Good news for Times readers: We have scheduled community meetings on successive Mondays over the next two weeks to invite readers to get involved with our newspapers.

The first meeting, from 4 to 6 p.m. April 24, will be held at Groton Public Library’s Meeting Room 1 and is geared toward readers of the Stonington, Mystic, Thames River and Groton papers. The second meeting is set at the same time May 1 at New London Public Library’s community room and is intended for readers of the Lyme, Waterford, Montville and New London publications.

As promised a couple months ago, we are reaching out to readers and potential contributors to the Times. We would love to engage retirees, students, parents and anyone with an interest in writing or photography and a love for their community to be a part of these meetings.

Already we have implemented a series of changes in the Times. We have a new teen columnist, Maria Proulx, as well as several contributors to our Kindness in Real Life series in which we have asked readers to talk about their - or others’ - engagement with nonprofits or examples of what to do, or not to do, to make a better community. We also have started several historical columns in some of our publications, the most recent being Jim Streeter’s History Revisited piece on the Gold Star Memorial Bridge.

Behind the scenes, we are also engaging with many of our communities, including a visit to Montville to talk to local citizens and a series of New London Voices interviews in which we have partnered with Connecticut College students to conduct interviews with seniors as a Story Corps-like project.

But we can do better. The intention with these initial meetings is to develop a core group of community enthusiasts to help encourage more contributions, possibly from local school newspapers that are covering high school and middle school sports as well as other events.

The idea eventually would be that we would have regular meetings in each of our towns at local coffee shops to keep developing ideas and seeking contributions. Once we have the local papers humming, we would like to expand even more, perhaps into podcasting, vlogging and Story Corps-type interviews in all our towns.

In addition, we are starting to look at the Times Facebook page - yes, we have one, so feel free to find it and like it at https://www.facebook.com/TheTimesCT/. We will be using this page to engage our readers, tell them about stories and encourage local submissions of photographs and snippets of information about, for instance, shops closing or starting up.

It’s an exciting time to be in journalism with all the varied options out there to connect with people - and that’s where we hope to make the Times an invaluable resource. We are your people-oriented newspaper ready to celebrate the good things in life and hoping you can help us uncover those great untold stories.

So please come to one of our meetings. If you can’t come to the one most appropriate to your town, feel free to drop in to the other meeting. We are glad to have you as part of the Times family.

Lee Howard is The Day’s community editor.