‘A great pause’ to ponder the plights of strangers
I pull off the Post Road in Darien and park outside PersontoPerson. I’m early for a change, so I check my email. In seconds I go from 10 minutes early to two hours late.
I enter the building anyway to apologize to Nancy Coughlin for misreading 11:30 as 1:30 and to schedule another appointment. My spell in the waiting room is familiar because I’ve been here before. Enthusiastic volunteers, mostly older white women, assist clients, mostly black and Latino mothers.
Coughlin invites me into her office to chat for 20 minutes before her next appointment. She’s so new at the position of chief executive officer that the leaning frames on the floor look anxious to crawl into place on the freshly painted white walls.
P2P is one of the agencies that monitors the pulse of our communities. Coughlin comes to the job from the helm of Neighbor to Neighbor in Greenwich, which also provides food and clothing to families in need. P2P is the next link in the safety net, serving Stamford, Norwalk, Darien, New Canaan, Weston, Wilton and Westport.
The clock is ticking, so we quickly spin through what amounts to my personal greatest hits: how poverty manages to thrive among obscene wealth, the sense of proud identity in our towns that stifles collaboration, the relentless aftermath of 9/11.
In lower Fairfield County, these issues are like mosquitoes in the August dawn, visible only to those who focus on them or feel their bite.
Coughlin eventually recognized the full picture after moving from New York to Darien in 1999 (“It was still the gogo ’90s”). The party crashed in 2007.
“The Recession was in some ways the great equalizer,” she says.
I recall once visiting her predecessor, Ceci Maher, in this building during that era. A man who was once a major donor had returned as a client.
“There was a great pause, people were kind of humbled for a minute,” Coughlin says slowly.
I underscore the phrase “great pause.” We experienced something similar on Sept. 11, 2001. Many felt it on Nov. 8, 2016. Days of reckoning.
She later notes that she and her husband “were not unscathed” by the Recession as he lost a job in finance. When the economy started reviving, some were able to climb back to the summit, she points out, while diminished professional jobs left a crowd at the bottom. Many in the middle (United Way’s ALICE category) are struggling to stretch their paychecks across the widening wealth gap.
“So every time I feel like we’re at a breaking point, we’re not,” she says in a tone of both resignation and resolve.
Like any good CEO, she summons statistics, numbers that happen to represent real people. From her last job, she learned that “what Greenwich has all in one community is the poverty plus the wealth.”
Which brings us to the invisible walls between our communities. We spitball the reasons. Lack of county government. Local pride. She nominates Interstate95 as “the great nemesis.”
“We need to care about people a little bit more.”
Coughlin emphasizes her points with perpetual, but graceful, hand movements. We pick up the conversation 24 hours later on the phone. Even without the gestures, her words — and vision — remain powerful.
She mentions P2P’s mobile food pantry, which I happened to write about a few months ago, It has taken the burden away from Stamford clients to find transportation to Darien, so P2P is developing a partnership with Connecticut Food Bank to do the same in Norwalk.
The soul of the organization remains the volunteers. That “great pause” of the Recession transformed many stayathome moms into second, or in some cases, primary income earners, resulting in a loss of volunteers. Many volunteers these days are retired, or still in high school beefing up college applications.
“The high school kids are pretty fluent Spanish speakers, and they like to be able to practice,” she says.
I inquire about memorable encounters with clients, and Coughlin summons another of my favorite subjects: How few of our residents take advantage of — or have access to — the majesty of
“We need to care about people a little bit more.” Nancy Coughlin, PersontoPerson CEO
Long Island Sound.
She details a recent anecdote about a program hosted by boat owners from Noroton Yacht Club, who for a quarter of a century have been taking kids out on the water, many of whom had never been on a boat.
One little girl was wary, explaining that she tended to get carsick.
“When she came back she was all smiles, she said it was the best experience she ever had and that she did not think she would ever get carsick again.
“The people who own the boat had taught her about looking out onto the horizon.”
It sounds like something you might hear delivered from a pulpit. A child’s horizon changed by a thoughtful neighbor.
More children should have access to such horizons. More adults should be able to see what’s right in front of them. John Breunig is editorial page editor of The Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. Jbreunig@scni.com; 2039642281; twitter.com/johnbreunig.