Meet Tiff

Mother. Legislator. Teacher. Nonprofit Leader. Advocate. Coalition-Builder.

Mother. Legislator. Teacher. Nonprofit Leader. Advocate.

Coalition-Builder. 

Tiff Bluemle has dedicated her career to encouraging the potential and success of children and adults. After a six-year stint teaching high school history, Tiff served as executive director of Vermont Works for Women (VWW), a nonprofit organization helping women and girls to think about their lives in the broadest terms and to develop skills that are critical to long-term economic independence. Under her seventeen years of leadership, VWW worked with thousands of women and girls, grew its budget five-fold, and developed youth initiatives and job training programs for incarcerated women that have been replicated or recognized in national publications. 

She has made a practice of building broad coalitions to identify achievable solutions. She fought hard as an advocate to advance changes in workforce development policy, increase Vermonters’ access to vocational training, establish the state’s first transitional home for women under correctional supervision, and improve conditions for inmates housed at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. 

The success of these collaborative efforts ultimately inspired her to help launch Change The Story VT, an initiative designed to fast-track women’s economic well-being by aligning the priorities and efforts of the VT Women’s Fund, the VT Commission on Women, and Vermont Works for Women. In five years, Change The Story has developed and published groundbreaking data on women to expose gender disparities that continue to inhibit women from reaching their full potential. It has partnered with dozens of Vermont employers and men to promote inclusive workplaces, pay equity and champion culture change. 

Seeing that the pandemic had raised the political will to address issues she’d worked on for two decades,Tiff ran to serve Burlington’s South End in the VT House of Representatives in 2020. In her first term, she’s helped champion key housing bills, employment protections for victims of sexual harassment, and sentencing reforms for custodial parents. She serves on the House General, Housing and Military Affairs committee, the House Sexual Harassment Prevention Panel, and as a leader of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.

Tiff, her partner, and two sons have lived in the South End of Burlington for 20 years.