Dana Hanson has lived much of her life leaping into things. She fought to save a neighborhood library and ended up in a political career. She accepted a job with Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and that led to a stint working for Newton’s congressman. And now she’s jumping back in to City Hall, ready to help Mayor Marc Laredo execute his vision for Newton and help Newton thrive through a time of immense change.

“it’s kind of interesting to have your job be based on just reducing the friction in people’s everyday lives,” she said, sitting in the communications director’s office since she didn’t have an office yet.

Hanson, who’s been hard at work for three weeks in her new role, thrives in that kind of environment.

Made in Manhattan

Hanson is used to big changes. She was born in Manhattan and lived there until she was about 10, and then her family moved to Weston, Mass.

She went to Brown University and earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and then moved to Cambridge and earned her master’s degree at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She also got married, to Brian Burba.

In 1999, Hanson and her husband made another big change.

“We were living in Cambridge, and we were just sort of thinking about our next act and thinking about maybe starting family, and we thought that the public schools in Newton would be amazing,” she said. “And we’ve lived in Auburndale ever since.”

Hanson’s career at the time was in safety and industrial hygiene. She worked for Environmental Health & Engineering in Newton. And she consulted for UMass Lowell, researching long-term health effects of the Big Dig on construction workers. Occupational safety had been focused on preventing accidents, but no one had studied the effects of simply doing the job.

And it turns out there are a lot of health effects from doing the job.

“It’s loud, and there were a lot of repetitive stress injuries and construction at the time, and then, of course, we were measuring for particulate matter,” she said.

Worker health risks would come into the spotlight again as crews were cleaning up the debris after Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in Hanson’s birthplace of Manhattan. By then, Hanson was a stay-at-home-mom.

“I was fortunate,” she said. “I was able to stay home. So I was a stay at home mom for a good long time, starting in 2000.”

But she didn’t just stay home. While raising her two kids, Theo and Briuce, she got out into her new community and got to work.

She was president of the cooperative nursery school and president of the Elementary School PTO, and she volunteered for the Auburndale Community Library.

That little library ignited a spark in Hanson that would lead her to a public service career.

Saving a library

In 2009, there was an override request from Mayor David Cohen, part of which would pay to keep the city’s four small branch libraries–Auburndale, Waban

That override effort failed, and the city closed its four branch libraries. But Hanson didn’t give up on Auburndale, and she teamed up with then-Aldermen Amy Sangiolo, Leonard Gentile and Jay Charney to save her neighborhood library.

“And with a lot of neighbor power, we were able to approach the city and sort of strike a deal to reopen the Auburndale Community Library as a volunteer-run library,” she said. “And the ACL has been in existence for over 15 years now.”

That opened a new world of interest for Hanson when it came to community involvement.

“I’s kind of like how a lot of people get engaged in civic life. You’re just sort of enjoying your work, life and play, and then something happens in the city and you’re like, ‘Hmmm,’ and then you get involved,” she said . “Forn me, ny ‘hmmm’ was, “Really, they’re going to close our branch library?’ And then I got very involved.”

So, when Mayor Setti Warren took office, Dana asked if he would appoint her as a trustee of the city’s main library, the Newton Free Library.

“My riff was: Libraries are like children–You can love more than one,” she laughed.

Hanson served as a trustee with Audrey Cooper, a longtime school employee who volunteered for the library and the namesake for the Cooper Center for Active Living.

“She was really an incredible mentor to me, a dear friend, somebody who I would crash through a wall for,” Hanson said. “She was the most inspiring human being ever.”

Through her friendship with Cooper, Hanson met an alderman from Ward 7 named Ruthanne Fuller.

Joining Team Fuller

In late 2016, Hanson was serving as president of the Day Middle School PTO, where her sons were students, and she got a call from Fuller.

Fuller asked Hanson to be part of her campaign team, and Hanson accepted and became co-chair of the Fuller’s mayoral campaign, alongside former State Treasurer Steve Grossman, who lives in Newton.

Fuller won and became Newton’s first woman mayor, and Hanson stayed on to serve as the administration’s director of community engagement and inclusion.

That role, and local government in general, would see a big change in 2020 when COVID-19 arrived.

