Tim Barretto
Tim Barretto teaches writing, speaking, and literature at the University of New Hampshire's Thompson School of Applied Science. He and colleague Kate Hanson co-founded the Community Leadership program (http://www.thompsonschool.unh.edu/CoLead/) at the school in 2001 as a way of helping students interested in becoming activists and community leaders to find and develop their voices.
Tim's creative work includes two novels, Searching for Joy and A Family's Loss; short stories published in literary journals; and a one-act play about bullying entitled "Choices, Choices, Choices!" that was performed at several elementary schools in New Hampshire's Strafford County.
As a college student Tim was so moved by Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which poses the religious and philosophical question of why children suffer, that he felt compelled to act. As a result, in addition to a lifelong career of teaching and writing, he has spent most of his adult life pursuing ways to prevent child abuse, and in that pursuit has served as a passionate advocate for children. He was a founder of Strafford County for Kids in 1990 and of the HUB Family Resource Center in 1994. Both of these nonprofits were created with missions related to strengthening families and preventing child abuse. In 2012, in collaboration with the Rochester Child Care Center, he was a co-founder of the Strafford County Parent Education Program, which is designed to help "parents and/or those standing in the position of a parent" develop "parenting skills and techniques designed to promote harmonious parent/child relationships and to enable and/or enhance safe, wholesome home lives for children that will result in their development into responsible and productive adults."
When he has free time, Tim loves to spend it outdoors with family and friends. He is an avid fly fisherman, hiker, and skier, passions which have led him to climb all 48 of the four-thousand foot peaks in New Hampshire, many with his wife, Mary, and his two sons, Nick and Chris, and to ski and fish across the United States. He and Mary currently live in Dover, NH.
