por Josh Kornberg, Greater Hartford Gives Foundation Vice President for Advancement
Tuesday morning, I got on the phone with Ted Sergi, one of our former board chairs, to talk through a new project I’m working on with donors. Ted has had a career most people only get to read about. Longtime educator, Connecticut’s Commissioner of Education, the first executive director of the Centro de Ciencias de Connecticut. He has spent a lifetime shaping this state, and he is still doing it.
The call was supposed to be about logistics. It didn’t stay there. Ted started talking about the fund he grants through every year, and I could hear the difference between someone who gives and someone who makes donations the way Ted does. He talked about food, housing, shelter, the basics that hold a family together. He told me about handing books directly to children and said nothing in his life has given him more joy.
I hung up and went about my day. That afternoon, we lost Dolly Parton.
By evening, the internet was flowing with tributes to Dolly, and not just the music. The Imagination Library, which has put hundreds of millions of books directly into children’s hands, the same way Ted described doing it one child at a time. The wildfire relief fund she built for families in her home state who lost everything, paying them month after month until they were back on their feet. The stories people were only now sharing, about the strip mall she quietly bought to protect a neighborhood, the band uniforms she paid for without ever being asked. She spent a fortune making sure the help was specific enough to see.
I sat with that, Ted’s voice still in my head, Dolly’s legacy all over my feed. I felt the weight of it more than I expected to. For both of them, giving had become one of the ways they inhabited the world. They stayed close not because they distrusted what would happen without them, but because that closeness gave them purpose and joy.
That does not make proximity a truer form of philanthropy. Philanthropy is not one thing. Some people give and release the gift into the care of others. Trust is itself an act of generosity, and a gift is no less personal because the donor does not remain close.
For Ted and Dolly, participation was part of the gift.
Dolly often described her father as one of the smartest people she had ever known, though he never had the opportunity to learn to read and write. She created the Imagination Library in his honor. “My daddy just loved it when all the little kids would call me ‘The Book Lady,’” she once recalled. It meant more to him than her fame.
For Dolly, giving books to children was not simply philanthropy she could watch in action. It was a way to love her father, reckon with the barriers that had kept him and so many others from learning to read, and open that joy to a new generation.
Ted was describing something similar. When he places a book into a child’s hands, he is not watching philanthropy happen. He is living the reason he gives.
This is the part of my job I take most seriously. As a community foundation, our responsibility is not simply to help someone make a charitable gift. It is to understand how generosity belongs within their life, then help it take a form that feels true to them. That may mean honoring a donor’s trust by carrying a gift forward on their behalf. It may mean creating a way for them to remain close to the work. The real responsibility is to understand the life that shapes the gift and helps the gift carry that life forward. I feel that responsibility every day. When we get it right, someone’s generosity becomes exactly what they hoped it would be. That is the whole point of this work.
These are the conversations and reminders that center me in this work. We’ll keep doing it, with and for community.
Thank you, Dolly and Ted, for the reminder.