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Courtney Luciana |
May 18, 2022 3:34 pm
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Bike to Work Week celebration at State Street Station.
Seth Osborne was headed to Liberty Safe Haven on 210 State Str. to see his case manager to help him apply for disability Tuesday morning, when a free breakfast array caught his eye.
That drew him over to what ended up to be a celebration for Bike to Work Week, aimed at encouraging more people to get around town on two wheels. He was encouraged. But first he needs the wheels.
State legislators Josh Elliott and Jorge Cabrera at WNHH FM.
Students will find more social workers and counselors in their schools. Mobile crisis centers will be on call 24 – 7. And some people wrestling with the long-term effects of trauma or addiction will get chance to see whether “magic mushrooms” can help guide them through the darkness.
by
Kevin Maloney |
May 16, 2022 8:00 am
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Monette Ferguson and Kevin Maloney.
Talk about poverty, and you sometimes have to use the language of war. Many people are seen as casualties in the war against it. Fortunately, there are also alliances that can be forged in this fight.
The Alliance for Community Empowerment is one such organization that has worked on the frontlines of the War on Poverty since the 1960s. Executive Director Dr. Monette Ferguson joined the “Municipal Voice,” a co-production of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and WNHHFM, to talk about economic disparity.
Inside the convention hall, candidates jostled for last-minute support to win the party’s endorsement. Democratic Town Committee Chair Vincent Mauro Jr. had his two candidates picked. If this were his uncle’s day in charge, or his father’s — heck, even if this were 2010 — he could have given the signal, and all of New Haven’s delegates would have lined up behind him to vote with one voice.
Mykola Blyzniuk steered a 53-foot tractor-trailer from George Street filled with 24 pallets and 600 cartons of donated bandages, wheelchairs, scalpels, breathing tubes, and first aid kits destined for Lviv, Ukraine.
Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jackie Downing kick off the Great Give Radiothon on WNHH FM.
Giving topped $2 million as the New Haven’s annual 36-hour “Great Give” entered the final laps Thursday, with 510 nonprofits in a friendly competition to raise money and win $268,500 in prizes.
by
Courtney Luciana |
May 4, 2022 1:45 pm
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Courtney Luciana Photo
Francis Miller gets work underway.
Francis Miller stood on a ladder taking pictures of the New Haven Green Memorial that honors fallen heroes of World War I — not just for fun, but as a first step in a preservation project.
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Courtney Luciana |
Apr 29, 2022 1:07 pm
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Cesar Perez Thursday at the Church Street bus stop.
Cesar Perez encountered a friend by the bus stop near the Dunkin Donuts at Church and Center streets.
“I have only one,” she told him. “I’ll split it with you.”
Not now, Perez responded: He was about to be otherwise engaged, chatting about the lure of drugs on the street in New Haven and his desire to start fresh somewhere else.
We don’t know where in Africa Lucretia was born. We don’t know where she’s buried. We do know where she lived in New Haven — and Ann Garrett Robinson and Steven Winter are working, four centuries later, to make sure her name lives on there.
by
Maya McFadden and Nora Grace-Flood |
Apr 27, 2022 2:53 pm
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Edward Ray Van Epps leaves Sunrise Cafe well-fed.
For the first time since the pandemic broke, “Eddie Wigs” Wednesday ate his usual breakfast of eggs, smoothie and milk inside with other homeless New Haveners rather than out on the street.
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Courtney Luciana |
Apr 25, 2022 4:29 pm
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Eric Vidro.
Eric Vidro was headed to Chapel Street Monday morning during his morning shift — as a budding clothing designer — before his third-shift gig in a factory.
The latter pays the bills. The former fuels his dreams.
Josh Geballe ushered the DMV into the 21st century. Can he do the same for New Haven’s start-up economy?
He’s ready to give it his best.
Until two months ago, Geballe served as Gov. Ned Lamont’s chief operating officer (aka right-hand man), overseeing daily responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and, not incidentally, finally bringing license renewals online and revamping the seemingly hopeless Department of Motor Vehicles along with a team of other state officials.
Now Geballe has taken on another ambitious task: heading a new department at Yale charged with “supporting and expanding innovation and entrepreneurship across the university and throughout the Greater New Haven region.”
