A reckoning with hate, disease made us stronger
March 6, 2020: The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving was poised to lean into our strategic priorities addressing the disparities and inequities in the community. Faint echoes about a faraway virus were beginning to agitate the financial markets, but our mission was clear, our steps meticulously were mapped.
The next week, we sent the entire Foundation staff home.
The subsequent 12 months upended and challenged everything we thought about our organization, our work and the way we do it, as well as our role in the Hartford region. The global COVID19 pandemic, consisting of a public health and economic crisis, was overlaid upon the long-smoldering pandemic of structural racism in the United States. Together these dual pandemics created a once-in-a-lifetime calamity, but simultaneously revealed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This dichotomy would force the United States to draw upon its greatest strengths while exposing some of our country’s most significant weaknesses and failures. At the Hartford Foundation, we would be required to reckon with the same.
From the ongoing unjustifiable murders of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement to the avoidable COVID-19related deaths of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens to a deadly insurrection against the seat of the federal government, incited by a sitting president, we have lived through a nightmare. At the same time, we have seen millions of people across the country and around the world take to the streets to demand racial justice. We have witnessed people give of themselves without hesitation to help others in desperate need. We have marveled at the scientific community’s ability to create, test and verify multiple vaccines in just a matter of months.
During these last 365 days, we have been humbled, validated, inspired, frustrated,
saddened, riveted and overjoyed, and we have endured virtually every state of being that an organization might experience. Yet I can declare that the Hartford Foundation emerges one year later a stronger, nimbler and more impactful organization than we could have ever imagined the first week of March 2020. We would have never chosen the path that led us here, but we would not trade the results for anything.
We are clearer in speaking about our work to help dismantle structural racism and increase social and economic mobility and why we believe it is important. We are leading and inspiring our donors and stakeholders in new and different ways; yet we are also being led and inspired by the same. We are learning from, measuring and evaluating the impact of our work in ways that are meaningful to the communities
we serve. Most important, we are approaching our charge with a combination of humility, ambition and commitment; it is a recipe that will carry us through our upcoming 100-year anniversary and will inform our path into the next 100 years after that.
Jay Williams is president of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.