Meet the ‘Lifeblood of Hubbardston’ Katie Young

This week’s Joy Beat takes us to Hubbardston, Mass., where one caller made a nomination:

“Her name is Katie Young, and she is essentially the lifeblood of the community. She has worked tirelessly to increase activities and events in Hubbardston, putting Hubbardston on the map and tirelessly promotes any kind of activity in our town. Our town would not be the same without her.”

It’s people like Katie who leave these indelible marks on their community and spread joy by bringing people together — exactly the kind of person we celebrate on the Joy Beat. Katie joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more of all she’s done for her community. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: So, “the lifeblood of the community.” Those are powerful words. Let me first get your reaction to how it feels to hear that.

Katie Young: I hear stuff like that a lot. Usually, it’s always good things — you know, you take the good with the bad. But the majority of the stuff that I try to do is good, positive things, and I hear that kind of stuff a lot with the amount of events and things that I do in this area.

Rath: Tell us about the journey to becoming a “lifeblood.” How did it start for you in Hubbardston, and why?

Young: Well, first of all, I’m born and raised in Hubbardston, so there’s no better place to do it than the place you’re born and raised. You know the town very well, in and out.

I have six kids that I’m raising here in town, and I was, for a long time, kind of stuck at home — not trapped or anything, but stuck at home. I have lots of small children, but I wanted to do things with the kids, so it started with becoming a Girl Scout leader, or helping the PTO do something, or the classroom mom and things like that. [With] my work, I have extra time to do things. I can donate my time, so I felt like donating my time was the best way to do things for my community.

So that kind of morphed into doing more things for the community, like the 250th birthday for the town of Hubbardston and, you know, scholarship committees. Now I’m a selectboard person — and just things like that. It turned into me becoming the special events advisor to the town of Hubbardston, which they kind of created that spot for me? To just do fun things in town on a large scale.

Everything that I do, I have to fundraise for to get the money because we can’t use tax money on fun things because we don’t have enough money. I do a lot of fundraising to do large-scale events that are always free to everyone to enter — free parking, free this, free that. Because, again, going back to having six children, you walk into an event and you have to pay for tickets and pay for parking and pay for this and pay for that: It gets very expensive very quickly. So I try to make it very welcoming to, not only our community residents in town, but also other communities or the local towns around us.

Everybody’s welcome to come, whether you reside in town or not, everyone is welcome to my events.

Rath: Clearly, you love Hubbardston — it’s really obvious. Tell us a bit about the town, the history and why you love it so much.

Young: Well, I’m, I think, five or six generations deep in Hubbardston. My family’s been here for a very long time. And they, too — before me, like my mom and my aunts and all the rest of my family members — have volunteered and donated their time.

My mother was the bicentennial queen in town for the 200th celebration, and my aunts and my mom did rec programs. They, too, volunteered as Cub Scout leaders and Girl Scout leaders. So it’s kind of been ingrained in me since birth to volunteer for your place that you live and the place that you love.

Hubbardston is a great place. It’s small. We have a great community here. Everyone tries to help each other. We have a lot of beautiful amenities out here — lots of forests, lots of farms. This is just a great, wholesome place to live and raise your children.

Rath: Tell us about some of the initiatives or projects you’ve been involved with that you’re most proud of.

Young: I have a few rolling large-scale activities. I do five big ones a year that are sponsored.

The first one that kicks off the year is Frozen Assets. That’s one that we take guesses on when this 2-D outhouse — that me and my husband built — that sits on a pond is going to fall through the ice. Everyone takes guesses, and we put the forms into the small businesses in town. So that way it forces people into these small shops and businesses to put in their guess form in the worst time of the year for the businesses, which is January. Because you don’t get a lot of business in January — due to after Christmas, wintertime “blahs,” because people just don’t go shopping and things. It’s geared to not only have something fun in the winter to keep your eye on, but it also gears people to go into the shops and maybe get a cup of coffee or pizza.

The next one is the Hubbardston Fair, which is a really big one. It’s at the rec field, and we have well over 100 vendors and a lot of free activities for kids. We have a band, and we have food trucks and all kinds of fun things. It’s a day event, so you can come and go as you please. You can stay and hang out and do everything from watch a pottery wheel to get some food off the food truck to petting some reptiles, maybe get a pony ride and see a whole bunch of local vendors and artisans with the different things that they sell. It’s just a fun day.

Courtesy of Katie Young

Then, the next one is a super fun one we have in August. It’s a cardboard boat race. People make boats out of nothing but cardboard and duct tape. They race them one at a time — we have different categories to enter; we have youths and adults and group vessels, and the fastest ones without sinking win.

It’s super fun, it’s really funny to watch. We have trophies for “Best Sink,” and “Most Creative Vessel,” and “Extended Voyage” for that poor person that’s out there paddling for like 25 minutes.

The last one of the year, for the large-scale ones, is the Hubbardston Light Fight, which is a decorating contest for your Christmas lights. Again, you have different categories, and there’s rules and regulations to go along with it because it’s a contest.

You’d be surprised how large some of these decorating people are. I’m one of the bigger ones — I pull my name out, though, so I don’t actually win. But yeah, we have the “Go Big or Stay Home” category. It’s like, “If you could see your house from space, this is the category for you!”

So yeah, we try to have fun out here. We do smaller ones like brunch with Santa and Earth Day cleanup kind of stuff, and things like the summer concert series, but the big ones are the rolling ones that everyone always talks about.

Rath: Amazing. Katie, you have six kids — you raise six kids. How on earth do you do all of this?

Young: You want to hear what’s even worse? I have two sets of twins back to back. They’re 19 months apart, so I had four kids under the age of two.

Rath: Wow.

Young: It’s amazing — when you do that, when you have six kids and four of them are under the age of two, and you’re with them all the time, you just have to get stuff done. It brings out some stuff that you can do. So what I can do and what another person could do is usually two different things, just because I’ve had to do the amount of work in a short period of time just to get life going, you know?

If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at 617 - 300 - BEAT (2328).