By Heather Munro Prescott

 

On July 11, 2023, NBC Connecticut reporter Jane Caffrey introduced nightly news viewers to a pilot program of the Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford. The course, part of the Literacy Volunteers’ Career Pathways program, offered literacy support and job training for adult learners pursuing careers in food service management. Cecilia, an immigrant from Peru and one of the course’s first graduates, had been employed in a supermarket bakery and looked forward to pursuing a job with better pay and benefits. “Literacy,” she said, “will help me to find a job.” Also attending the program were James and Shawn, two students from the Open Hearth, a Hartford shelter for men experiencing homelessness, who planned to use the skills and certification they earned to advance in the food service field. But while learning about this innovative program, viewers did not hear about one of the most important factors underlying its success: the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, which, through its Hartford Greater Together Community Fund, awarded Literacy Volunteers a $2,500 grant for its Career Pathways program. This amount was part of the approximately $107,000 the Hartford Foundation granted Literacy Volunteers in 2023 and a fraction of the more than $3 million in support the Foundation had provided since 1981.

According to Smithsonian scholar Amanda B. Moniz, who studies the history of giving in America, “Engaged philanthropy is vital to democracy.” Yet philanthropy is often invisible. Every day, Connecticut residents walk past the hidden contributions of the Hartford Foundation. Like Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford, area nonprofits that support libraries, schools, senior centers, cultural centers, hospitals, playgrounds, and sports fields have all benefited from Foundation funding.

 

In Connecticut, formal philanthropy dates back to the early days of the American Republic, beginning primarily as the province of

prosperous white businessmen. Men established foundations, and women provided a volunteer workforce. The Hartford Foundation was founded in 1925 by two bankers, Maynard T. Hazen and Clark T. Durant, who sought a way to create an organization that would accept “gifts, devises, and bequests” and serve as a resource for community benefit. The Foundation’s trustees and distribution committee came from the city’s most distinguished citizens and were predominantly white men. In his article “Connecticut’s Philanthropic Impulse” (Connecticut Explored, Fall 2015), Gene Leach observed that foundations like the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving differed from earlier 19th-century efforts rooted in church-based charity. Community foundations were nonsectarian grant-making institutions whose adopted “procedures made for far-sightedness and objectivity.”

By 1936, the Foundation had sufficient funds to make grants. One of its first awards was to the Council of Social Agencies for a socioeconomic study of the economically depressed Brackett School district in Hartford’s North End. The Foundation also provided relief to areas devastated by the floods of 1936 and 1937. Among the hardest hit was the low-income Front Street neighborhood, then the home of Hartford’s Little Italy.

By the early 1940s, problems arose because of America’s preparation for entry into the Second World War—from housing shortages to job and housing discrimination based on race. As local industries geared up for war production, workers came to the city to take on war-related jobs. Black migrants from the South were segregated into cheap public housing projects. Following the war, the Foundation responded to new needs caused by ongoing racial inequality within the region. Black residents were still largely confined to cheap, run-down housing. The city also saw an influx of Puerto Rican migrants who came to the city following the war and who were also segregated in economically depressed portions of the city. The Foundation responded with efforts like a 1949 study that “coordinat[ed] the North End’s social service centers,” which enabled grassroots organizations to better meet the needs of their communities (“Pooling Trust Funds for a Better Hartford,” The Hartford Courant, January 11, 1950).

In the 1950s, Hartford, like other cities, engaged in the urban renewal movement, which was fueled by a mixture of idealism and federal dollars. As Lizabeth Cohen explained in “Ed Logue and Urban Renewal in New Haven” (Connecticut Explored, Summer 2021), urban renewal projects included tearing down older neighborhoods, building public housing and parking, and encircling cities with an interstate highway system that allowed for suburban development. Racially restrictive covenants in suburbs made it difficult for Black and Latino families to find housing outside the cities. African Americans found available housing primarily in Hartford’s decaying North End as a result of this confluence of government policies and legal maneuvers (Fiona Vernal, “How Hartford’s North End Became an African American Community,” Connecticut Explored, Fall 2022, and Jack Dougherty, “The Rise of Exclusionary Zoning in Connecticut,” Spring 2023). Discontent with inadequate housing, discriminatory employment practices, increasing social problems, and the effects of urban renewal came to a head in the North End on Labor Day weekend in 1969. Residents set fires to buildings and obstructed traffic, and there were confrontations among protestors, police officers, and firefighters.