That’s the mission statement of the department, called Yale Ventures. It replaces Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) set up in the 1980s to oversee “tech transfer” — helping researchers and profs patent and license their discoveries and turn them into new businesses.
The new Yale Ventures incorporates and expands that mission. It aims to work both within the university and in the broader community to train innovators to start companies, mentor them through the process, seek new corporate funding sources for start-ups, connect local companies as potential partners, help fill New Haven office and lab space, and help entrepreneurs as well as other New Haveners land jobs in the new companies.
Tech start-ups can produce jobs for New Haveners from all walks of life, Geballe (whose formal title at Yale is senior associate provost for entrepreneurship & innovation) stated during a conversation about the new venture Thursday on WNHHFM’s “Dateline New Haven” program: “The typical biotech start-up is going to have some leadership, they’re going to have some PhDs in white coats doing research. They also have lab techs, and office staff. There’s enormous demand, unmet need for those types of jobs.”
Planting start-up seeds throughout town also makes for a potentially stable, long-term economic strategy.
“It’s a much more robust form of economic growth, when you have many smaller firms that are growing,” Geballe observed.
“Some of them become Alexions or Arvinas that employ hundreds of people. But even then it’s not one massive employer that employs thousands of people, that if their technology shifts or they move overseas, then it’s a devastating effect. We have much more diversification.”
In a sense Geballe’s mission marks a third phase in the evolving town-gown effort to replace the tens of thousands of jobs lost to dying or fleeing manufacturers with a new tech-driven eds-and-meds economy. Phase 1 began in the 1980s with OCR’s creation and the creation of Science Park as a successor to the largely abandoned Winchester rifle complex. Yale President Rick Levin ushered in Phase 2.0 by embracing both OCR and Science Park rather than keeping it at arm’s length and working closely with New Haven’s DeStefano administration on economic development. Those efforts bore fruit, as evidence by the filling up of Science park buildings, 300 George St., 100 College St., and the not-yet-finished 101 College St.
Which gives Geballe and his team a chance to bring the effort to the next level.
An initial step will be the Yale-hosted annual Innovation Summit on May 17 and 18 (details here), which this year will feature more participation by innovators outside Yale’s community, who will have the chance to pitch venture capitalists and network with other new-economy movers and shakers.
Geballe: No danger of "getting bored."
Geballe, who is 47 and grew up in Stony Creek, comes to his new task with a combination of tech experience — including learning business management ropes at IBM, then running a successful software start-up (at the dawn of cloud computing’s rise), and finally diving into government service as Lamont’s COO. He said he can envision staying with his new job for decades, for the rest of his career.
He said Yale Ventures itself feels like a start-up. “We’re moving fast,” he said. “We’re not getting everything perfect. We’ll experiment.”
After two career-sector moves in five years, Geballe was asked how long he envisions staying in his new job.
“Rest of my life,” he responded. “ When you’ve got a university like Yale that’s spending a billion dollars a year on R&D, there’s never going to be an end to the new innovations coming out.
“If you ever get bored doing this work, you’re doing this wrong. “
The boys in the band: Nolan Wazni, Jack Marchand, Ben Card at WNHH FM.
A rising band of New Haven pop-rockers had a new album to put out. But first they had to:
• Find a place they could practice and record. • Factor in the fact that the lead vocalist’s voice was changing. • In one case, get a ride from mom for the pre-release radio interview. • In another case, get permission to leave school for an hour.
Such are the extra challenges of making your mark in music if you’re also a bunch of high-school juniors.
by
Nora Grace-Flood and Maya McFadden |
Apr 20, 2022 3:57 pm
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Nora Grace-Flood photos
Eddi M. photographs Alina ...
... in flower-filled Wooster Square Park.
Wooster Square’s cherry blossoms served as a fitting seasonal backdrop Wednesday morning — for a photographer aiming to turn the trees’ ephemeral beauty into immortal crypto wealth.
by
Kevin Maloney |
Apr 18, 2022 8:00 am
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Caroline Simmons, Stamford’s new mayor, wants any businesses interested in the city to email her at mayorsoffice@stamfordct.gov.
Just four months into the job, Mayor Simmons has become the city’s number one promoter. She joined “The Municipal Voice,” a co-production of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and WNHHFM, to talk about what drew her to local government, what she was able to accomplish in her first 100 days and what she has her eyes on for the future.
