When people ask what I do as a Senior Community Impact Officer at Greater Hartford Gives Foundation, the easy answer is that I oversee investments in education, postsecondary success, and workforce development.
That’s true. But it only tells part of the story.
After nearly three decades working across education, workforce development, nonprofit leadership, and philanthropy, I’ve come to believe that some of the most important work happens outside the grantmaking. Instead, it happens at tables where people including educators, employers, nonprofit leaders, public officials, community members, and funders come together to tackle challenges that no organization can solve alone.
As someone born and raised in Hartford, that belief is rooted in me. I grew up in public housing. I attended Hartford Public Schools. How can I not see myself in the data? I was that child in Head Start, that young boy learning in ESL, shaped by bilingual education programs. Much of my life has been spent navigating the very systems we discuss today.
The issues facing our region aren’t abstract policy discussions. The numbers are personal. Behind them are young people like the Young Legends, once disconnected from school and work, now developing as leaders, undoing their trauma, and creating positive change in their communities. There are parents like the immigrant mother who left her country and a career in law and is learning English at Literacy of Greater Hartford in pursuit of greater opportunity.
These experiences are often invisible in reports and dashboards. My lived experience helps me understand both the barriers young people and families face and what becomes possible when communities, institutions, and philanthropy work together.
Educational attainment, workforce participation, economic mobility, housing stability, and health rarely exist as separate issues. In people’s lives, they are deeply interconnected. Lasting change requires strong relationships, shared ownership, and systems that work together. It also requires listening to and learning from the people whose lived experiences provide insights that data alone cannot.
Learning from the People Closest to the Work
One of the greatest privileges of this work is the opportunity to learn from people who are closest to the challenges and closest to the solutions.
Every collaborative I participate in exposes me to perspectives that challenge my assumptions and deepen my understanding of what’s happening across our communities. I hear from employers struggling to fill positions, educators rethinking how students prepare for careers, nonprofit leaders responding to changing needs, and young people navigating systems that often weren’t designed with them in mind.
I think often about a conversation with Maria Amado, founder of Hartford Family Child Care Educators Community, Inc., who described opening her business in 2023.
“I was for two years navigating alone with my program. I didn’t have connections with organizations or institutions. Nothing.”
Her experience reflects something I hear across sectors. People closest to the work often spend as much energy navigating systems as they do serving their communities.
When we take time to listen, we gain a better understanding of the challenges they’re facing and the barriers our systems unintentionally create. Collaboration shortens the distance between decision makers and people with lived experience.
What Workforce Development Has Taught Me About Systems
One lesson I’ve encountered repeatedly through workforce development is that opportunity is rarely limited by talent alone.
More often, people encounter disconnected systems.
Education, workforce development, childcare, transportation, housing, and human services are frequently funded, managed, and measured separately. Yet individuals experience them all at once.
The work requires us to prepare people for opportunity and strengthen the systems that connect people to those very opportunities.
Childcare providers understand this reality particularly well. They see every day how a parent’s ability to work is connected to affordable care, developmental supports, and educational opportunities. Their perspective reminds us that workforce development doesn’t begin at the workplace. It begins wherever families are trying to create stability.
Keeping Young People at the Center of Change
Some of the work that resonates most deeply with me involves young people.
Through my involvement with the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative (HOYC) at Capital Workforce Partners and Roca, Inc. Hartford, I’ve seen how easily young people can become disconnected from systems intended to support them. I’ve also witnessed the power of trusted relationships to reconnect them.
Those experiences are a reminder that systems change is ultimately human work.
Behind every workforce, statistic, educational benchmark, credential, or employment outcome is a young person trying to build a future. Behind every data point is a family working toward stability and opportunity.
Beyond the Grant
At Greater Hartford Gives, some of our most valuable contributions happen beyond funding.
I saw that firsthand through my participation in the The Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum’s Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose (BMWP) Funder Community of Practice. As one of the few community foundation representatives, I had the opportunity to learn alongside funders, researchers, practitioners, and community leaders exploring how belonging, meaning, wellbeing and purpose can improve outcomes for young people.
The added value was in bringing those ideas back to Hartford.
Through ongoing conversations with HOYC Director Kyle Wright MPS and other partners, we explored how BMWP could strengthen the collaborative’s Opportunity Youth Action Plan. Over time, HOYC began incorporating those principles into career navigation, workforce development, youth leadership, coordinated supports, and an emerging referral platform designed to better connect young people with opportunities and services.
That work attracted national support. An initial $80,000 investment from Aspen supported youth fellowships, workforce-focused BMWP initiatives, and collaborative learning opportunities. More recently, Kyle shared that Aspen helped secure resources for HOYC to participate in its 2026 convening and present Hartford’s work to a national audience.
The work continued through other learning opportunities. While participating in the Urban Institute‘s Upward Mobility Training Sprint, I used HOYC as my working example, developing an ecosystem map, defining the problem, primary actors and data to visualize the organizations, partnerships, and pathways supporting young people across Greater Hartford.
During a recent conversation, I shared portions of that work with Kyle because I thought they might be useful to HOYC’s efforts. His immediate reaction was that parts of the framework could strengthen the story HOYC planned to share through Aspen’s national network.
The goal was never for the framework or mapping work to belong to me. The goal was to make it useful to the people leading the work, supporting young people, and building stronger pathways to opportunity.
Building Trust Across Education, Workforce, and Community Systems
Maria once told me:
“We are not babysitters. We are psychologists, therapists, social workers. We have a thousand jobs.”
Beneath her humor is an important truth. Expertise doesn’t always come from titles or institutions. Some of the deepest expertise lives with the people closest to children, families, workers, and communities.
After three decades in this work, I carry the community where I grew up into the positions and appointments I hold today. Building better futures requires all of us and the lived experiences that shape what we see and understand. Our responsibility as funders is to listen to people like Maria and our partners like HOYC, share what we can, learn from their expertise, and ensure it helps shape decisions.
That responsibility is why I continue to invest my time in collaboratives across Connecticut. Grantmaking is part of my work. Collaboration sits at the heart of it.