We can probably all breathe easier knowing that David Chichester didn’t take up a hobby like collecting coins or beer-cans.
Instead, the recent transplant to Greenfield decided to dive into serving his longtime home town of Conway, and the entire region, to fill a soup-to-nuts span of needs — human services, town government and cultural organizations.
Today Chichester, 81, will be honored as the 36th Recorder Citizen of the Year at a Franklin County Chamber of Commerce breakfast reception.
“There are so many people in the community doing so much wonderful work, it seems sort of crazy to pick out one person to honor,” said Mary McClintock, who nominated the man she got to know as a fellow member of the Conway Planning Board when he served on it from 2012 to 2017.
“The thing I find compelling about Dave is the length of time and range of stuff he’s done, and his quiet impact on this community without any big fanfare,” she says.
Soon after retiring from Phoenix Mutual Insurance in 1994 at age 57 as the vice president of customer service, he recalls, “I decided I would create a hobby. I investigated coins, stamps and all kinds of collection opportunities. Nothing appealed to me; it just wasn’t me. I began searching for what I would do.”
He joined the Board of Health in Conway, where he moved in 1981, and remained a member for 14 years — much of that time as chair.
“I viewed it as an opportunity to meet people,” he recalls. “There were lots of things to learn, and that’s what turned me on. I felt this is going to be more fun than collecting stamps.”
He also became assistant emergency management director for the town, “as a sequel to the Board Of Health work,” leading to the director’s post.
In both roles, Chichester worked with neighboring towns to develop regional approaches, such as setting up drive-through flu vaccination clinics in Deerfield and helping establish a regional public health program to collaborate on solutions for doing health inspections, septic system inspections and enforce the health code.
His role as emergency management director meant that Chichester — the “voice of Conway” on reverse-911 townwide calls — responded when the February 2017 tornado touched down.
“I was in Maine, and I got a call from Joe Strzegowski late at night,” he recalls. “I thought he was kidding. In February? A tornado? My wife and I came back, and I was shocked by what I saw. We were very fortunate from an emergency management point of view — it was all property damage.”
After leaving the Board of Health, Chichester joined the Conway Planning Board. Fellow member Strzegowski notes, “Dave is a very deserving. He’s dedicated to civic service, and his attention to detail helped us get through our policies and procedures.”
Phoebe Walker, who has known Chichester from her work at the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, says, “Dave’s always struck me as incredibly giving of his time for his community.”
It was Chichester, she says, who helped towns devise a cooperative public health service to collaborate on meeting the challenges of their overburdened health boards.
“He’s always been very, very generous with his time and attention, which is so valuable to people who need oversight.”
Yet by the time he began doing work for the town, Chichester had already been devoting volunteer time to other causes for years.
After moving to Franklin County, he joined the recently formed NELCWIT board in 1982 as its first male member, following up on an experience he and his wife, Elaine, had as counselors in Enfield, Conn., with a Hartford YWCA satellite domestic violence program in the 1970s.
“It turned out that having a man involved was really important,” he recalls, “because very often there was a boyfriend or husband or father of the victim. The guys in the woman’s life were pretty much ignored, and many were very angry because their wife or girlfriend or daughter had gotten assaulted.”
Chichester recalls talking things out with one such victim’s father in a parked car at the Enfield mall one night.
“He wanted to kill the guy, and I tried to explain to him, ‘That’s not a help to your daughter. That will only make the situation worse. What she needs is your love, your help, your understanding.’”
Chichester’s wife also worked for the program counseling women who had been abused, and also joined him on the NELCWIT board.
By the time he began volunteering for the town of Conway, Chichester had already been involved as a member of Arena Civic Theater’s Board of Directors for two or three years, at the suggestion of his stockbroker, Ted Pennock, who was also on the board. ACT at the time was producing plays at the Roundhouse on the Franklin County Fairgrounds, and Chichester even got on stage for its production of “South Pacific.”
