By Megan O’Neill
I knew Chris Allen’s name before I knew Chris Allen.
When it was suggested that Chris be the first person I sit down with for Coffee with Meg, I had already heard her name around North Andover. I knew she had been involved with the farmers market. I knew she had served on town committees. I knew she was one of those people who seemed to know everyone.
What I didn’t know was how much of North Andover’s story she had been part of—or how much of her own life she had been carrying at the same time.
Chris moved to North Andover in 1984, the same week her oldest son, Patrick, was born. She and her husband, Larry, would go on to raise three children here, and like so many women, Chris first got involved in town through her kids.
When Patrick started at the old Bradstreet School, Chris volunteered to help with fundraising. She had an idea for a walkathon-style fundraiser and, as she jokingly remembers it, “bullied” her way into making it happen. She believes it was the first one the school held.
From there, she told me, things “just sort of roller-skated.”
There were PTOs and sports, school events and the North Andover Music Association. But it was the fight to save arts and music in North Andover schools that changed the way Chris understood community involvement.
In 2006, the district was facing cuts to arts and music. One music teacher’s time had already been divided between the middle and high schools. Chris remembers students arriving at school with their instruments in the morning and having nowhere to put them because there wasn’t a teacher there to open the music room. Parents volunteered to monitor the room so kids could simply drop off their instruments.
Chris could see where things were heading.
“We’re going to lose our music teacher. We’re going to lose the program,” she remembers thinking.
She wanted to do something about it. When there was hesitation about having the Music Association itself become involved in advocacy, Chris created a separate group called STAMP: Save the Arts and Music Program.
She will be the first to tell you that, at the time, she didn’t fully understand how town funding worked.
She just knew this mattered.
“You can’t say that North Andover has good schools” without art and music, she remembers arguing.
So she started attending meetings and speaking up. Somewhere along the way, someone told her that one of the most effective things residents could do was write to the people making the decisions.
Chris took that information and ran with it.
She reached out to people connected to the music program and asked them to write to the School Committee and Board of Selectmen. But she didn’t hand them talking points or tell them what to say.
She asked them to tell their stories.
Tell them what music means to your child. Tell them what it has meant to your family. Tell them why losing it would matter.
Hundreds of messages came in.
Chris started watching the tone of the meetings change. The conversation changed. Eventually, the funding changed.
They got their music teacher back.
“That was the epiphany,” she told me.
It wasn’t just that they had saved a program Chris cared about. She had seen what could happen when people understood how to make their voices heard.
That experience eventually led Chris to run for School Committee, where she served for six years. Over the years, she would also serve on the Planning Board and Finance Committee and become involved with the North Andover Historical Society and other community organizations.
But one of the most interesting things Chris told me about those years had nothing to do with a particular vote or accomplishment.
She started paying attention to the people who could change her mind.
If she walked into a conversation believing one thing and someone managed to make her see it differently, she would think about it afterward.
How did that happen?
What did that person say? How did they communicate it? Why was she able to hear them?
It’s a small detail about Chris that explains a lot.
She learned how to listen. She learned how to bring people together. She learned that getting something done usually requires more than having a good idea.
And in 2016, another idea started taking shape.
She teamed up with friends to organize North Andover’s first farmers market.
The goal wasn’t simply to create a place where residents could buy produce on the weekend. They wanted to bring people downtown.
The market was created in conjunction with the North Andover Merchants Association, with the hope that people would come to support local farms and vendors and then stick around, discover a business they hadn’t visited before or simply spend more time downtown.
Chris made a point of telling me about Tina Messina, owner of First and Main, who allowed the group to use space at the former Converse factory property when the market was getting started.
“The number one reason we were able to make it happen,” Chris said, was having access to that space.
That happened a lot during our conversation.
I would ask Chris about something she had done, and within a minute she would be telling me about the other people who made it possible.
