Business & Tech
Alice Fitzpatrick: "We Want You To Invest In Your Community"
The head of the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut is retiring after 18 years.
By Elissa Bass
Ten years into a corporate career at fast-paced computer company LexisNexis in Los Angeles, Alice Fitzpatrick had an epiphany.
“I didn’t want it written on my tombstone that I had made a bunch of lawyers richer,” she says.
So at the age of 45 she took a leave of absence, joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa — for two years. She worked for the first lady of Botswana, and she ran a community center.
“It changed everything,” she says. “It gave me a sense of balance. I knew when I got back, no more corporate frenzy.”
That led Fitzpatrick to seek out nonprofits for her next career path, and after a stint with an organization in L.A., she came back to her native Connecticut to be closer to family. For the last 18 years she has shepherded the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut from a small nonprofit with a miniscule endowment serving 11 communities to a $42 million agency that serves 42 towns in three counties.
This month, Fitzpatrick retires amidst much fanfare and gala-ing (including the May 30 dinner in which she will be recognized as the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut's 63rd Citizen of the Year).
The word ‘retiring’ “applies to somebody else, not me,” Fitzpatrick says with a laugh during an interview in her historic Stonington Borough home recently.
“I’m anything but retiring. But that number 70 (her birthday was in January), that’s very sobering. You almost have to justify why you are still working. It is time.”
Under her guidance, the Community Foundation:
- In 1999, started the first Women & Girls Fund in southeastern Connecticut. It now is the second largest women’s fund in Connecticut at $2.2 million and has expanded to Norwich, Windham and beyond.
- Launched Let’s Read, a children’s literacy initiative that is designed to help local schools, libraries and other programs to get children reading at grade level by 3rd grade.
- Gave a gift to the community in the form of $100,000 to each of the 13 libraries in its then-territory in 2008 during the community foundation’s 25th anniversary.
- Created a $200,000 permanent endowment to support these libraries in perpetuity.
“When I came the Community Foundation had been around for 12 or 13 years. They had a small endowment, four or five million, and they gave out grants. There was a lot of community people involved, the board had 40 people.
“I was the only staff. My instructions were to double the endowment.”
Fitzpatrick did just that, some by smart planning and ideas, and some by just dumb luck. “In a six-week period, $7 million walked in the door from three different sources,” she says. “I can’t take credit for that.”
Suddenly being flush with cash “changed everything. Now, we could think about the mission. We did not have to think about how to pay the light bill.”
Fitzpatrick arrived here not knowing anyone, but she quickly realized who the movers and shakers were, and they connected.
“People like (the late) Connie Pike (of Old Lyme) and Roz Mallove (of New London), salt of the earth people who made it their business to get me to know everybody.” And as she got to know everybody, she gradually changed the Community Foundation’s public message.
“When I came here, I felt like I had been issued a tin cup and told to line up with all the other beggars,” she says. “We put endless time into grant-making. We had $250,000 to give away and we spent six months figuring out how to divide it. Our focus had been on spreading the wealth. I wanted our focus to be on considering the impact. We are not looking for your charity. We want you to invest in the community.”
She had first found this strategy in L.A., at the large nonprofit she was hired to run after she got back from Africa. A huge organization with a giant budget and multitudes of programs, Fitzpatrick realized it was her job to measure progress.
“So instead of being the alpha dog, I became the border collie, circling around and tucking someone back in and keeping everyone centered. And once I got everyone to agree, it would stick! There was no sense of failure, and who cares how long it took, we were moving things along.”
And so the Women’s & Girls’ Fund, by far the foundation’s most successful initiative, was born.
“We’d start to say ‘what do we stand for’ and you could see people’s eyes glaze over. But the minute you said Women’s and Girls’ Fund, it was, ‘where do I sign up?’ It became like a club people wanted to be a part of.”
The beauty of being issue-oriented, Fitzpatrick says, is that it allows focus. The New London superintendent of schools approached her with the issue of teen pregnancy in the city, and the foundation worked to bring together disparate community agencies under one umbrella to work together. A probate judge spoke with her about the issue of domestic violence, and again, agencies were connected and strategies created. When New London eliminated its social services department, and city churches stepped in to help the homeless, the Community Foundation gave its support to their efforts.
“Nobody can solve these problems by themselves,” she says. “You’ve got to pull together strengths to solve them. This goes against general Connecticut-ness.”
The foundation walked the walk in 2009 when the southeastern branch merged with the Tri-County branch in northeastern Connecticut, creating a 42-town agency. “That took years to do,” Fitzpatrick noted. “But it was the right thing.”
Her retirement plans include a new Peace Corps initiative in Africa that would have her setting up nonprofits in Lesotho. But she will always return to the Borough.
“I belong here. I knew it from the day I arrived. You know, I had a lot of interviews for the job. First a phone interview, and then a role-playing interview and then interviews with all these people. It was a really long day, and I kept thinking, ‘Really? For this little tiny job?’ And when I got out of there I was starving and I though I would never make it back to Boston. So I got off the highway in Stonington and came into the village. The Harborview was closed, but Skipper’s Dock was open.
“So there I was sitting in the deck, on the water, watching this spectacular sunset, and they bring me a cocktail, and they bring me a lobster, and I start thinking ‘this job might not be so bad after all.’ And that was it.”
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