The Rethink Local Podcast

Welcome to a special episode of the RETHINK LOCAL podcast. In it, I talk with Nate Bernitz who is a community and economic development field specialist at the University of New Hampshire extension about ways to improve retention and recruitment on municipal boards and committees and help leverage the power of volunteers to improve local decision-making. 

This topic has come up a lot in meetings and workshops with town officials, and some best practices have been highly requested, so Nate and I run through a bunch of best practices and practical tips that you can implement in your community to increase how effective these boards and committees are as well ensure they have full and representative membership from your community.

Nate and I recorded a long conversation here and I actually decided to break it into two shorter episodes. This episode is the practical tips that you can take right to your town and implement. The second conversation which I'll post shortly, is a more conceptual conversation around the importance of effective community engagement and building your local civic ecosystem.

There is also a free four-page PDF linked below with a guide for your town on low-cost, high-impact ways to step up your board, committee, and volunteerism game. Check it out and let us know if you have any tips that you've found to work well in your community! 

In this episode, we roughly cover the following topics:

I also prepared a handout/takeaways PDF that you can download for free online at Rethink Local, and that is an action plan for your town.

Additional resources:

More about Nate Bernitz and UNH Extension:

Nate is a community & economic development field specialist for UNH Extension, providing educational outreach that builds community and regional leaders’ capacity to grow and sustain the economy. Nate’s areas of focus include economic development, business retention and engagement, and building partnerships that stimulate innovation and foster regional collaboration.  Nate serves the New Hampshire Seacoast Region. Nate holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of New Hampshire.

UNH Extension works in five broad topic areas:  Community and Economic Development, Education & 4-H Youth Development, Food & Agriculture, Health and Well-Being,  and Natural Resources. By working in collaboration with county, state and federal governments, UNH Extension is at work in every New Hampshire county, making the state’s key industries stronger, developing vibrant communities and municipal leaders, fostering healthy families and an informed and engaged citizenry, and keeping the state’s natural resources healthy and productive.

Today I want to talk about public records requests — not from an abstract legal perspective, but from the ground level of actually working in towns across Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

I believe public records access is essential. But things are getting more challenging and we are having the wrong conversation in some key areas, falling into an overly binary debate that doesn't get us closer to better solutions. But there are several solutions that help meet the goals of "both sides" of the debate. 

So I want to walk through five areas:

Have you had a similar or different experience with public records requests?

Reach out to share your thoughts, ideas, or challenges that you are facing.  

Additional resources:

In this quicker update type episode, I share a bit about the contract that Rethink Local just started over the last couple weeks in Randolph Vermont, where my company was brought in to provide planning and zoning services, as well explore some opportunities for shared services in the future. I'll be serving as Randolph's Zoning Administrator under the title of Director of Planning, Zoning, and Regional Partnerships.

In this episode, I wanted to share why local land use and zoning is so critical. Not just about "housing" as we typically think about it, which is already a major priority in our region, but how it is a bedrock to some themes around community and belonging that our country is struggling so much with in 2025, and which housing is one of the early-chain contributors to. We also cover some thoughts and opportunities for people to plug in at the local level to be involved in helping ensure local policies and practices support creating diverse, resilient communities. 

For more information about the work between Rethink Local and Randolph, visit rethinklocal.us or randolphvt.org. 

Additional resources: 

In this episode of Upper Valley Vibes, we're going to talk about community nursing - the program mostly centered in small rural communities in the northeast US, get to know some of the folks who helped drive the adoption of these programs in the Upper Valley and hear from several nurses in different towns about what it's like and why this healthcare service is so valuable.

Part of what I'd like to do on this podcast is spotlight some of the ways in which really large challenges, such as healthcare, are actually being worked on or addressed by creative solutions driven by people right here in our local communities.

It was challenging to try and edit the conversations because there was so many interesting topics. So, this episode is just an overview of a few of the most interesting key points about these programs. In future episodes, I will release the full 30-minute or so conversations with each of the community nurses that we hear from in this episode.

The conversations touched on a range of topics from their backgrounds, how they don't work with insurance the benefits that brings, how community nursing is different than other medicine and healthcare and how they work together, why relationships matter in medicine, why community matters, the value of preventative care, and the overall vibe of this piece of our healthcare system, one of the only ones, that isn't centered around a large corporation making as much money as possible, but rather, with the number one goal as supporting and improving the lives and health of people.

In this episode we'll hear from :

Resources:

Last month, millions of people turned out to vote in the 2024 elections.  I voted stickers made their way across social media, ads and signs littered our internet and streets for weeks and months leading up to it, and billions was spent on the whole thing.

But, the truth is that voting for president is only a drop in the bucket compared to the number of opportunities that our system of government makes available for us all to be involved in. In fact, our systems are designed specifically to have more of us more involved regularly. At the same time many people are looking for ways to get involved, many local communities are struggling to find people to help out. Let's fix that!

In this episode, we talk a bit about how much attention has shifted to the presidency from the nation's original founding, and cover five areas that if you have energy, ideas,  to get more involved you can start doing tomorrow. Some of you will already be familiar with at least some of these, but hopefully there are some ideas in here that can provide you or anyone you know some inspiration or guidance on ways they can get more involved beyond just voting.

We talk about five nonpartisan, accessible, and impactful ways that anyone get more involved:

Are there other ways you have found helpful in getting involved? Send anything I missed or any questions over to me at [email protected].

