Team Haverhill Marks 20 Years of Turning Good Ideas into Innovative City Change and Progress

(Additional photographs below.)

If you make a list of the events and community initiatives that are Haverhill’s hallmark, most involve a Team Haverhill effort.

For 20 years the nonprofit, independent and all-volunteer community action group has been taking great ideas and turning them into reality—from the 19-week Haverhill Farmers Market and Thursday Night Live summer concert series on Bradford Common to September’s River Ruckus, the new Edible Avenue in Riverside Park, a host of public art projects and Let’s Hike Haverhill. Asked by WHAV to share the group’s “secret sauce,” President Kevin Burke didn’t hesitate.

“There’s lot of nonprofit organizations in Haverhill that do amazing work and we support and collaborate with many of them. The thing that makes Team Haverhill special is that we are all residents that care deeply about Haverhill. Team Haverhill is completely volunteer driven. We have no paid employees, no office, 100% of our donations and sponsor support go directly to our projects. And all of our projects are focused on making Haverhill a better place to live, learn, work and play,” Burke said.

Team Haverhill is the brainchild of Sally Cerasuolo-O’Rorke, who was the president of the Greater Haverhill Chamber of Commerce when it was founded. Cerasuolo-O’Rorke sought to duplicate the energy and commitment of the Lowell Plan, a 24-year-old public-private partnership that had helped guide Lowell’s economic resurgence.

At the same time, leaders of the Lowell Plan were intrigued that Haverhill had the Greater Haverhill Foundation, which was instrumental in launching the Ward Hill Industrial Park in the 1960s, downtown’s Harbor Place during the last decade and provides financial support to the city’s nonprofits. Haverhill shared how it had organized its foundation. Leaders of the Lowell Plan explained to Haverhill how to organize a public-private partnership.

“What we needed was an entity that could generate ideas along with a team that could work with businesses and the city,” Cerasuolo-O’Rorke told WHAV.

In 2005, she proposed the idea to the Chamber’s board of directors, and Team Haverhill was born. It has since become its own separate nonprofit, Burke said, though it continues to work closely with the Chamber.

Today the group has a core of 40 members who meet monthly to hear about initiatives in Haverhill and brainstorm new ones. Burke said Team Haverhill events draw upwards of 350 volunteers a year, some who give a single hour picking up litter prior to River Ruckus or, like him, give upwards of 20 hours or more a week to keep Team Haverhill humming.

Fueling great ideas has remained Team Haverhill’s most important function, Burke said. Each spring Team Haverhill invites the public to submit ideas for community projects and then they are discussed at the Possible Dreams evening. Upwards of 12 to 15 ideas are submitted each year and some 150 to 200 people come out to hear about them and refine them, Burke said.

“Possible Dreams is our longest standing project and it really reaches out beyond Team Haverhill. It’s sort of an incubator for projects throughout the community,” Burke explained, noting that Team Haverhill often matches people who don’t know each other but have similar ideas.

Alice Mann, the group’s immediate past president and an original Team Haverhill organizer, coined the title “Possible Dreams” after naysayers complained the group focused too much on the impossible. In fact, Mann said when she first proposed the idea of an annual brainstorming session modeled on a format that assigns people to small groups to promote conversation, her idea was poo-pooed. But she persisted and it has proven a successful way to gather ideas and find supporters to run with them.

Among projects first proposed at Possible Dreams events are the Clement Farm Disc Golf Course of Main Street; annual Woofstock dog festival; Haverhill Restaurant Week; revitalized Farmers Market; downtown mural project, which has inspired over 30 decorated walls; and large shoe sculptures, called the Soles of Haverhill.

Kathleen Fitts, a past president of the Haverhill Garden Club, has experienced first-hand what partnering with Team Haverhill can do. Fitts said she had been working with Gale Park Neighbors for several years to bring the small greenspace off Kenoza Avenue back to its former glory. While the group managed small landscaping projects on their own, their real objective was the replace the park’s fountain which had fallen into disrepair and barely functioned. But the group couldn’t figure out a way to pay for the $200,000 needed. That’s when Fitts decided to bring the project to a Team Haverhill Possible Dreams event.

“I was there to tell people about the Gale Park fountain and it certainly helped to spur fundraising and get us the attention that helped us raise the money to replace a very hideous, old non-working fountain with the granite structure that we have today,” Fitts said.

More recently, Ann Jacobson suggested an edible garden in Haverhill after one with which she was familiar in Newburyport. Fitts took the idea back to the Haverhill Garden Club and, with help from the city, gardens that feature a host of edible herbs and flowers opened last summer in Riverside Park.

Timothy J. Jordan, who has been volunteering with Team Haverhill since its inception, said he thinks part of Team Haverhill’s success has been working with the city and state government, but staying above the political fray. Now, as a city councilor and recently voted Haverhill City Council president, Jordan said he is all the more aware of the importance of Team Haverhill’s independence.

“I think one of the keys to Team Haverhill’s success has just been a lot of like-minded individuals who really care about improving the quality of life in the city rather than spending their time complaining about what wrong and this and that. It’s kind of like what can we do to make the city better and then rolling up your sleeves and doing it,” Jordan said.

Mann said, for her, the willingness and ability of Team Haverhill to evolve over time has also been important.

“For me the biggest success has been the transitions. Team Haverhill really has reorganized and refocused itself at least three times in that 20 years really to fit what’s going on in the city, to fit the different opportunities and different needs and the different players,” Mann said.

Team Haverhill’s 2026 Possible Dreams night is planned for Monday, March 9, at 7 p.m., at Northern Essex Community College’s Hartleb Technology Center, 100 Elliot St., in Haverhill. Ideas must be submitted in advance at its website, TeamHaverhill.org. The deadline is Monday, Feb. 9.