“I remember the days leading up to when we were shutting down, I had been asked to go to a meeting in Somerville on behalf of the city,” Hanson recalled. At that meeting, right before the state shut everything down, people were told the virus was in America and a shutdown was coming.

“And it was really quite startling in that moment,” Hanson said. “And I drove back to Newton and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, everything’s gonna change.’ And it did.”

Auburndale Branch Library. Photo by Dan Atkinson

Joining Team Auchincloss

Fortunately for Hanson, she thrives amidst big change. And in the middle of the global pandemic, she made another big change and went to work for new Congressman Jake Auchincloss.

When working on Fuller’s 2017 campaign, Hanson met Jake Auchincloss, who was the first city councilor to endorse Fuller for mayor. After he won his first election to Congress in November 2020, Auchincloss asked Hanson to join his team in his district office.

That job had her dealing with leaders of 35 communities, from Newton to Fall River, and navigating the political diversity within that region.

When Auchincloss took office in January 2021, the pandemic was still raging and vaccines were being rolled out gradually, depending on age group and health factors. So, there was no new normal yet, and the old normal was gone. Team Auchincloss was born in an environment of limbo.

“Everything was very online-based,” Hanson said. “So in sort of an odd way, sort of bringing a team together from Massachusetts, in Washington, DC., it was very natural, because everything was remote. So it didn’t feel like we were sort of two teams. We were certainly one team, because it was like everything was virtual. So, but it was interesting doing outreach in a virtual format for sort of the first six months of the gig. And then as soon as we were able to really get him out there, boom, we were out into all of his 35 cities and towns.”

There’s a lot of cultural diversity among those 35 districts. Newton has nearly 90,000 residents, while Hopedale has fewer than 7,000. There are farming communities, towns with Republican elected officials, and towns sprawling with Trump campaign signs. There are conservative Blue Dog Democrats and progressive activists.

But as Hanson points out, governing and campaigning are not the same, and Hanson enjoyed the job while the Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency, because that meant being able to get funding for those diverse 35 communities regardless of anyone’s political leanings.

But after the 2024 election, which saw Republicans gain control of Congress and Donald Trump ascend to the presidency a second time, Hanson knew the job would change as well.

Newton City Hall, June 2023. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

‘A municipal gal’

Serving as a liaison between a congressional office and 35 communities nurtured Hanson’s love for local government.

“Any time that a city or town had an issue or a question for the federal government or they had a grant application, or they had a tricky situation with a local and federal nexus, that was the stuff that I loved doing the most,” she said.

So, it seemed a natural next move when Mayor-elect Marc Laredo asked Hanson to be his chief of staff.

“It turns out, I’m a municipal gal,” she said.

The chief of staff works with the city’s 24 city councilors, the state delegation, the federal delegation, the governor’s office and the various large organizations and agencies, which she calls “eye-level partnerships,” that keep the city going.

“And a really exciting part of my portfolio is supporting the mayor’s economic development team,” she continued. “[Laredo] has really placed a strong emphasis on making Newton a great place to retain businesses, encourage new businesses and really think about how we caen be a great place for employers to come.”

What does a typical day look like for a chief of staff? There actually is no typical day. Hanson didn’t have a typical day when she worked for Fuller or Auchincloss, either.

“But the the most exciting thing about these jobs is just when you leave at the night, you’re looking at what’s on your calendar tomorrow, you’re prepping for your meetings, and you can be talking about everything,” Hanson said. “First we’re talking about the Parks and Recreation budget. Then we’ll have a meeting about boards and commissions, and then you’ll be sitting in watching a City Council meeting on Zoom, or you’ll be talking to a resident about an issue, about anything from quality-of-life issues, like a pothole on their street, or there’s a question about something with another department, and so it’s never the same.”

Above all, Hanson said, she and the administration are working to boost people’s faith and trust in City Hall.

“I heard somewhere that, in a time where people do have concerns about governmental institutions and questions about the federal government, it’s kind of known that that local elected officials are generally held in high regard, and that they’re really trusted,” she said. “And so I think that that’s something that we’re really trying to work on and make sure that our residents know: that in a world that’s really uncertain and in a national political climate where it may feel like things are shifting and very unpredictable, that here in Newton, Mayor Laredo, your employees at City Hall, we are heads-down, just trying to make Newton the best place that it can be.”