Episode links:

This is a special episode that I'm posting in December to both of my podcasts, Rethinking and Upper Valley Vibes. On one hand it's the holiday season and taking a quick break from the time required for having and editing discussions which will resume on Upper Valley Vibes in January with some great stuff lined up, but also, I've had so many conversations with people about wanting to get more involved after this really intense presidential election - so I recorded this special episode to help provide some information for people looking for some ways to invest their time and energy in helping contribute to their community or others around them beyond voting for president. I hope you find this information valuable and have a great and relaxing holiday season with family and friends, and if you have any suggestions of things I missed for this episode that I should add to the list, please send them over to me at [email protected].

In this episode of Upper Valley Vibes we took another visit to Norwich over the summer where I sit down with Greg Prince.

Greg has been an educator for the bulk of life - teaching English oversees in the 60s, administering and overseeing program at various schools and colleges, which brought him to Dartmouth as the first Dean of Summer Programs in 1970 and of course where I learned of him, his time as president of Hampshire College (where I went) from 1989 to 2005. Although he had left the year before I came in, his name and fingerprints were on a lot at Hampshire, the most impactful of which for me something called the Principles of Discourse, which I came to know as a document at Hampshire that laid out seven principles for how to support more honest, truth-focused, civil discourse on important and difficult issues.

In this conversation (which I hate to have edited a bit for length), we cover a wide range of topics, from Greg's early education career, to the history of developing the principles of discourse while at Dartmouth, the issues he has with how we break down "higher" and k-12 education, how to support young people to have the capacity for self-directed critical thought, protests and civil disobedience, lessons from giving young people the responsibilities, the value of learning to live with ambiguity, and so much more.

I was excited to learn that Greg lived in the Upper Valley after coming up to work here, and it's been really wonderful getting to know someone who has invested so much time in helping find ways to support others to be the best version of themselves, whatever they decide that might be.

Additional links:

Hi everyone, Alex Torpey here, your host of Upper Valley Vibes.

In this episode, I invited some VIPs from outside the Upper Valley up to Junction Arts Media's (Formerly CATV) podcast recording studio in White River Junction. (Which by the way, JAM is a partner on this podcast and that podcast recording studio can be used by anyone! There are some links in the show notes with more info if you're interested in that.)

Anyway, if you live in Raymond New Hampshire you have an easier time getting informed about what's happening at Town Meeting than people do in many towns. Why? This is because of the dedicated work of a dozen or so volunteers who constitute the Raymond Voter Information Project who are my guests this episode.

These community members and volunteers have been compiling a detailed voter guide for 15 years that gets mailed to every household in Raymond prior to Town Meeting. They compile information, perform editorial reviews to ensure the information is as neutral and objective as possible, and even include things like further research and reasons why someone might vote yes and reasons why someone might vote no, and a voter guide you can fill out and take with you on election day.

It's really interesting to have this much work being done by an independent, nonpartisan organization of individuals who are working to educate and inform their neighbors. Raymond VIP's annual voter guide has become a relied upon resource in town, especially as local media and papers have dropped off over the last two decades. I invited them up here to share a bit about what they do, how they got started, how this relates to local newspapers, lessons they have learned over the years, and maybe some inspiration and ideas for anyone out there who wants to see their community more informed and engaged at Town meeting.

We all met last year after they heard about the Town Meeting handbook I created with a dozen other town managers and officials in New Hampshire, they reached out, and we all really hit it off, as we all believe that helping ensure a well attended and representative town meeting is one of the most important things we can do in our communities. So I'll stop there and get right to the conversation with Susan, Dana and Deb. Enjoy!

• Raymond VIP online: https://www.raymondvip.org/

• Susan Clark's book Slow Democracy: http://slowdemocracy.org/

Hi Alex Torpey here, your host of Upper Valley Vibes.

In this episode, I take a walk on the rail trail in Lebanon with Josh Crane of Norwich, Vermont. Josh is the Senior Producer and Managing Editor of the really great podcast Brave Little State that many of you have probably heard of, published by Vermont Public. Before joining Brave Little State and moving to the Upper Valley in 2021, Josh spent years reporting and producing podcasts at WBUR in Boston.

I asked him to talk in large part because of a great episode he did for Brave Little State about the Upper Valley where he talked to some local legends like Steve Taylor in Plainfield and Rob Gurwitt of Daybreak and many more.  We actually don't end up getting too far down that rabbit hole about the history of the Upper Valley in this episode, but  if you're interested in the history of the phrase "Upper Valley," the newspaper wars, who thinks what boundaries are where and a lot more about what makes the Upper Valley unique, that Brave Little State episode is definitely worth checking out and is linked below.

In this episode on Upper Valley Vibes, Josh and I talk a bit about the Upper Valley, important dynamics about small, trusting communities and how that might influence politics and policy, the role of journalism in local civics, the value of local ownership and accountability, what he hears from meeting people around Vermont through Brave Little State, and importantly, who has the best town fair in the Upper Valley.

Thanks for engaging in what's happening in your community. If you enjoy what you hear please share with a friend.

Show notes:

• Brave Little state episode on the Upper Valley: https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state/2024-02-23/the-newspaper-war-that-shaped-the-upper-valley

As we get this thing going I wanted to share a little bit about my goals for the podcast, and first, share a little of my background so you all can get to know where I’m coming from and the perspective that will be part of this podcast. I think it's important to know about the context of people who we listen to, read, etc, and hope you'll join me to hear a bit about what informs my mindset.

Do you know someone who is up to some interesting things around the Upper Valley? Reach out to me at [email protected]!

I can't wait to bring you interesting stories of people doing amazing things in their communities around the Upper Valley.

Show links: 

• The free nonpartisan guide we created (Featured on NHPR!) for increasing engagement at Town Meeting: https://rethinklocal.us/resources-town-meeting-turnout-and-engagement/