Adam Hirshan and Julie Hirshan Hart at the Phone Banks at the December Auction 2023
The Greater Lakes Region Children’s Auction is one of things Julie Hirshan Hart loves most about living in our area. The editor of The Laconia Daily Sun finds it awe inspiring and a little overwhelming that the entire community comes together to support the cause.
So, she just had to be part of it.
When Julie was 14, she worked after school at her family’s newspaper to the north—The Conway Daily Sun—writing birth announcements and readying letters to the editor for publication.
She didn’t intend to make journalism her career, although that was her major at Flagler College in Florida. For years, Julie worked in nonprofit administration, but a desire for change called her back to her roots.
Now, Julie is the succession plan for The Laconia Daily Sun—the center of its future.
“I’m very proud to be the second generation working at the paper,” she says. “I grew up in a newspaper office. Many people in the Conway office are still the same faces I was seeing when I was growing up. That is a testament to the environment that has been created here in Laconia and at our sister paper.”
Julie was introduced to the Auction when she first started working for The Sun in 2018. She was working as the community editor and received many press releases from the Auction, friends of the Auction, and Pub Mania teams—as well as dozens of other organizations.
These communications piqued her interest and taught her about all of the incredible things the Auction was doing for the community and the creative ways teams approached their fundraising.
It wasn’t long before The Laconia Daily Sun had its own fundraising team, The Rising Suns, and participated in Pub Mania.
“We’re still a young team, still figuring it out,” Julie says. One thing she realized is that activity around the Auction doesn’t just happen in December. The effort is year-round.
Since that realization, Julie and her team have dived into the fundraising frenzy, taking part in the Shuffles hosted at Patrick’s Pub, fundraising, selling ornaments and holiday greetings, answering phones at the phone bank, and raffling off a popular April Fools spoof edition of the paper to raise funds.
Around the holidays, The Sun publishes “Santa’s Naughty List,” in which—for a donation—area residents can create a humorous reason that Santa put someone they know on the naughty list. (Though there sure won’t be any coal in the stockings of those generous enough to contribute.)
One of the most wide-ranging and valuable ways that Julie and The Sun Publisher Adam Hirshan, Julie’s father, and Managing Director Elaine Hirshan, her mother, support the Auction is through their generous media partnership. They donate the majority of the ad space for the nonprofit and give the Auction “a lot of ink.”
The Sun publishes the Auction’s community news all year, picking up press releases, running photos of Auction volunteers and grant recipients, and hosting a live stream all week long of the Auction as it happens. Julie and fellow Sun leaders keep the community up to date on opportunities to support the Auction throughout the year.
“I think the most valuable thing we can do is share how to support the Auction and all of the good work that those funds raised pour back into the community,” says Julie.
Julie appreciates the Auction’s special attention to the children of the Lakes Region and says, “They are the most important members of our community and will grow up to be leaders. It is important to invest in them and make sure they have the tools they need to become our future leaders.”
Though she says she and her team at The Laconia Daily Sun are still figuring out ways to support the Auction, they clearly know what the Auction is all about. It’s for the kids!
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