Community Capital of Vermont, a statewide, nonprofit community-based lending organization that provides loans and business coaching to underserved businesspeople and new entrepreneurs, has selected five new members of its board of directors for Fiscal Year 2018.

David Chevalier is the Vice President of Commercial Services for Northfield Savings Bank. With more than ten years of banking and lending experience, Chevalier leads in providing the lending and financial management services that help Vermont businesses acquire assets, create jobs and grow. He is a resident of Shelburne.

Seven Days, Vermont’s free, independent newsweekly, won 14 first-place awards in this year’s New England Better Newspaper Competition, including top honors for its reporting and writing, website, headline writing, design and presentation, and video journalism. The paper also won nine second-place awards and four third-place awards — 27 total. The contest is organized by the New England Newspaper & Press Association. Winners were announced at NENPA’s annual convention Saturday night in Boston.

Saint Michael’s College journalism Professor Traci Griffith was elected to the Executive Committee of the National American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Board during a late-January meeting in Atlanta. “It’s an opportunity to step up and have Vermont have a more significant role in setting an an agenda for the national organization – it gives us more of a voice,” said Griffith, who chairs the Saint Michael’s Department of Media Studies, Journalism and Digital Arts and also is an attorney.