The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Barbara Dalio to speak widely about her school partnership
NORWALK — Barbara Dalio will launch a series of town hall-style gatherings Tuesday evening to talk about her innovative and unfortunately, controversial plan to help at-risk youths — at a place called the Carver Center in Norwalk that has special meaning to the Greenwich philanthropist.
Dalio’s joint project with the state, called the Partnership for Connecticut Inc., combines $100 million from Dalio Philanthropies, $100 million from state taxpayers and, if the plan succeeds, yet another $100 million from other private donors.
It culminates 12 years of work for Barbara Dalio, work that started at the Carver Center after the last of the Dalios’ four sons was grown.
There, as a benefactor looking to make a difference for struggling youths in 2008, she had a lot more questions than answers. At the private, nonprofit Carver, which runs after-school and summertime programs with the Norwalk school system, Dalio didn’t want to just write checks and walk away with maybe a plaque on a wall or a building named in her honor.
No, she spent two years listening to teachers, listening to administrators, listening to students — young people on the verge of dropping out, facing a grim future in the richest state of the richest nation, where Dalio and her husband, Ray Dalio, occupied the summit of the economic mountain.
They still occupy that summit with a net worth exceeding $18 billion, according to Forbes, from Ray Dalio’s Westport-based Bridgewater Associates.
Barbara Dalio did write checks, some small, some very large. “When I started, that’s what I did with many of the schools,” she said in an interview Monday at the Hearst offices in Norwalk, not far from the Carver Center. “They would maybe need $20,000 for books.”
Or much more than that. In all, she said, Dalio Education Initiatives, part of the larger Dalio Philanthropies, has given about $60 million in Connecticut.
But her dreams were bigger than what even tens of millions of dollars can buy. They have to do with nurturing a culture that helps troubled young people succeed. And her motivation, from the start, was personal.
“I have two children with learning differences,” Dalio said, giving no more details. Today her sons range in age from 32 to 42.
In Norwalk and other Connecticut cities over the last dozen years, she said, “It was easier for me to relate to those kids because a lot of them have learning differences on top of all the circumstances that they have, a lot of poverty.”
And the partnership, the culmination of a lot of ideas including hers about cultural change is underway — wading through some 340 program ideas, zeroing in on a CEO. The idea is to reach the estimated 39,000 young people who are disconnected from the system and reconnect them in ways that steer them back on track to graduation and meaningful work.
It means connecting more directly with employers and more profoundly with the troubled families whose lives hang in the balance. It means working on soft skills like punctuality and concerns such as transportation and health.
That’s not a new idea, not in the least. Dalio’s hope is that the partnership creates a new platform to do it better — and let’s face it, we’ve seen mixed success at best.
“Then what is the next level is that we can really impact 70,000,” she said, referring to a larger number of disengaged people, including young adults. “And it’s not just 70,000, but maybe changing the way we have done things forever.”
That’s what she wants to talk about in the public forums, staring Tuesday at the Carver Center.
The transparency issue
For the moment, it’s unfortunate that the effort has mired politically in a flap over its exemption from Freedom of Information laws, granted last spring by the General Assembly.
Some top elected officials, including the two top Republicans in the legislature, who are also on the partnership board, believe that exemption — slipped quietly into the state budget — should be revoked. They say the partnership must adhere to all the open-government rules of any public agency because we’re talking about $20 million a year from the state, for five years — and I’d guess it will grow from there.
Barbara Dalio, softspoken and unassuming for anyone, much less for someone of unimaginable wealth, is prepared to talk about that FOI controversy too. Simply put, as I said in a column last month, the partnership needs to be able to have some conversations with families, school professionals, administrators and privatesector partners that those people won’t have if their every utterance might end up in a news story.
“The kids and the families, when they come and we’re discussing the different issues they might have, it would be very difficult, especially when you’re dealing with mental issues,” she said.
As for the money: “Every penny will be made public,” she said, describing a plan for regular disclosures, and the board meetings will be, and have been, public.
This really should remain a side issue especially since every single government agency operates similarly. Ever wonder why school board seem to vote quickly on contentious issues? Ever wonder how the state legislature magically reaches a deal on a $20 billion budget every year, after winnowing thousands of bills down to a workable number that get votes?
It’s called back-room negotiation and it’s how government works, people. I hate to break it to you this way, I know it’s harsh.
Addressing disengagement
Harsher still, by a longshot, are the lives Barbara Dalio hopes to make better if the partnership works.
American-style poverty — concentrated the way it is, often along race lines, sometimes just a few hundred yards from extreme wealth — didn’t make sense to her. Not that it should make sense to anyone, but Dalio, who was born in New York, spent most of her childhood and youth in Madrid, Spain, moving to New York in her 20s.
A liberal arts graduate, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in a few different jobs and met Ray, then a commodities trader working out of his apartment, about a year later. They married and moved to Wilton, later Greenwich.
“I would ask Ray, what’s going on, why do we have this poverty?” she said.
Part of the answer is that jobs for many young people not bound for college have fallen behind, especially if the job-seekers don’t have trade skills or computer literacy. That’s a lot of what Barbara Dalio hopes to address with the partnership.
The bigger picture came together very slowly. First, Dalio Education Initiatives helped to build up programs such as the Carver Center, officially the Carver Foundation of Norwalk — named for George Washington Carver, an African American scientist and inventor who died in 1943 in Alabama.
Today, Carver serves 2,600 students, mostly from 17 schools in Norwalk. When Dalio started her involvement, it was basically a single community center.
“She’s one of the individuals who believed in our vision and supported it,” CEO Novelette Peterkin said. “Barbara has a beautiful mind and a courageous heart. She brings out the best in everyuone .... She has a passion for these students.”
Dalio deflects the conversation from herself.
“I am eager to just start doing the work and I hope everybody gets excited because it’s going to take all the different communities, the different industries to come together to make this happen.”
The first of about 15 community meetings about the Partnership for Connecticut Inc., led by Barbara Dalio, will be Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Carver Center, 7 Academy St., Norwalk. The gatherings are open to anyone.