The unrest prompted the Foundation to fund various programs for the city’s Black and Latino residents. This included sponsoring start-up costs for the Community Renewal Team and the Hartford branch of the Urban League; city and suburban library expansions; La Casa de Puerto Rico, a social services agency; and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Hartford. The Foundation also funded Project Bridge, a school dropout prevention program for “at-risk” youth in the city. By the early 1980s, programs benefiting the city’s people of color comprised 30 to 40 percent of the Foundation’s grants.

Meanwhile, the Foundation had been working for decades toward inclusivity in its decision-making processes. According to the 1971 annual report, “The idea was to help those

in greatest need to help themselves, rather than impose programs devised by whites on black and Puerto Rican people.” The leadership of the Foundation also became more diverse. The distribution committee broadened with the addition of Delores P. Graham, assistant to the president of the University of Hartford. She served from 1976 to 1980 and was the committee’s first African American member. In 1988, the distribution committee added its first Latino member, Assistant City Manager for Human Services Maria Borrero, a visionary who improved healthcare for the Latino community (Obituary, The Hartford Courant, March 26, 2021).

Despite the efforts of the Foundation, Hartford residents continued to struggle. Manufacturing jobs disappeared and were replaced with low-wage service jobs. The nation went into a recession, and by 1982, unemployment was over 10 percent, the highest it had been since the Great Depression. The population of Hartford continued to decline, and between 1970 and 1980, the number of housing units in Hartford dropped 6 percent. At the same time, the conversion of rental units to condominiums made them too expensive for many city residents. According to a January 1, 1987, article in The Hartford Courant, Hartford had the second-highest child poverty rate in the nation, and the educational attainment of the city’s children lagged far behind those in the suburbs. According to the Connecticut Data Collaborative, Hartford’s child poverty rate is currently 37 percent; in 2006, it was 43 percent, the sixth-highest rate in the nation among cities with populations over 100,000 (Connecticut General Assembly Commission on Children, “Child Poverty in Connecticut,” 2007).

During the 1990s and 2000s, the Hartford Foundation developed new initiatives to address these disparities, many of them focusing on children and their families. In 1995, the Foundation funded six Brighter Futures Family Centers across Hartford, which it continues to support. According to Richard Sussman, then the Foundation’s director of early childhood investments, these community hubs “emphasize family development and underscore the importance of families being their child’s first teachers.” Meanwhile, the Foundation continued to seek more significant input from the communities it served, embarking on a listening tour in 2018. These conversations led to the creation of a Greater Together Community Fund for each of the 29 towns in the Hartford region. Each fund provides resources to an advisory committee of town residents who use grant money to meet their community’s unique, ever-changing needs.

In 2020, greater Hartford was severely challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincided with a reckoning of centuries of systemic racism in the United States. In response, the Foundation awarded the region’s nonprofit agencies a record-breaking $52.7 million, a level of investment that continues. Among other investments, the funding helped finance Connecticorps, which provided stipends and scholarships to individuals volunteering at nonprofits whose staffs were depleted by the pandemic. In a June 26, 2020, article in The Hartford Courant, Jay Williams, Foundation president and CEO, described the program as “the essence of why we exist as a community foundation”: using Foundation grants to build the capacity of nonprofits serving on the frontlines during the crisis.

In 2025, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving will mark its 100th anniversary. As a community foundation, it serves nearly 800,000 residents and hundreds of nonprofits in the greater Hartford region. It has been a steady but subtle guiding force in the transformation of Hartford over the past hundred years through its funding of diverse nonprofit organizations and its commitment to participatory decision-making.

 

Heather Munro Prescott is CSU professor emerita of history at Central Connecticut State University. She has written numerous books and articles on the history of medicine, focusing on the history of women, children, and adolescents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn More!

José E. Cruz, “María Sánchez: Godmother of Hartford’s Puerto Rican Community,” Connecticut Explored, Summer 2003, ctexplored.org/maria-sanchez-godmother-of-hartfords-puerto-rican-community/

 Vivian Zoë, “The Victorian Philanthropy of John Fox Slater & William Albert Slater,” Connecticut Explored, Fall 2021, ctexplored.org/the-victorian-philanthropy-of-john-fox-slater-and-william-albert-slater/