We Invested $2.39M in Educational Equity. We Learned So Much More.

Dear Friend,

The Fairfield County Business Collaborative for Education Equity will award its final round of grants this fall. It’s the culmination of a five-year partnership between our Community Foundation and some of the region’s most engaged business leaders.

This round of grants brings the Collaborative’s total awards to $2.39 million, supporting programs that reached an estimated 10,000 Fairfield County students.

But the Collaborative’s impact stretches far beyond those dollars. I want to share what it has meant, what it taught us, and how it continues to shape the way we approach our work today.

A partnership takes shape

The Business Collaborative began in August 2020, in the earliest and most uncertain months of the pandemic. A group of Fairfield County business leaders watched schools close, families scramble, and longstanding inequities in our region grow sharper by the week. They wanted to do something.

So, they came to us.

That origin story is worth remembering. The Foundation didn’t design the Collaborative and then invite business leaders to join. It began with the business leaders who saw a problem, believed they could contribute, and wanted a partner that could help them channel their resources thoughtfully. Our role was to create the structure and conditions that enabled intention to become action.

Over the next five years, meaningful work took shape. Members provided laptops so students could learn from home. They advocated to protect programs that support chronically absent students. They matched community giving to fund hundreds of classroom projects.

As the acute crisis of the pandemic eased, they turned toward the deeper, more entrenched inequities in education. The Collaborative commissioned a landmark study on the economic case for supporting Opportunity Youth, young adults who are disconnected from school and work.

Yet the lessons from the Collaborative aren’t contained within the walls of Connecticut’s classrooms. We ultimately learned how partnership happens.

Building the muscle of collaboration

The Collaborative brought business and nonprofit leaders, community members, and our staff around the same table. Members didn’t just read executive summaries and take site visits. They had sustained conversations with the organizations doing the work. That built a shared understanding of what our nonprofit partners are facing, where the gaps really are, and what it will take to close them.

We started, understandably, with a problem to solve and a group of people willing to help solve it. What we came to see is that the deeper work, the systems-level change so many of us aspire to, requires something that comes before the problem-solving. It requires relationships. It requires trust. It requires the muscle of collaboration itself, which is built one conversation at a time.

That understanding sits at the heart of how we work today.

When we convene our CEO Roundtable on economic opportunity, when we built the Career Pathways partnership with Nuvance Health and Connecticut State Community College, when we sit down with corporate partners on Black Maternal Health, we are not starting with a grant strategy. We are starting with the question of who needs to be in the room and what it will take for them to trust one another enough to do the hard work together.

We’re just getting started

The Business Collaborative also affirmed something we already believed: that the health of our schools, the strength of our workforce, the vibrancy of our neighborhoods depend on business leaders who see themselves as partners working for the well-being of the region, not just employers within it.

To the members of the Business Collaborative—Avangrid Foundation, Bank of America, FactSet Charitable Foundation, First County Bank, Gallatin Point Capital, Henkel, Lapine Associates, Littlejohn & Co., McKinsey & Company, Pitney Bowes, Synchrony, The Ashforth Company, The Tudor Foundation, and Xerox—thank you for saying yes in 2020, when the future felt uncertain. Thank you for staying at the table through five years of listening, learning, and giving. And thank you for helping us see, together, what deeper collaboration can look like.

Though the Business Collaborative is formally closing, the work it began has evolved into new forms of business and community partnerships. And the way of working it helped us grow into is very much ongoing—and stronger as a result.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Community Foundation is partnering with the business community today, I invite you to reach out to our Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations, Rebecca Mandell. There is more we can do together, and our region needs that spirit of partnership now more than ever.

In Community,

Mendi Blue Paca
PRESIDENT & CEO
FAIRFIELD COUNTY’S COMMUNITY FOUNDATION

To start a conversation about deepening your business’s local social impact and strategic philanthropy, contact Rebecca Mandell, Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations, at RMandell@FCCFoundation.org or call (203) 750-3241.