Connecticut
Adhlere Coffy and Amanda Olberg: How to address Connecticut’s unspoken crisis
New research published at the end of last year by Dalio Education reveals a statewide crisis: 63,000 young people in Connecticut between the ages of 14 to 26 are not engaged in school or work, not on track for gainful employment, or both, while another 17,000 are at the greatest risk for experiencing disconnection.
The report, Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis, is a call to action with recommendations for how local stakeholders can take concrete steps toward addressing this crisis. Through our work with the Connecticut Opportunity Project, a social investment fund of Dalio Education, we know that young people experiencing disconnection can re-engage and thrive if they have the support they need. The investments we make in community-based nonprofits across Connecticut aid our grantee partners in achieving results with young people every day, demonstrating that the report’s recommendations are impactful. In short, we know they work.
CTOP invests currently in seven Connecticut-based organizations: COMPASS Youth Collaborative, Forge City Works, Our Piece of the Pie, and Roca Hartford Young Mother’s Program in Hartford; Connecticut Violence Intervention and Prevention in New Haven; Domus Kids in Stamford; and RYASAP in Bridgeport. Heroic individuals at these organizations have worked tirelessly for years – decades, even – serving young people who are experiencing disconnection. Yet the challenge they have faced in their work, common across the nonprofit sector, is that the level of resources available to deploy in advancing their missions is insufficient to meet the need we know exists.
Embodying one of the report recommendations, CTOP is working to change this status quo, providing financial and non-financial resources to our grantee partners to help them strengthen their organizational capacity for continuous improvement and high-quality service delivery – which means helping a growing number of young people to positively alter their life trajectories.
CTOP provides unrestricted grant dollars along with extensive technical assistance over the long-term time horizon that we know is necessary for organizations to engage in meaningful capacity building that translates into improved outcomes for young people.
What this capacity building looks like is supporting our grantee partners in internalizing what we know from the evidence works to re-engage young people, and then redesigning their programming and training their staff in new skills accordingly. It also looks like building and deploying robust data systems that enable their organizations to monitor and manage service delivery, and how those activities are impacting the skills development of young people. And it looks like strengthening the infrastructure of their boards and internal management systems in ways that are critical to the long-term health of the organization, making it possible for high performance to be sustained over time.
In our just-published 2023 Annual Report, CTOP reports on a metric we use called the active program slot that has advanced our grantee partners’ efforts to understand, manage, and drive up the social value they are creating on a day-to-day basis. Going beyond a basic count of young people served, the active program slot requires that a program participant receive the kinds and levels of services and supports that the organization’s evidence-informed program model says is needed to promote successful re-engagement in education and/or gainful employment.
In 2023, our third year of implementing CTOP’s 10-year social investment strategy, the number of active program slots our grantee partners delivered in aggregate rose to 925, up from 387 just two years prior. And in this past year, our grantee partners are seeing more and more of their young people achieve the long-term results that prove that strengthening organizational capacity leads to positive youth outcomes. For example, at Domus Kids – which, like all of our grantee partners, enrolls in its core programming the very same young people who are part of the shocking statistics revealed in Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis – 93% of their program graduates are still enrolled in post-secondary education or employed on the path to self-sufficiency twelve months following their graduation from Domus’s programs.
The work of CTOP’s grantee partners is a testament to the return on investment from strengthening a nonprofit’s capacity to do its work effectively and sustainably – as well as to the profound potential to succeed and thrive that is within every young person currently experiencing disconnection.
What we see in our work every day is that it is possible to address Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis, if our statewide community commits to doing so together.
Adhlere Coffy and Amanda Olberg are Senior Portfolio Directors at the Connecticut Opportunity Project.
Connecticut
Kevin Rennie: Connecticut Bar Association is familiar with silence at crucial moments
Watch your mouth. That was the message from the Connecticut Bar Association’s three top leaders to the organization’s thousands of members, of which I’m one. The June 13 statement was prompted by perpetually aggrieved Donald Trump supporters hurling abuse at prosecutors, jurors and Judge Juan Merchan after the former president’s conviction this month on 34 counts of violating New York law through a 2016 hush money scheme.
The CBA officers, Maggie Castinado, James T. Shearin and Emily A. Gianquinto, condemned but did not name public officials who issued statements calling the trial a sham, hoax, and rigged; abused Judge Merchan as corrupt and unethical; and claimed the jury was partisan and in the bag for guilty verdicts from the start.
The statement excoriated social media posts seeking to breach the confidentiality of the jurors’ identity. What it did not allege is that any Connecticut lawyers were participating in these assaults on the rule of law. Near its conclusion, the trio’s homily got to the point. “It is up to us, as lawyers,” they wrote, “to defend the courts and our judges. As individuals, and as an Association, we cannot let the charged political climate in which we live dismantle the third branch of government. To remain silent renders us complicit in that effort.”
