Hilltown Families Voted as Best Blog
2nd Year in a Row!

Thank you to all of our readers for voting Hilltown Families as the Best Blog for the 2nd year in a row!

We can’t thank our readers enough for voting Hilltown Families as the Best Blog for the 2nd year in a row in the Valley Advocate Best of the Valley Readers’ Poll for 2012!

Interviewing Hilltown Families founder, Sienna Wildfield, Maureen Turner of the Valley Advocate writes:

When Sienna Wildfield takes her nine-year-old daughter to the Ashfield farmers’ market, she doesn’t worry about keeping track of her every single second. “Half the people there know her,” Wildfield says. “Everyone has an eye on her. It’s a safer community for her to be growing up in.”

That feeling of connection to a community is a big part of what drives Wildfield’s “Hilltown Families,” winner, for the second year, of the award for Best Local Blog. The site, which Wildfield calls an “online grassroots communication network,” has events calendars, essays and art by contributors, podcasts and other goodies, and, its name notwithstanding, covers the four western counties.

Readers can easily discern the ethos behind Wildfield’s work, with its focus on the local and sustainable, non-commercial and often non-mainstream… But there’s something a little less obvious that drives her, too: a desire to help families make real, multi-generational connections to their communities, the way her own child has.

Hilltown Families focuses a lot on what Wildfield calls “place-based, community-learning opportunities”… kinds of opportunities can supplement, in really enriching ways, kids’ school studies, Wildfield says. But they also help create and reinforce families’ connections to the place where they live—something she hopes kids will carry with them as they get older. “If their foundation of what they’re learning is coming from where they live, they grow up and become more invested in their community,” she says. “They want to protect their environment, they want to keep things local, they want to support their local economy, they are more civic minded.” And whether those kids stay in the Valley when they grow up or move elsewhere, Wildfield hopes they’ll carry that belief in the importance of community with them. “This isn’t a short-term thing,” she says. “It’s a real investment.”

HILLTOWN FAMILIES CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

There are several ♥ amazing folks behind the scenes at Hilltown Families, along with an excellent team of ♥ contributing writers & community correspondents!  Our current team of writers include:

• Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser ♦ Mash Notes to Paradise
• Bill Corbet ♦ Raising Children: Love, Limits & Lessons
• Amy Dryansky ♦ One Clover & A Bee: Poems For Families To Learn & Love
• Logan Fisher ♦ Hindsight Parenting: Raising Kids the Second Time Around
• John Heffernan ♦ Tech Talk: Supporting Creative Play with Technology
• Kurt Heidinger, Ph.D. ♦ The Ripple: Stories About Western MA Rivers
• Daria Marmaluk-Hajioannou ♦ Music Trekking: Traveling the World in Song
• Kelly Bevan McIlquham ♦ Berkshire Family Fun
• Amy Meltzer ♦ Not Your Grandparents’ Shtetl: Exploring Jewish Culture in Western MA
• Cheli Mennella ♦ Open Sesame: Kid Lit Musings & Reviews
• Carrie St. John ♦ What to Play? Play Ideas for Family & Community

JOIN US!

Interested in joining our team of writers, community correspondents, volunteers, fundraisers, sponsors, advertisers and street team? We have many opportunities and welcome your involvement to continue the mission of Hilltown Families!  Send an email with your interests: hillltownfamilies@gmail.com.

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