Meet Ashley and Peter
Our family. Our hometown. A story we’re still building together.
We grew up a block and a half apart in Hastings, Minnesota. Today, we’re raising two young sons here and building HastingsNow.com—an independent local media and storytelling business.
For more than a decade, we’ve been photographing, filming and sharing life here. We want to help people find what matters today—and preserve what they’ll be grateful to remember tomorrow.
The community that shaped us
Ashley’s family connections stretch back generations, including roots in Cowtown. Her parents worked at Smead, her grandfather Henri worked at the Hastings Creamery, and her grandmother Audrey worked in local school and restaurant kitchens.
Peter grew up around his father’s small business, Rivertown Eye Care. A trip for milk could take 45 minutes because patients kept stopping his dad to talk. As kids, Peter and his brothers just wanted to get home. Looking back, those conversations showed how deeply a local business could become part of people’s lives.
Those connections helped shape HastingsNow.
Some moments become more precious with time
In 2012, we interviewed Ashley’s grandparents, Henri and Missy (Anna) Tessier, to preserve their stories. That family project captured something at the heart of our work: people’s lives are worth remembering.
Some of the people we’ve photographed and interviewed over the years are no longer here. That makes the moments we captured especially meaningful.
We’re preserving more than events. We want to remember the faces, voices and everyday moments that make this place home.
A place to find more of Hastings
Our community-feed work goes back to 2018, a history documented in Walls.io’s 2022 customer story about HastingsNow.
Today, our free community feeds organize public updates across 21 categories, from businesses and nonprofits to schools, sports and community activities. The pages are available around the clock, with RSS-based tools gathering updates as source feeds refresh. We cover the ongoing hosting and feed-service costs.
Organizations do not have to pay to be included in these feeds. Don’t see yours represented? Send us your public website or social-media page so we can review it for inclusion.
Alongside the feeds, we produce LOCAL 10, our reviewed daily selection of ten useful local updates, and Weather + On This Date, pairing a Hastings forecast with three moments from history.
Automated feed posts are not individually reviewed by us; our daily features are. We use modern tools, including AI, and remain responsible for our editorial work. Read how our stories are made.
Our next chapter
Approximately 1.1 million organic views on Facebook alone in one 90-day reporting period.
We haven’t paid for Facebook advertising in years. Seeing our work find an audience encourages us—but behind it are still two people, raising a family and building a small business with limited equipment.
September 2026 Facebook analytics snapshot: the displayed 90-day period also shows approximately 181,000 viewers. Figures are rounded; views are not unique people.
Our next goal is to make the work more sustainable: more time documenting local people, businesses and sports; reliable production equipment; and more of our photo and video archive organized and accessible.
Help us keep showing up
Hire us to tell your story. Our photography, video and storytelling packages help businesses and organizations share what makes them worth knowing.
Help sustain the daily work. Contribute through Venmo, or contact us about equipment or other practical support.
Support us without spending. Share a story, recommend us, send a useful update or tell us how our work has helped you. An honest testimonial can help someone else understand its value.
You do not have to be a paying client to be considered for our community feeds or LOCAL 10. We retain editorial judgment.
Whether you’ve been here for generations or just arrived, you belong in this community’s story.
Thank you for being part of our story—and helping us keep telling Hastings’ stories.
Ashley and Peter