The Montclair Girl Team 
Dear Montclair Girl readers and friends,
2025 was The Local Girl’s 13th birthday, and we were constantly reminded of the path we’ve been on and how much more there is to learn. One constant has been you: our readers, supporters, commenters, and friends. It truly feels like we’ve created a little community here on the internet, and that’s the whole point. Thank you for the encouragement and interaction as we explore what makes where we live so interesting, which includes the good and the challenging.
Something we’re teeing up for January 2026 is a focus on screen-free activities, and to kick that off, we rounded up 25 screen-free things to do in Montclair and beyond. Stay tuned for more about how we’re exploring everything analog.
But, in the meantime, we’re closing the year with our own TLG highlight reel, sharing some of the things that happened in 2025 that we’re most proud of.
- The Montclair Girl Puppy Bowl raised $1500 for two animal rescue organizations
- Along those lines, we launched The Local Girl Gives! This is something we’ve been doing since 2017 with our Hoboken Girl Helps initiatives, where we volunteer in-person with groups of our readers and organize ways to give back, and this year we were able to donate $10,000 to 10 NJ non-profits ($1000 each), based on who you shared with us. The non-profits we gave back to included:
- New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children;
- The Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum
- Guttenberg Arts; the Hudson Pride Center;
- Waterspirit;
- Tomorrow’s Children’s Fund
- Whole Spectrum Autism;
- FARAH: Foundation for Arab American Heritage;
- Wise Animal Rescue; and
- The Forest School at Tenafly Nature Center
- We launched a new interface of our site, and parent brand, The Local Girl
- We redesigned our sites and launched our newest sister site, The Fairfax Girl in FFX, Virginia.
- We hosted the first-ever Montclair Girl Market at Lackawanna Station
We spotlighted dozens of adoptable animals, and, of course, countless small businesses and community members who make our communities tick.
We’ll still be posting a bit here and there, but our core team will be OOO from December 25th to January 4th.
Our out-of-office messages are up, our DMs will have an auto-reply, and we’ll be a bit off the grid this week. On January 5th, we’ll be back with regular content. You’re welcome to send us tips at any time to [email protected] + @themontclairgirl on Instagram, but they’ll be read upon our return.
See you next year!
The Montclair Girl Team