And then U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a lawyer, had to go and spoil it all three days later by unleashing the same type of hyperbole. He called the Supreme Court “brazenly corrupt and brazenly political” on CNN. Murphy added that Justice Clarence Thomas is “just a grift,” while Justice Samuel Alito is an open political partisan.
As of Friday, the civility umpires at the CBA had issued no statement chiding Murphy.
The CBA is familiar with silence at crucial moments. Six years ago, a mob of antisemites targeted the renomination of Judge Jane Emons to the Superior Court. Judge Emons was the target of appalling rhetoric. The CBA released no thunderbolts as the House of Representatives refused to vote on her renomination, forcing her off the bench.
A few years ago, I wrote about Alice Bruno, a Connecticut judge who failed to show up for work for two years while continuing to receive her salary and benefits. Emails showed plenty of people knew that Judge Bruno had been missing in action, but they remained silent. Bruno’s fate was decided in a secret proceeding when she was granted a disability pension that currently pays her more than $5,000 every two weeks. She worked, often erratically, as a Superior Court judge for only four years before she stopped showing up in 2019.
Before becoming a judge, Bruno did an 18-month stint as executive director of the Connecticut Bar Association. It remained silent throughout the Bruno saga, which undermined the public’s confidence in the judiciary.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a sensational investigation into the appalling saga of a federal bankruptcy judge and his personal relationship with lawyer Elizabeth Freeman, who had been his law partner and clerk in Houston. One of the nation’s biggest law firms, Kirkland & Ellis, brought in Freeman to work with it on cases before her boyfriend, Judge David R. Jones.
An anonymous letter lit the fuse on exposing the shocking conflicts at work in the nation’s busiest bankruptcy court. Michael Van Deelan, a small investor in a firm that filed for bankruptcy in the Houston court, believed he had not been treated fairly in the shakeout of the company. Van Deelan received a copy of the letter and filed it with the court in an attempt to have Jones disqualified from his case. Van Deelan’s motion was denied and the letter was sealed from public view, the Journal reported.
Van Deelan discovered through an internet search that Jones and Freeman owned a house together since 2017. Plenty of lawyers appear to have known that the two were engaged in a romantic relationship. To expose it would have ended a sweet arrangement that was a bonanza for the firms and their bankruptcy clients who brought Freeman in on their cases.
No one said a word. Only Van Deelan, a 74-year-old retired math teacher, brought justice where corruption ruled. It took an Appellate Court judge only a week to find probable cause by Jones for failing to disclose his relationship with Freeman. He resigned.
It requires no courage for bar association leaders to condemn those discreditable officials who donned red ties and made pilgrimages to New York to stand outside the courthouse to mewl and whine that the justice system was targeting the loathsome demagogue, Donald Trump.
To shine a searing light when something goes wrong in the judicial branch of government when no one is paying attention— that’s what protects the integrity of the system.
Kevin Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com
Connecticut
Providence man killed in Connecticut crash | ABC6
BROOKLYN, Conn. (WLNE) — Connecticut State Police said that a Providence man was killed in a crash that took place in Brooklyn on Friday.
Police said that two cars hit each other at the intersection of Wauregan Road and Gorman Road.
70-year-old Sergio Valera Urena, of Providence, sustained “fatal injuries” on scene.
The other driver, a 22-year-old from Moosup, Connecticut, was transported to the hospital for minor injuries.
The collision is still under investigation.
Connecticut
New York City girl missing since 2021 found in Connecticut
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A young girl who went missing from New York City nearly three years ago was found in Connecticut Friday.
Authorities say the girl disappeared from her home in East New York, Brooklyn in December, 2021. No details of the circumstances surrounding her disappearance were immediately released.
The U.S. Marshals Violent Fugitive Task Force and Bridgeport Police said they found the girl Friday in Bridgeport. They moved in after receiving a request for assistance from the NYPD earlier this month.
Authorities say the girl, who is now 16, is in good health and is returning to her home with her parents.
A report prepared by the New York State Department of Criminal Justice Services shows that in 2021, 10,184 children went missing in New York, and 93.2% of children under 18 who disappeared were runaways. That same year, there were two stranger abductions, seven acquaintance abductions, and 40 familial abductions.
-
Politics1 week ago
President Biden had front row seat to dog, Commander, repeatedly biting Secret Service agents: report
-
News1 week ago
171,000 Traveled for Abortions Last Year. See Where They Went.
-
Politics1 week ago
Trump travels to DC to meet with congressional Republicans, speak with nation's top business executives
-
World1 week ago
The far right will probably fall short in French legislative elections
-
Politics1 week ago
Durbin looks to force Supreme Court ethics bill vote amid Alito controversy
-
News1 week ago
Photographer shares ‘magical’ photos of rare white bison calf at Yellowstone
-
News6 days ago
It's easy to believe young voters could back Trump at young conservative conference
-
World1 week ago
Hezbollah rains rockets on Israel after senior commander killed