Act Locally Waco Blog – “Greatest Hits of 2017”
by Ashley Bean Thornton
One of my favorite things to do in the world is edit the Act Locally Waco blog. This year the Act Locally Waco blog published 152 posts written by 111 different Wacoans. Topics ran the gamut from prejudice to planting a garden, from frisbee golf to financial planning, from gratitude to graduating from high school – with everything you can imagine in between. The connecting thread is that they all have something to do with these aspirations for Waco that are the driving force behind Act Locally Waco.
December is a wonderful, but hectic, month for most of us so I thought it might be nice to give my beautiful bloggers a month to focus on family, friends and the joys of the holidays rather than on meeting our blog deadlines. So, for the month of December we will have one or two new posts, but mainly we will be reprising “2017’s greatest hits.”
I couldn’t possibly pick my favorites – so I used the simple (cop out?) approach of pulling up the 10 blog posts that got the most “opens” according to our Google Analytics. It is an intriguing collection that gives at least a little insight into the interests and concerns of Act Locally Waco readers. Interestingly, there were a handful of posts from previous years that were still getting as many opens as the newer posts, so included some of those in the list along with the top 10 from this year.
I hope these lists inspire you to go back and re-read your personal favorites. There have been so many terrific ones… but of course they couldn’t all be in the list of the 10 most opened. I would love for you to reply in the comments or on the Facebook page with a note about some of your favorites.
We will be reposting these in the next few weeks between now and the new year — but I know some of you are “list” people who would like to see them all at once. So, I offer the list below, with thanks to everyone who has written for the blog this year, with pride in what we have created together, and with no small amount of wonder at the beautiful complexity that makes up our beloved community! Enjoy!
Think of it as a Christmas present from your community to you, and invitation for you to write in 2018! – ABT
The 10 blog posts written in 2017 that got the most opens this year:
- A letter to my DACAmented friends in Waco by Eloisa Haynes (1,022 opens)
- What does teen dating violence look like? by Berkeley Anderson (807)
- Prejudice then and now…by Ashley Bean Thornton (766)
- Fighting a Monster of our Own Creation by Andre’ Watkins (743)
- God, Gender and Shortcuts by Leslie King (641)
- Four Things I Wish I Had Known in High School by Kassidy Munden (640)
- What the research tells us about how to help your kids do well at school by Jon M. Engelhardt (475)
- Communities of Waco: King’s Landing by Rebecca Melton Mercer (446)
- Changing The Community, One Mentor At A Time by Stephanie Korteweg (432)
- Stop the Bleeding by Mike Stone (385)
A few posts from previous years that got quite a few opens in 2017…
- Where are Waco’s public pools? by Rachel Lynne Wilkerson, 2016 (745)
- Why should we care about housing and homelessness? by Phil York, 2013 (699)
- My Story of Homelessness, Hope, and a Mustard Seed by Destiny Fernandez, 2016 (555)
- What about people who “Just don’t want to work…” by Ashley Bean Thornton, 2015 (523)
- Entrepreneurs of Waco: Black Oak Art by Shannon Lesko, 2016 (495)
This Act Locally Waco blog post is by Ashley Bean Thornton, she has lived in Waco almost 20 years now. Far longer than she ever lived anywhere else. She likes to walk. If you see her out walking, honk and wave and say “hi!”
The Act Locally Waco blog publishes posts with a connection to these aspirations for Waco. If you are interested in writing for the Act Locally Waco Blog, please email [email protected] for more information.