NORTHFIELD — With one joking “nay” vote from Vice Chair Bernard “Bernie” Boudreau, the Selectboard voted on Tuesday evening to “reluctantly accept” the retirement of Senior Center Director Colleen Letourneau.
“I was going to motion to not accept her letter of resignation,” Boudreau said Tuesday night, “but she told me it wouldn’t do any good.”
Leaving behind about four decades in the gerontology and social work fields, Letourneau, 67, plans to retire on June 25, allowing time for her successor to be chosen to ensure a smooth transition period. In the five years since Letourneau first took the helm of the Senior Center in 2021, she has been responsible for a variety of sweeping changes, including implementing a state-of-the-art hearing loop system that improves accessibility for people with hearing loss and introducing “Memory Cafes” for residents experiencing cognitive decline, along with their caretakers.
Still, town officials who worked with Letourneau, such as Town Administrator Andrea Llamas, said the director’s legacy as a friend to the community has been just as monumental.
“It’s not just all the things that she’s brought to the town, all the programs she started and how vibrant she’s made the center, and how active it is and how many people participate. But I want to speak from another level to town staff and how she’s been a great member of the staff, how she’s been a member of our community, a part of our team,” Llamas said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We will not only miss all the programming that everybody’s getting, but we will also miss her as a member of the team. We hope that we can get someone who will mesh well with the team.”
Letourneau, a Greenfield resident, began her career in social services by working at a group home for child abuse victims in New Hampshire in the mid-1980s, and later took a job investigating State Police cases for the Attorney General’s Office in Concord, New Hampshire. She said the work took an emotional toll on her and prompted her decision to take a job at Quabbin Valley Healthcare in 1993.
From then on, Letourneau spent years working as a consultant, director or private geriatric service manager for a number of nursing homes across the region, including RegalCare at Greenfield, which was then known as Buckley HealthCare Center, and Coaching Caregivers. Her most recent position before she was hired in Northfield was at Day Brook Village Senior Living in Holyoke.
“I worked right through COVID-19. It was grueling, to say the least, and very, very difficult, trying to help people calm down and trust the system and the restrictions, and it took a toll on everybody. I decided to look for another job working with senior citizens … and I started in Northfield in July 2021,” Letourneau said. “The [Senior Center] was actually closed at the time, still under restrictions from COVID. My husband came and he repainted the entire Senior Center just to make it have a fresh face and a lighter feel to it, using light blues and whites just to brighten it up. We just hit the ground running.
“I’ve been blessed with an incredible Council on Aging board,” Letourneau continued. “I’ve got a robust Friends of Northfield Senior Center group and I just listened to what people wanted to do.”
Alongside the Memory Cafes and hearing assistance programs, Letourneau also started the Senior Center’s “Happy Feet” program, in which Northfield Elementary School kindergartners go on walks and other social outings with seniors citizens.
Having worked “every day” of her life since she started working on a tobacco farm at 14 years old, Letourneau said she is “reluctantly looking forward” to retirement. In her letter to the Selectboard announcing her plans, she described her time in Northfield as the “most rewarding” part of her lengthy career in social services and gerontology.
“I will miss working with my colleagues, the Council on Aging, the Friends of the Northfield Senior Center group, my coworkers, and all the patrons and volunteers that I have met,” Boudreau said, reading from Letourneau’s letter. “My time here has been the opportunity of a lifetime.”