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 Logo for Hamilton-Wenham Citizens for a Strong Community (HWCSC)I created, and maintain a community based website for the towns of Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts. 

CSC's History:

In the spring/summer of 2003 when property tax overrides were defeated in Hamilton, but not in Wenham, our school district had to lay off a huge number of people.  Ultimately, a special two town school district meeting was held to vote on a stripped down budget which passed, but at a great cost to the schools. 

A group was created called SOS (Save Our Students) which raised over $210,000 in a month to help hire back teachers. 

One thing was certain,  communication was at a low point and something needed to be done to try and unite our community.  I co-founded a grass roots organization called Citizens for a Strong Community (CSC) which started meeting in September 2003. 

In an effort to get people to attend meetings, and to stay abreast of the situation, I started a website - www.hwcsc.org, and a email newsletter called the Update which is currently sent to around 440 people.  

As you can imagine, it takes a great deal of time to keep up with the CSC Website and the Update.  In an effort to free up my time (to earn a living!) I hope to make the site more self sufficient.  I've recently created a five member board of directors and hope to apply for 501 (3)(c) non-profit status. 

What's in the works for the CSC web site:

  • Convert the site to a portal using Joomla! Here's a link to the beta site - www.hwcsc.info/joomla/, bear in mind I'm just getting started.
    • Built in message forum
    • RSS feeds from various news sources
    • EK Feeds from the official calendars at:
      • The town of Hamilton
      • The town of Wenham
      • The Hamilton-Wenham Public Schools
      • The Hamilton-Wenham Public Library
  • New board of directors
  • Apply for 501 (3)(c) non-profit status

Other efforts under way:

  • Find a sponsor for a Community Calendar using the same database as used by the towns, schools and library.  This calendar would cover all the non-profit organizations in our community.

Visit the CSC website at www.hwcsc.org

A quick word about the CSC website

The CSC website was created before I knew anything about writing valid HTML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  If you were to run the W3C validation tool on the home page, you would see that there are hundreds of errors.  By comparison, use the tool on this website.  This is what every website should strive for.