March 25, 6-8pm

Join Innovate413 and UMass Downtown for a hands-on startup workshop. Bring your curiosity and your passion and connect with local mentors who will be on-hand to help you turn your spark into a real idea. Discover your "why", map your strengths, shape your concept, get feedback, and leave with a plan. 

This free event is open to anyone curious about how to turn an idea into reality. Registration is required.

Register Here

March 26, 5:30-7pm

Have you ever wanted to collect food, diapers, or supplies for a local organization but weren't sure where to start? Join us for How to Run a Drive: From Idea to Impact  - a panel discussion with people experienced in running diaper drives (United Way of the Franklin and Hampshire Region), food drives (Amherst Survival Center), and emergency response drives (UMass member of the Olympia Fire response team). Our panelists will walk you through the process from start to finish and discuss the important role community members can play in addressing critical community needs.

Presented in partnership with the UMass Amherst Community Campaign, this event is free and open to all.

Register Here (Recommended)

March 27, 3-6pm

Time sure flies when you're working to support local partnerships and strengthen campus-community ties. Come celebrate one year with us! Stop by, say hello, enjoy some sweet treats, and discover everything UMass Downtown has to offer.

Be one of the first 50 guests and receive a free UMass Downtown tote bag!

Plus, enter to win our Grand Prize:

• Overnight stay and breakfast provided courtesy of the Inn on Boltwood 

• $150 gift card to Osteria Vespa 

• Curated Aster & Pine gift box

• $50 gift card to the UMass Store 

• $50 Amherst Area Gift Card to explore local favorites

One lucky winner takes it all!

March 28, 10-11am

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) challenges current graduate student researchers with presenting the significance and impact of their research in 3 minutes or less.

Join us for the program's Community Day, which brings the 3MT to the Amherst community, with audience members voting for the People's Choice winner. Anyone is welcome to come watch and vote for their favorite presenter, who will win $250!

March 31, 6-7pm

AI chatbots are becoming our new coworkers. Can we trust them? In the second installment of our Talking Tech series, join UMass faculty Francine Berman and Laura Haas for discussion about what chatbots can do, what they can’t do, and where the limits should be.

Sponsored by Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass, Talking Tech aims to demystify the technology that drives our world.

Francine Berman is Director of Public Interest Technology in the Manning College of Computer and Information Sciences at UMass, as well as a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Berman is a leader in the field of Public Interest Technology, focused on the responsible development, use and management of technology for social impact. Berman received the 2024 Pioneer in Tech award from the National Center for Women in Technology and is a regular panelist on WAMC’s Roundtable.

Laura Haas is Professor and former Dean of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass. Haas was formerly an IBM Fellow, leading research and development in data management and data science..  She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and currently chairs the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.

April 11, 6-7:30pm

Presented in partnership with the Amherst Business Improvement District, Writers Reading is a curated series featuring local authors. Join us for a line-up curated by Anna Maria Hong. Fellow authors Eula Biss, James Hannaham, and John Hennessy will join Hong in sharing selections from their work. 

This event is free to attend and open to all. Books will be available for purchase.

This installment of the Writers Reading series is part of the 2026 Amherst Literary Walk, presented by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Amherst Business Improvement District.

Anna Maria Hong is the author of the poetry collections Age of Glass (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and Fablesque (Tupelo Press), winner of the Berkshire Prize, and the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and essays appear in many publications including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, the Hawthornden Foundation, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, she is an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College. 

Eula Biss is the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New America Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world. For the past twenty years, Biss has taught writing in large lecture halls and small community bookstores, at public elementary schools and private universities. She developed a commitment to progressive education at Hampshire College and is currently the Joan Leiman Jacobson Non-Fiction Writer in Residence at Smith College. 

James Hannaham is a writer, a visual artist, or both. His novel Delicious Foods won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has shown work at The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Kimberley-Klark Gallery, Open Source, and elsewhere. His most recent novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, won the Ferro-Grumley Award from the Publishing Triangle, a second Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was also a New York Times Notable Book. His shorter works have appeared in Brink, The Ocean State Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and as poets.org’s poem-a-day. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous residencies, among them Yaddo, Macdowell, and Fundación Valparaíso. 

John Hennessy is the author of three collections, the recently published Exit Garden State (Lost Horse Press), Coney Island Pilgrims, and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in The Believer, multiple editions of Best American Poetry, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation finalist and Derek Walcott Prize winner, and Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature), winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Scholarly Translation, and Honorable Mention for the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Set Change, Yuri Andrukhovych’s selected poems (NYRB/Poets Series), was runner-up for the AAUS Translation Prize and earned an NEA grant. Hennessy teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as poetry editor for The Common.

First Tuesdays, 10am-4pm

Looking for job opportunities at UMass Amherst? Need help with your application or have questions about the hiring process? Are you a new employee with questions about onboarding? UMass Amherst Human Resources is here to help! 

The UMass HR team offers weekly community office hours at UMass Downtown to provide application assistance and interview guidance for prospective employees and CORI verifications and onboarding support for new hires. 

No appointment necessary. Just stop by during UMass HR's community office hours!

First Thursdays, 7-8pm

Get to know some MASSively talented up-and-coming UMass musicicans in this chill monthly concert series. Spring 2026 dates are February 5, March 5, April 2, and May 7. Check back monthly for artist line-ups. 

• February 5: Keira Doyle and Judd Kozuch

• March 5: Brielle, Raina, and Caramia

Presented in partnership with the UMass Songwriting and Production Club, the MASSive Desk Concert Series is free and open to all.

James oversees the university's multipurpose retail, event and meeting satellite space in downtown Amherst, which opened this week.

The conversations, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on April 24, May 6 and June 10 in the university’s new multipurpose retail, event and meeting space at 108 North Pleasant St. in downtown Amherst, are free and open to all.

Attendees at the event, scheduled for 5:30-7 p.m. at UMass Downtown, will learn about various volunteer opportunities and discover ways to contribute their time and skills to support local organizations and strengthen our community.