In this special episode I sit down with Allie Levy of Still North Books and Bar talking about some of the great value in supporting local businesses this Saturday, November 25th for Small Business Saturday in Hanover.

Supporting local businesses has so many benefits - aside from keeping money in the community, shopping local helps create and support good and well paying jobs in the Upper Valley, reduces the environmental footprint of your shopping and so much more.

Parking is free throughout Hanover on Saturday. Park once, and get outside and walk around and support local!

Here is a selection of some of the businesses in Downtown Hanover offerring Small Business Saturday promos:

You can also purchase new gift cards through the Upper valley's Local Luv gift card program!

This is your Town Manager Alex Torpey here with another spotlight episode.

I sit down in Town Hall with Sian Beilock, Dartmouth College's 19th president, who was inaugurated in September of this year. Sian and I discuss a range of issues from mental health, to housing in Hanover, to disagreeing and having civil conversations, what insights we can gain from cognitive science and psychology about how people interact with each other, and whether Sian can still beat her daughter in tennis or not. Both Sian and I wanted to make sure to share how essential it is to both of our organizations that we explore new ways to work even more effectively together.

Much of this kicked off last year, when I and our Selectboard were invited to a reception lunch that was hosted by the College's Board of Trustees. Although many Town and College staff already work well together, I made the case for the value in finding new ways to collaborate at a more senior, and big picture level, with me being new and Dartmouth expecting a new president soon. On that day, everyone recommitted to this great and important work, and I think we've already made a lot of progress, with so much more to come.
 

Sian and I first had a chance to discus this when we met in February of this year about the challenges and opportunities in Hanover, at Dartmouth, and in our broader regional community in the Upper Valley. Since then, the College has created a VP of Government and Community Relations (Great discussion with Emma Wolfe a few episodes back), and since then we've worked together on a range of new programs and issues, such as around economic and community development in our downtown, around housing, transportation, sustainability, student involvement, and more, already with notable results.

Growing up in a College town in New Jersey that I later happened to become the mayor of, and being involved in Town governance when I was in College, the complex thread of how dynamics work in College towns has always been on my mind, and that complexity, vibrancy, and challenge and opportunity is part of what excites me about the work that we're doing in Hanover. Finding the right way for the Town, and its many related stakeholders, and the College, and its many related stakeholders, to work together, even, and especially, when we aren't 100% aligned on how to approach a particular problem, idea, or policy, is one of the most important things we can do in Hanover to ensure our community's success and future.

So please enjoy this conversation with Sian and look for more in the coming weeks, months, and years about how we're collaborating on issues that matter most to our community.

More resources:

Hey all, this is your Town Manager Alex Torpey with your October update. First update: fall has come and gone! Anyway, October was a busy month in town, and in this October recap, we're going to cover topics

This includes updates on:

Links and Resources:

I had the pleasure to attend the annual conference of the International City/County Management Association last week in Austin Texas and wanted to bring you some stories from Town Managers from across the country. Nearly 6,000 local government managers and professionals gathered from around the world to work on every issue you could possibly imagine (Learn about ICMA here).

For this conference, I was also selected as one of two town managers by the Municipal Management Association of New Hampshire, along with Karen Conard, the City Manager of Portsmouth, to represent our state at a 4-hour in-depth session looking at the municipal manager's role in facilitating or making change in a community, a deep dive into the dynamics that can enable or disable local progress. Here are some of the other sessions I attended:

Beyond going to and/or presenting at various sessions, the fun and meaningful part of going to conferences like this is getting to meet tons of interesting folks that are ultra passionate about finding ways to help their communities address some of their biggest challenges. I enjoy sharing what I'm working on, learning about what other people are doing, and workshopping ideas that we can all take back to our day-to-day.

I wanted to bring a small slice of the conference to you all, and so I managed to grab a few quick 3-5 minute discussions with a number of city and town managers and other attendees from all around the country. Check out the conversations below and learn a little bit about what's happening in local government outside of the Upper Valley!

Hey all, this is your town Manager Alex Torpey with your September update!

Here are some of the things we've been working on in September:

September 11th and 18th Selectboard Meetings

Don't forget to join us on Allen Street Friday October 27th and Saturday October 28th for some great Halloween events!

More links:

In Hanover, we care a lot about making sure people have information about what's happening in their community. It's part of the reason we started this podcast and why the Selectboard does business the way it does. But government is only one piece to the puzzle of informing, engaging, and activating a community.

In this episode, I take a walk through Pine Park in Hanover with Rob Gurwitt, publisher of the daily email newsletter that many of us know and love - Daybreak. To the sound of gravel footsteps and late summer insects, we cover a wide range of super important topics such as:

Rob has a long personal and professional history of not only working in and around government, but in finding creative ways through various mediums to inform and engage people, and ultimately contribute positively to creating community. Rob wrote for the Congressional Quarterly, spent many years writing for Governing Magazine, and has spent years in different ways writing about what's happening and changing in communities. Rob helped launch the DailyUV, and since 2019, has published Daybreak.

You can signup for Daybreak here: https://daybreak.news/

You can find the article from Governing Magazine about Tupelo, MI that we discussed here.

This is your Town Manager, Alex Torpey, and I'm here to welcome new and returning students back on campus and in town with the top five tips of what you might want to know about things happening around town!

We'll talk about:

Resources:

You made quite a good decision to go to such a great College in such a wonderful area. You're lucky to be here, and we're lucky to have you here. See you around town!

This is your Town Manager Alex Torpey here with your August update. In this episode we're going to cover updates from our August 21st Selectboard meeting, which includes updates on:

Additional links:

In this episode, I sit down with long-time resident and volunteer Susan Edwards to talk about the upcoming Town Yard Sale on September 2nd at 10am as well as to learn more about the Hanover Garden Club and Susan's own background and volunteering in Hanover and the Upper Valley. You might see the Garden Club's handiwork all around town with beautiful native plants that really add a lot to our downtown and community!

We encourage folks to stop by the Yard Sale (details below) as proceeds for booths help fund Sustainable Hanover and other great work. We also thank Dartmouth for their collaboration, and Susan and the many volunteers who make this and so many great events and opportunities happen in our community.

The 12th Annual Hanover Community Yard Sale will be held on Saturday, September 2nd, 2023, 10 am to 2 pm! Location is Dewey Field lot

Interested in volunteering to make the event a success? Email [email protected]!

Resources:

In this episode I sit down with Associate Professor of Business Administration Adam Kleinbaum at Dartmouth's Tuck Business School. Adam and colleagues have recently completed a study where they used FMRI technology to measure brain activity of people as they have conversations and build consensus (or don't), which appeared in Daybreak earlier this summer.

I sit with Adam in Town Hall and we talk about the study, and it's broader implications for how we relate to eachother, how implicit narratives change based on social interactions (and other environmental factors), and fascinating implications for what leadership means - for example, that the most influential individuals that helped produce cognitive alignment were open-minded people who fleshed out ideas from others, rather than who aggressively pushed their own ideas. There is significant implication and alignments with tenants of positive psychnology as well. There are broad ranging implications for this work in how we conceptualize our personal and professional relationships, and importantly, how people work together to think about and address large problems.

The other study authors were: Beau Sievers, Dartmouth’s Christopher Welker, Uri Hasson, and Dartmouth’s Thalia Wheatley.

More links: