Joan Mulford Braun passed away peacefully in the company of family at her home in Shelburne, Vt., on Thursday, February 6, 2025. She was 87.
As a longtime resident of Charlotte, Vt., Joan directed the experiential and service-learning program, DUO (Do Unto Others), at Champlain Valley Union High School from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
Joan was born in Philadelphia, Pa., in 1937, the eldest of John Mulford and Virginia Compton Mulford’s four children. As a girl, she attended the Agnes Irwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 with a BA. That year she married Theodore E. Braun Jr., who was completing medical school at Penn. They remained happily married for more than 60 years until his death in October 2021.
In 1970, Joan and Ted moved to Charlotte, where they raised their three sons and were active residents of a town they richly enjoyed for nearly 50 years. Joan was elected to the Charlotte School Board in the early 1970s, then pursued a master’s of education at the University of Vermont. After she received her degree, she joined the Direction Center at CVU in fall 1978. Her leadership of the DUO program took her around the U.S., as a leader in the then innovative field of experiential public education. Her work — partnering high school teens with community mentors — brought her into contact with a great variety of students, people and businesses throughout Chittenden County, a diversity of humanity and experience she sought and nourished throughout her life.
After retiring in 1997, she devoted herself to volunteer work with the Charlotte Senior Center and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington, Vt. — where she and Ted were engaged members for more than 50 years — and to international travel and the lives of her expanding family of grandchildren. She deeply enjoyed activities that brought her into the natural world she so treasured in Vermont; she walked, gardened, skied, biked, swam and kayaked. She also took great pleasure in UVM basketball and the vital artistic community in and around Burlington. Theater, music of all sorts, and the work of local craft and fine artists elicited her delight and support. In 2016 Joan and Ted moved to Shelburne, where she maintained a wide circle of strong friendships that sustained and enriched her.
She’s survived by her sisters, Margaret Bartholomew of Shelburne and Nancy Burrill of San Francisco; sons, Theodore Braun III of Los Angeles, Michael Braun of Houston and Stuart Braun of Portland, Maine; three daughters in-law, Lori Froeling, Sandra Hurtado and Colleen Kelly; and beloved grandchildren, Isabella Hurtado-Braun, Daniel Hurtado-Braun, Samuel Braun, Lucas Braun and Grace Braun.
Services will be held on February 21, 2025, 1 p.m., at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington, with a reception to follow at the Hotel Champlain. In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory may be made to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul and the Charlotte Public Library.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.