On Montpelier’s lively Front Porch Forum, Morgan Brown is one of the most frequent posters, providing local news, commentary and occasional humor.
“Can’t sleep at night? Restless?” began one recent post. “Not to worry, call the Insomnia Warmline. Our professionally trained, volunteer, experienced peers, people who are sleepless at night as well, will bore you to sleep.”
When Brown went silent for several months this winter, his absence was noted by locals. Upon his return in February, he had some not-so-humorous news to share: He had been diagnosed with an aggressive case of colon cancer and been in and out of the hospital for weeks.
The response was immediate and kind. “Morgan Brown, So sorry to hear of your health struggles. I’m thinking of you,” Cindy McCloud wrote on Front Porch Forum.
Brown told VTDigger he was incredibly grateful for the Montpelierians who had driven him to the hospital, brought him omelettes and scrambled eggs, and looked after his cat, Miss “Cleo” Cleopatra, while he was gone.
“I’ve learned not to say no because that sometimes pisses people off because they want to help,” he said.
In mid-May, Brown received a positive update. His oncologist told him he could have a year or more to live if he pursued treatment, rather than his initial prognosis of three months to a year.
Brown fully intends to pursue treatment. However, he said he’s still in a lot of pain.
“I’m a fighter, and I intend to beat those odds, so I intend to be around for a while,” he said. “Winston Churchill’s favorite saying every day in the morning was, ‘Keep buggering on.’ And that’s basically a model I’ve adopted — keep buggering on.”
Brown’s diagnosis has also forced him to retire from his passion of advocating for unhoused Vermonters, especially those living on the streets of Montpelier.
Brown has attended protests, served on the city’s Homelessness Task Force, and written commentaries for outlets like VTDigger in support of policies that would provide more compassion and support to unhoused Vermonters.
The issue is personal to him. Brown spent 12 years living unhoused, transitioning between a variety of living situations before he found housing 15 years ago.
When it comes to housing policy, Brown is adamant and firm. “There shouldn’t be one person living outside,” he said.
Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont and a friend of Brown’s, called him a well-respected member of the community who gives with “all of his heart.”
She said she was saddened to hear of his cancer diagnosis.
“I don’t really want to know a world where Morgan Brown is not part of the life that I have or the work that I do because we need him here,” she said.
‘Every person is worth the effort’
Brown grew up in eastern Massachusetts but said he never felt connected to it.
“I don’t say I’m from there. I say I was plopped there as a little kid,” he said.
He first came to Vermont more than 30 years ago. He had chipped in to help a friend get their car up to Montpelier. From the first time he saw the small city, he knew he wanted to live there.
“I saw the kids hanging out in front of City Center. I said to myself, ‘Well, if they can do that, this place is for me, you know, I’ll be accepted,’” he said.
For a while Brown lived at Another Way, a local community center for unhoused Vermonters and psychiatric survivors. The center did not usually allow people to live there, but he had an “unofficial” arrangement, he said.
“Otherwise, I would have been out in the woods with a tarp,” he said.
Eventually, with the assistance of an employee at Washington County Mental Health Services, Brown was able to get a motel room, then an apartment. When asked about how his experience informs his opinions on the housing crisis, he deflected.
“I try not to just use my own perspective. I watch and I listen to whoever’s outside and whatever. And I actually draw more on that than my own (experience),” he said.
Lately, he’s had a hard time keeping up with the local unhoused community because his health mostly keeps him at home. Brown lives in a small efficiency apartment in a multi-unit building with Cleo, a 12-year-old cat with a “voracious appetite.”
His recent hospitalization was the longest the two had been apart since he adopted her 11 years ago. “Ever since I got back from the hospital, she hasn’t let me out of her sight,” Brown said.
He recalled one of the last in-person protests he was able to attend was the sleep-in on the steps of the Vermont Statehouse in 2021, when activists camped out at the Capitol for weeks to protest the removal of unhoused Vermonters from the motel program.
Although he stayed with them for only one night — and “didn’t get any sleep at all,” he said — Siegel recalled Brown coming by to give the protesters water and moral support, then getting a hotel room in town for them when the protest was over so they could go straight to bed.
“He did not tell us, because we would have refused,” she said. “It was just like, I can’t quite describe it, but he would show up with whatever he had and give all of it.”
Since then, the two have kept in touch through text and email. Siegel has read Brown’s poetry out loud at various protests and events.
“He writes beautiful poetry, and especially beautiful poetry about the experience of homelessness and the experience of watching other people go through it after now that he’s housed,” she said.
His poetry, political writing and observations about daily life are collected on his blog, Green Mountain Meandering Missives. At times he addresses his thoughts on the housing crisis directly to Gov. Phil Scott.
“It boggles the mind how your administration can be so deliberately indifferent and uncaring when it comes to those who are being or already have been evicted from the Vermont Hotel/Motel Program without those persons having anywhere else safe and secure to go inside, day or night,” he wrote in an open letter to Scott last month.
The Legislature and Scott have clashed in recent years over whether to extend funding to the state’s motel program, which housed thousands of Vermonters during the Covid-19 pandemic but has slowly been rolled back.
To everyday Vermonters, Brown asked them to consider doing for others what they would want done for their loved ones if they were facing a difficult situation. “What would you want for your loved ones? You’d pull out all the stops, right?” he said.
He said society tends to classify certain people as “not worth it” — but Brown said he believes “every human life, every person is worth the effort.”
“The problem is sometimes people have given up on themselves, so we need to double down on them. We need to show them that they matter. That somebody cares for them, even if they don’t care for themselves,” he said. “And that, sometimes it helps. Without wanting something from them. They’re not obliged, there’s no expectation. I’m not a religious person, per se, but it’s God’s true love.”
