When I’ve had conversations with someone in Vermont officialdom and the name “Brenda Siegel” comes up, it usually elicits a bit of a grimace. Siegel isn’t a comfortable character. She’s direct, some would say abrasive. She’s a fierce advocate for an unpopular cause. When she walks into a legislative hearing, the assembled lawmakers brace for impact. When she earned the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2022, the party offered some support but endorsements were few and the donor class shunned her campaign.

And now that H.938 has become law as Act 143, she ought to be taking a nice long victory lap. She did issue a press release; otherwise I suspect she got right back to work.

Act 143 is far from perfect, but it’s a much better law than any of our political leaders really wanted. It’s an attempt at creating a comprehensive response to homelessness instead of the box of Band-Aids that is the hotel/motel program. Crucially, it requires for the first time that the state’s homelessness response system must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I bet you thought that was a given, but apparently not.

There are other heroes in this story — House Human Services Chair Theresa Wood and Rep. Jubilee McGill for starters — but it wouldn’t have happened without Siegel’s tenacity and willingness to be unpopular in the service of her cause.

And in the category of poetic justice, End Homelessness Vermont, the nonprofit she founded and ran on a shoestring, is now part of the official system. The state’s FY2027 budget includes a $200,000 appropriation for EHV, which will now work alongside state agencies to try to lift the unhoused into safe, productive lives.

Gee, maybe she could have been a good governor after all.

For years, official Vermont’s response to our homelessness crisis has been, in a word, shameful. The Scott administration has been solely focused on cost — and on fashioning a system seemingly designed to frustrate the eligible and limit access. The Legislature has fought against the most miserly aspects of administration policy, but has consistently tightened the spigot and forced thousands of Vermonters onto the streets and under the overpasses.

And Siegel was fighting back every step of the way. She buttonholed lawmakers who didn’t want to talk to her. She made “lived experience” an unignorable part of the legislative record by curating testimony from those who’d experienced homelessness and suffered from the cruelty and carelessness of a system that was (supposedly) there to help. Their voices exposed the bland assurances of the Scott administration for what they were: convenient fictions.

Our Political Betters kept grinding away at the hotel/motel program without offering any real substitutes, and Siegel fought and fought and fought for years. She camped out on the Statehouse steps for almost a month of late fall weather, risking her own health in the process. Every time there was a mass unsheltering due to hotel/motel cuts, Siegel was out there connecting reporters with those losing their housing, making sure the story got the coverage it deserved — and at the same time, running a statewide hotline trying desperately to find shelter for all those affected.

Again, she’s not the only hero in this story, and she does have her flaws. But Brenda Siegel should get a goddamn medal for her public service.

In lieu of a shiny honorific, her organization End Homelessness Vermont is getting $200,000 from the state. The budget appropriation states that the money will allow EHV to ““continue providing statewide housing navigation, case management, service coordination, technical assistance, appeals, and permanent housing support for individuals living with complex needs and disabilities who are experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity.”

In short, as Siegel couldn’t resist noting in a press release, the money “is allocated for us to do exactly what we do every day.” Yeah, bit of a victory lap there. Also this:

End Homelessness Vermont started as a hotline, born out of necessity, to make sure people weren’t left outside when they had nowhere to go. Today we… answer thousands of calls a year. We walk alongside people from the moment of crisis through permanent housing. And we don’t give up on anyone.

Which is, I must note, what the state should have been doing from the start.

The famous words of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich could have been uttered with Siegel in mind: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”