Sandy Lafleur was at the back of Wilton Town Meeting on March 10 during a recess for ballot voting, having donned her hat as coordinator of the Wilton Collaborative Space to take feedback on what kind of course people had the most interest in – the very different options of computer programming or ancient Greek – when she heard a couple words that sparked her interest.
At the podium, Selectman Kermit Williams was speaking of the town’s Citizen of the Year. He was already well into his speech by the time the words “dulcimer” and “contra dance” reached Lafleur’s ears. That was when she started to really pay attention – for who else in town was a dulcimer-playing, contra dance caller?
“I had no idea,” Lafleur said of receiving the award. “It was a total surprise.”
Pat Fickett, director of the Wilton Public and Gregg Free Library, who has worked with Lafleur on various projects over the years, including Wilton Collaborative Space, said Lafleur being chosen wasn’t a surprise to her.
“Sandy sees this community as a whole. She’s looking at all different parts of the community and helping people connect and make it better. She woks incredibly hard at whatever project she’s taken on. She has the ability to draw people in and connect them,” Fickett said. “She brings people and ideas together. In my opinion, she’s a superstar at collaboration and positive connections.”
“Rarely has the Citizen of the Year done more things for Wilton than this year’s choice,” said Williams when presenting the award. “I don’t know how she does it all.”
Lafleur moved to Wilton in 2013, a move she said “was the best thing I ever did.” She immediately found kindred spirits in town by attending a community supper offered by the Community Center Committee, and very quickly, she became involved in the group herself, as well as many other town endeavors.
In her nearly 10 years in town, Lafleur has integrated herself fully into the community, jumping in as a co-coordinator for the town’s community garden, becoming instrumental in starting up the Wilton Folk Cafe and this year, becoming the coordinator for the Wilton Collaborative Space, a community center set up through a library grant.
In her role on the Community Center Committee, Lafleur has helped put on stone soup dinners in the park, cleaned up miles of Wilton roads and participated in regular open mic nights. She calls contra dances in Milford and helps arrange for the band.
Lafleur led the effort to reopen the “Still Good Shed” at the recycling center and to provide an option for green burials in town, burials where the impact to the environment is minimized. She has been an organizer for the Souhegan Sustainability Fair, and helped with a documentary film and discussion series hosted at the Town Hall Theater.
She said all of her many and varied activities have a thread in common – community.
“What I enjoy is people doing for themselves, and doing for others,” Lafleur said. “Whether it’s making music, growing our own food, making community, these things are our birthright. We can’t sit idly by and wait for people to do something for us. We need to sing, dance and play together. If I can be a tiny piece of making that happen, I’m so excited for that.”
Lafleur was involved in her community long before moving to Wilton, but said she has found something special here. Having grown up in Hampton, she lived for the majority of her life in Amherst, and said when she moved to Wilton she found them “worlds apart.”
“It was really hard raising well-grounded children in Amherst, because of the affluence there and the mindset. Wilton seemed like a very relaxed community, with values in line with mine. I was very enveloped in this community very quickly, and it just felt very comfortable,” Lafleur said.
That’s why she hopes to see that concept of community continue to grow, with projects like the collaborative space. During Town Meeting, voters approved an article resoundingly to continue funding the project for the remainder of the year after grant funding ends in July.
Lafleur said Wilton Collaborative Space could be the realization of a long-held dream for the Community Center Committee – a physical space.
“I’m very happy and grateful the voters recognized the value of this program and continued it. If we could have a community center, a place people could gather, a place for teens and for seniors, and programming for them, that’s what this town needs. There needs to be more of that kind of stuff happening,” Lafleur said.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.