By Sean Sullivan

The Natick Center Cultural District has a new director.

The NCCD serves as a hub, a liaison connecting community, culture and commerce. The hiring process to head the nonprofit group meant searching for someone with an eclectic skillset.

Just prior to chatting about her new role as director, Heather Rockwood said she’d just returned from a historical tour of Natick. The outing was an effort to get to know the town’s personality—it’s streets, structures and spirit.

“I come from the museum field,” said Rockwood. “It was a job of many hats.”

Those roles, she added, required persistent outreach to a variety of community stakeholders. There was constant fundraising to attend to, the building and maintenance of many relationships with organizations amenable to supporting public goods. 

“Moving into something like this, for me it just makes sense.”

Rockwood has nearly 15 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, and is coming to Natick from her role as communications manager for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Prior to that was a career in development and marketing for Rhode Island’s Newport Historical Society. Rockwood also worked out of the Old State House in Boston, the oldest surviving public building in the city.

The structure stands like an ancient sailing ship, preserved among the shadows of steel and glass towers rising up around it in the centuries since.

Natick’s main street still recalls the architectural character of a bygone era, and some of its churches date back a century and more. But steeped in old Boston and New England history, having worked in 300-year-old buildings, Rockwood said her new role in Natick situates her in more recent surroundings and history.

“Everything’s so nice and new,” she said.

She still serves as Chair of the Attleboro Cultural Council, and is a resident of that town. The commute to her newly-adopted Natick is about an hour long.

In all these roles, Rockwood honed her talents in the realms of fundraising, marketing and public relations.

As director of the Natick Center Cultural District, that experience should prove invaluable.

“It’s really about liaising,” she said, about finding the unconsidered threads and interests that could tie different groups together. It’s then about making, marketing and maintaining those connections.

“It’s a lot of getting to know people. It’s really about bringing businesses downtown and keeping them there.”

These winter months find northern communities in sort of a state of semi-hibernation. Towns and cities hunker down and bundle up between bouts of snow and snaps of cold. But cultural and community life continues behind closed doors, and outdoors beneath heavy coats and scarves.

Natick’s popular farmers market doesn’t retreat, but rather regroups indoors at the Common Street Spiritual Center until spring arrives. The event then steps back outside and across the thoroughfare onto the lawn.

Planning and marketing mainstays like the farmers market is what the NCCD was founded for, said Rockwood. The organization promotes the event year-round, but plans during winter months for its grand re-opening on the Natick Common lawn. It’s a signpost that the season has changed, a signal that a shift has taken place.

“We’re really starting to look toward the summer,” said Rockwood.

With those warmer months come “Natick Days,” “Natick Nights” the town’s “Artwalk” events, and an assortment of other outdoor festivals.

“Those are the things that are on my mind,” said Rockwood.