A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Monday, March 21, 2016, at 7:30 p.m. in the
City Hall Auditorium
President Brian S. McCarthy presided; City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch; Alderman Richard A. Dowd led in the Pledge to the Flag.
The roll call was taken with 13 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Caron and Alderman
Cookson were recorded absent.
Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton was also in attendance.
COMMUNICATIONS
MOTION BY ALDERMAN WILSHIRE THAT ALL COMMUNICATIONS BE READ BY TITLE ONLY
MOTION CARRIED
From: Brian S. McCarthy, President, Board of Aldermen
Re: Special Board of Aldermen Meeting
MOTION BY ALDERMAN WILSHIRE TO ACCEPT AND PLACE ON FILE
MOTION CARRIED
PRESENTATIONS
Joint Presentation by Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce and One Greater Nashua
Ms. Liz Fitzgerald, United Way of Greater Nashua
| am one of the two Co-Chairs of the One Greater Nashua Coalition. | want to thank you for extending this
invitation to speak with us. There are a lot of folks sitting up here and that’s because this is a community
based coalition with many people participating and representing many different organizations. | am going to
give you a little bit of history of where the coalition came from and why we want to go forward with such a thing
and my co-chair, Jared Barbosa will talk to you about just exactly what the coalition is and Janeth Orozco-
Sanchez, Jennifer McCormack and Tracy Hatch will talk about each of the specific goals as they are chairing
those specific goals. Galina will also talk a little bit more about the opportunity and the imperative for the work
that we are doing.
About three years ago during United Way’s Day of Caring some folks in the community came together as their
contribution for the day; the Day of Caring is a community-wide day of service where about 350 people from
companies and organizations throughout the city give up a day at their office or at home to go into the
community at one of our service providers and do some kind of task or function for a non-profit. It’s usually
painting a wall or building a fence. These particular individuals met at the community college and just had a
conversation about their vision for the community and Greater Nashua. That conversation was facilitated by
New Hampshire Listens and one of the recurring themes that came out of that was the idea that the community
was growing and rapidly changing in its demographic make-up and that although there were leaders emerging
in all different walks of life and communities, the groups were not connecting. The establishment leaders were
not connecting with the people that were emerging in different communities. All of the people at the table felt
like that was a really important thing to address. Paul Hebert, who was president of the United Way at the time
and Chris Williams who was president of the Chamber of Commerce volunteered to take that on and find a
way that we could bring the communities together. Just about six months after that meeting the Endowment
for Health put out an RFP around immigrant integration. They were looking for four communities in the state.
They wanted a broad sector of people to come together and plan. They were willing to fund for the planning
and they wanted one proposal from each of the communities and if they liked what they saw they were willing
to invest for three years in those initiatives with some best practices coming from Welcoming New Hampshire.