The farmers market has now been part of North Andover for nearly a decade, and its impact has stretched far beyond a weekly place to gather. Its work around food insecurity has helped turn funding into meals prepared by local restaurants and distributed to people who need them.
There’s a whole ecosystem behind something most of us experience simply as a farmers market.
When I asked Chris what she was most proud of after all these years of involvement, though, she went back to STAMP.
And even then, she immediately reminded me that it wasn’t something she did alone.
“It might have been my idea, and I might have pushed to do that, but it certainly wasn’t something I did by myself.”
It’s something the people who know Chris seem to recognize in her, too.
“If there is an event, meeting, or activity anywhere in North Andover, chances are good that Chris Allen has (or had) her hand in it,” said Janice Phillips, a member of the town’s Select Board who volunteers at the Farmers Market with Allen. “She is committed to the collective good of the community and walks the walk through her endless volunteerism.”
But it was the next thing Janice said that felt especially true after my conversation with Chris: “Chris is an expert at helping others find their own path to involvement.”
Her son, Taylor, sees something even simpler behind it.
“I think she does it because she appreciates the community that North Andover provides,” he said. “I think she just genuinely likes making things better.”
That might be the simplest explanation for a list of community involvement that spans more than four decades. Chris sees something that could be better, and she helps make it better.
Because Chris doesn’t seem particularly interested in being the person at the center of everything. She seems much more interested in getting other people into the room.
And there was a whole other side of Chris’s life happening behind all of this, too.
For 25 years, Chris worked full time at Abbott Financial Management. She raised three children. Her mother lived with Chris and Larry for much of their married life, and as she grew older, Chris became her caregiver.
She grocery shopped. She made her meals. She did her laundry. She handled the thousand little things that come with caring for someone you love.
“You just do the doing,” she told me.
Then Larry became sick.
He had a rare, progressive neurological disease that would eventually prove fatal. As his abilities changed, Chris found herself caring for both her mother and her husband.
Eventually, her mother needed more care than Chris could provide at home. Chris and Larry also left the old house on Belmont Street where they had raised their children and moved to a ranch that would be easier for Larry to navigate.
Chris’s mother died in February 2025, three weeks shy of her 98th birthday.
Larry died five months later.
As Chris told me about those years, I kept thinking about how much of the work that holds our families and communities together is work we never see.
And then I asked her the question I plan to ask everyone I sit down with for Coffee with Meg:
What makes North Andover feel like home to you?
Chris answered with stories.
She remembered snowstorms on Belmont Street when neighbors would finish their own driveways and then move on to someone else’s.
She remembered the Merrimack Valley gas crisis, when everyone came out of their houses and started checking on one another. Is your gas off? Is everyone okay?
She remembered people showing up with trucks when she needed help moving.
As his illness progressed, people around town knew something was changing. Someone would call Chris after seeing him fall. Someone else would notice he seemed confused.
One day, Larry locked himself out of the house without his phone or a key. He made his way to the superintendent’s office.
The superintendent knew Larry and knew Chris.
He called her, drove Larry home and sat with him in the driveway until Chris arrived with a key.
“Of all the stories Chris told me that morning, that’s the one I keep coming back to.
For more than 40 years, Chris Allen has shown up for North Andover. For its kids. Its schools. Its music programs. Its farmers market. Its organizations and its people.
And when her own life became heavy, people showed up for her.
They brought trucks. They made phone calls. They shoveled snow. They kept an eye on Larry. One of them sat beside him in a driveway so he wouldn’t have to wait alone.
Maybe that’s what makes North Andover feel like home.
We don’t all know each other. We certainly don’t always agree. We might not even talk to the people who live two doors down very often.
But when someone needs help, somebody shows up.
And so much of a community is built by people like Chris, who have been doing exactly that for years.
Megan O’Neill is a North Andover resident who appreciates the work her neighbors put into making our community so special. Have someone who you think Meg should profile? Email us at editor@northandoverlife.com.
