is a 501(c) 3, non-profit community arts organization based in Waterbury, Vermont. We are a diverse group of community-minded volunteers– creators of all kinds, business people, and arts enthusiasts—working to enrich our lives and community through the arts. Across Roads Center for the Arts primary goals was to provide the community with a physical space to gather and celebrate the area’s creative talents and growth. In 2017, Across Roads formally partnered with the Grange Hall Cultural Center in Waterbury Center to base its activities and grow its reach. Now when people ask, “Where is Across Roads Center for the Arts?” we can invite them into our home to enjoy our programming and community-based hospitality.
HISTORY
The Waterbury area has a long tradition of cottage arts– theater, music, visual art, dance, writing, public art, culinary and beautiful functional art– made by a multitude of area artists and craftspeople in the solitude of studios, garages, barns, and at kitchen tables throughout the region. For decades Waterbury was considered a “pass through” town, a place “in-between,” but through the inherent creative energy evident in its people and industry, the arts are becoming a reason to stop and stay.
Out of the FEMA Long-Term Recovery Process following Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, a concerted effort emerged to provide the Waterbury area with a creative hub to foster and empower the creative capital evident in our region and to fuel and diversify our economic base. Waterbury Activities and Cultural Center (WACC), a local arts group here since 1989, needing new energy and envisioning, merged with this effort in 2012 forming a renewed organization for creative activity in Central Vermont under the moniker, “Across Roads Center for the Arts”. Important traditions of WACC have been kept and carried forth, woven into the organization’s fabric and building on their 20+ years of hard work. These historical traditions, coupled with invigorated ideas and programming for the 21stCentury and the current developing area gives Across Roads Center for the Arts its foundation for continued community creative empowerment.