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Date: 4/6/2021
NORTHAMPTON – Through its Nice Tuesdays program, the Northampton Chamber of Commerce seeks to engage the community in fun activities that promote random acts of kindness every Tuesday.
Vince Jackson, the Northampton Chamber of Commerce’s executive director, said the program initially started in the fall of 2020 to encourage residents to commit small acts of kindness.
“We are just asking people to do random acts of kindness throughout downtown Northampton on Tuesday. It is just a way to show pride in our community, support each other during the pandemic, to bring awareness to your business or your causes and passions in life. It is just a way to bring vibrancy back to downtown,” he said.
While the program started as an individual effort, Jackson said businesses eventually began sponsoring their own events.
“When we started the campaign, it was more of an individual effort and along the way we saw businesses getting involved by sponsoring scavenger hunts and doing more fun things,” he said.
With more businesses getting involved in the program, Jackson said the chamber started Phase 2 of the program which now includes an adopt a Tuesday event.
“Now we have embarked on Phase 2 of the campaign by inviting businesses or individuals to adopt a Tuesday, where they are now sponsoring an activity that gets more publicity, requires a little more effort and has a greater impact,” he said.
Jackson said the program falls directly in line with the chamber’s goal to be an open organization.
“By virtue of being in this community you are part of the chamber. In this open organization model, it strives to just engage everyday people in everyday activities. One of the roles of the chamber is to make sure we promote a thriving economy and community and our way of doing a community program to achieve that is through Nice Tuesdays,” he said.
One of the chamber’s most recent Nice Tuesday’s was a Friends of the Northampton Rail Trail’s clean up on March 30 and the chamber will partner with the Western Massachusetts Math Partnership for a Sidewalk Math event on April 13.
“A group called Community Classroom, in partnership with the Western Massachusetts Math Partnership, adopted that Tuesday and they are going to do chalk art up and down the sidewalks in 24 locations throughout downtown that just engages the public in simple, everyday math facts,” Jackson said.
Through the program Jackson said the entire community can get involved in fun and engaging activities.
“It gets people downtown, and again we are just trying to create more vibrancy, and it is doing something fun and engaging that the whole community can participate in,” he said.