Holiday Message from Kelly & Emily

GSAs and Friends,
Thank you for watching our 2020 holiday message.

We want to wish you a Happy Holidays! What a crazy year 2020 has been, but we could not have made it through the year without our fantastic Granite State Ambassadors! It has been great to hear from so many of you the past couple weeks with such kind messages. We sure do miss seeing everyone!

It was wonderful to see so many of you at our Virtual Holiday Open House. Thank you to everyone who participated in the modules throughout the day. We sure had fun, and we learned a few things too! And of course, thank you to our partners for their donations to the raffle, and to everyone who participated in the raffle. Thanks to your generosity, we raised around $4000 towards our 25th anniversary celebration! This means we can have an exciting celebration all year long! In case you missed the open house, we have updated our open house webpage with a summary of the day’s events, the recording of the cooking show and the recipe, trivia, the lyrics for the sing-along, and the raffle winners.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already the end of December, but this means we can finally launch our 25th anniversary celebrations in only a couple weeks! We have so much planned for the year, but we want to share some highlights with you. We have established themes for every month of 2021, starting with Economic Development in January. February will be the White Mountains area, March will feature agriculture, April will be the Great North Woods, May will feature the Seacoast region, June will be the Lakes Region, July will be Dartmouth/Sunapee region, August will be the Monadnock Region, September will feature Natural Resources, October will feature South Central / Merrimack Valley region, November will be Arts and Culture, and December will be Historical Resources. Whew – what a list!

Throughout each month, we will have components of our agriculture passport integrated into the content, as well as aspects of our NH Travel Counselor Certification. Each month will include themed virtual engagement opportunities, tours, activities, resources, and so much more. For the first few months of 2021, we will focus primarily on virtual opportunities, but as time allows, we will begin to host more in-person activities. We are hoping to have several big events throughout the year too, including the Chuckster’s Mini golf tournament that we had to cancel during 2020. We will host our gala style AMBIES awards event in October, and this will be a culmination of our 25th anniversary, though we will still have themes and activities in November and December. Look for a new newsletter format starting in January, where we will feature our partners, as well as our fun monthly activities. Let us know if you have any ideas of learning opportunities that you think might be fun!

This has been a really exciting week for us, as a past partner reached out to contract with us for several large outdoor events in the summer of 2021, with COVID-19 precautions in place. We are looking forward to getting back into events as it becomes safe to do so and celebrating our 25th anniversary with you all year long. We hope that we can see you all in person sometime in the not so distant future. We are excited for a bright and sunny 2021, and thank you again for your overwhelming support of NHGSA in 2020! We wish you a happy, safe, and healthy holiday season, and the best wishes for 2021!

Kelly & Emily