Connie Fitch and Linda Ovian (pictured left to right), who are now both successful New Haven business women, remember well what it was like to be girls just becoming adolescents. If they could go back in time, they said, they would have loved to have a program that helped teach them grace, zest for life, leadership, and a deeper appreciation of their own uniqueness. So they invented one to do just that for today’s New Haven girls.
Fitch and Ovian presented their program as part of their graduation ceremony from the 22nd annual Leadership Greater New Haven (LGNH) program held at the Lawn Club on Tuesday night.
For the 22nd year, the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce (GNHCC) has recruited business, professional, and non-profit executives such as Fitch and Ovian — Fitch is in television and Ovian is a sales support executive for Anthem Health Care— for the ten-month long program.
LGNH participants take trips together, such as walking tours of the city and of Hartford, a cruise on the schooner Amistad. They hear an impressive roster of speakers, earn about the nexus of politics and economics, and receive leadership and community training. The idea is to inspire these people, who are mostly young, to sit on the non-profit boards of the future, and to be catalysts for social change.
In order to graduate, the 31 members of the class also must present a project they have developed over the past year that addresses a community need. It must be researched, needed, and sustainable. That’s what made the ceremony at the Lawn Club, thronged by hundreds of the graduates’ family and friends, so much fun.
Fitch and Ovian and their colleagues worked with the Girl Scouts Connecticut Trails Council to devise a day-long program, called G.U.R.L.Z. Just Be Yourself, which teaches confidence and self esteem through Grace, Uniqueness, Respect, Leadership, and Zest for life. A scientist, firefighter, physician, and designer, all women, were brought in to talk to 40 girl scouts. Games were played, dances danced. All of this has been put into a convenient box, program materials and all, to be used throughout the years ahead.
This happy crowd consists of a banker, an engineer, an attorney, a college admissions officer, a marketer, and a development manager. What they have in common is that none of them reside in New Haven, although all work here. So what was their project? They created walkingtoursnewhaven.com. “Since none of us live right in town,” said Jim Wright (on the far left), a transplanted New Yorker who is now with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, “we thought it would be great to create a tour, physical, virtual, downloadable, complete with pictures and maps. And so we did.”
Since time didn’t permit them to do the whole city, they fashioned four tours focusing on the theater and museum district including, of course, the site of the invention of the galaxy’s first hamburger; the exquisite plaza around the Beinecke Library; the Audubon arts district; and a circumnavigation of the Green. Each virtual tour, which appears to be full of well researched history and the personality of the narrator, takes about 30 minutes.
“If you were to walk it,” Wright said, “it would take 4,923 steps.”
A third group of LGNH graduates — (left to right) Robert Hutchison III, Robert Janes, J.R. Logan, and Jennifer Weymouth — surveyed their colleagues in business. They discovered that while you would be hard put to find a soul in proudly green New Haven who does not swear by recycling, only a third to half of the firms have formal programs to do so. This, despite serious concerns about the amount of white paper and electronics that need to be disposed of.
“The problem,” said Janes, “is that information on how readily to set up recycling programs was not easy to find.” So that’s the problem this group addressed. They worked with a half-dozen local environmental organizations and wrote a manual, on recycled paper of course, on the steps — including how to get management’s support, appointing a recycling coordinator, doing a kick-off event — for setting up a successful business recycling program. “This is meant to be a first step,” said Weymouth.
There were other moving presentations by groups who worked on the “digital divide” by funding the purchase of computer equipment and software for minority kids and setting up a foundation to further that; and Karen Cavanaugh, who works with Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic on Orange Street and Alicia DeSouza-Rocha, a special projects manager with Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, were proudly showing off their “Grow New Haven ” bags. What was their project? Why, urban agriculture.
The need they responded to was backyard gardeners and those growing small yields on community gardens who might want to participate in the growing green markets in the city, yet currently have no outlet. Unlike local farmers, these city residents might not be able to afford a table, for example, at CitySeed’s markets. How to bridge such gaps?
“We’re bringing together the New Haven Land Trust, which has a network of the local farmers, Junta, which provides business training including micro-loans, and CitySeed,” said Pete Stein, a member of the urban agriculture group, aka Rabbi Pete Stein, with the Regional Growth Partnership. “Through Grow New Haven,” he said, “which also has a website, “small gardeners will, by next summer, it is hoped, be able to share a table and participate, first, through a pilot program in Fair Haven.
The program is not inexpensive. According to one participant, the cost is on a sliding scale basis from $1,500 to $3,000, although scholarships are available. Participants are generally nominated by their colleagues, and frequently by their supervisors and bosses. To access the nomination process for the next class, the site is gnhcc.com. To date there are approximately 500 alumni of the Leadership Greater New Haven program. Thirty-one worthy others were added Tuesday night.