He also followed Pennock’s lead in joining the board of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and was there as the symphony presented its concert of Holst’s “The Planets” with the glass-blown planets of Josh Simpson and space photos taken by Simpson’s astronaut wife, Cady Coleman.
“While others in his situation might have retired to a life of leisure, Dave turned his retirement into essentially a full-time career as a community volunteer,” said McClintock, describing him as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.”
When the Franklin County Reinventing Justice project held a video conference in 1995, it was Chichester who worked out the details, and then volunteered for one of the community restorative justice panels that met with people whose cases had been diverted from the courts.
The two-day conference, which attracted 400 for two days at two locations, “went off without a hitch,” recalls Lucinda Brown, who also worked on the project early on, “and as I became wiser, I understood that doesn’t just happen. I didn’t understand then how gifted he was about process and organizing.”
Chichester also helped establish a Foundation for Community Justice to help support the restorative justice boards he volunteered on for a couple of years.
“We came up with some wonderful strategy for making change in this community, and it was on the leading edge of this kind of work in country,” Chichester reflects. “I thought the ideals were very worthy, and it had a lot of legs for changing our system of justice in this country.”
“Dave is so good at process, at planning, at seeing people’s strengths,” says Brown, who retired last year after 25 years of running the program. “He had the knack of building a sense of teamwork around a common goal, and everybody enjoying what they’re doing because they’re working from their strengths and sharing in whatever the endeavor is … He’s so interested in strengthening the community.”
Chichester, who volunteers two or three days a week in the Baystate Franklin Medical Center’s emergency room, bringing tea, cookies, blankets and pillows to comfort patients and relatives, helped set up that “patient advocate” program about 15 years ago. He also oversees the other 25 or so other ER volunteers.
“Some patients want no part of our visit; others want us to hold their hands and listen to their life story,” says Chichester, whose wife volunteers on the hospital’s main desk and in the gift shop. “Some have just lost a loved one, and we can help intervene and connect them with all the things that need to be done. We have to use our intuition about how can we help every one of these people be comfortable.”
Becky George, who coordinates the hospital’s more than 300 volunteers, says, “He’s amazing. I’ve never been more grateful that someone like Dave is in a team leadership position in a volunteer group. He’s one of my most trusted volunteers, and I’ve barely needed to be involved because he’s such an excellent leader and trainer.
Chichester has served on the hospital’s board of directors before its merger with Baystate, and has volunteered on its ethics, finance and audit committees as well as on the board of Baystate Administrative Services.
He also volunteered 100 hours editing a new Community Action resource referral website this summer and says he was astounded to discover nearly 600 human service agency outlets in the four counties it serves.
“There are all kinds of agencies, and I see how many of them are encountering financial problems, so they can’t hire the staffs needed and have to rely on volunteers,” says Chichester, pointing to the invisible lifeblood of the community that’s also invaluable — and hard to fill — in local government.
“I’m a firm believer that people should understand what needs there are and how they could fit a particular need. There are so many things in the towns that get done that are in the background that people don’t even know.”
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Other Recorder Citizens of the Yearare Joan Vander Vliet, Al Dray, Elizabeth Hollingsworth and Philip Gilmore of Deerfield; Pearl Care of Erving; Theodore Martineau of Montague City; Rolland Gifford, Marion Taylor and Marvin Shippee of Shelburne Falls; Ann Hamilton, Amy Clarke, Marjorie Reid, Edward Tombs, Irmarie Jones, Jean Cummings, David McCarthy, Charles Carter and Arline Cohn of Greenfield, Marie Putala, the Rev. Stanley Aksamit, John Carey, Shirley Lovett and Richard Kimball of Turners Falls, Albert Diemand and Theodore Lewis of Wendell, Frank R. “Bud” Foster and William Shores of Bernardston and Marian Holbrook and Raymond Zukowski of Northfield, Allan Adie of Gill, Clifford Fournier, Marty Picard and Geneva Lawson of Orange and Adelia Bardwell of Whately.