Around Town

‘It’s All about Our Town’: New Canaan Community Foundation Helps Save Christmas

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For many New Canaanites, the high Christmas season launches with the Holiday Stroll and first Sunday of December, when firefighters deck the fire house, and runs through Christmas Eve caroling at God’s Acre and Dec. 25 church services and family dinners. Two important pieces of favorite local Christmas traditions emanate from Kiwanis Park, where the Exchange Club for some 40 years has sold wreaths and trees alongside Santa’s Workshop, where local kids meet the big man on weekends. So when it was discovered suddenly two weeks ago that the fuel oil tank which heats Santa’s Workshop (at the New Canaan Girl Scouts Merrie Bee Cabin) had deteriorated irreparably, raising the prospect of a Workshop-less holiday for scores of locals, it represented a problem not just for the Exchange Club and Girl Scouts, but the community at large. Enter the New Canaan Community Foundation, which immediately issued a $2,600 emergency or “out of cycle” grant to cover most of the cost of a replacement tank.

Around Town

Young Philanthropists: Lessons in Nonprofits, New Canaan and Humanity

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Town resident Nicholas Smith, 17, had spent much of his downtime as a King Low Heywood Thomas freshman hanging out at New Canaan Library, playing tennis at the New Canaan Racquet Club or relaxing with friends. That year, at his mother’s prompting (“My mom was always looking for ways to get me out of the house”), Smith applied to join the New Canaan Community Foundation’s Young Philanthropists. Though he’d volunteered as a server in soup kitchens with his family, and even spent two weeks working at a construction site in Appalachia, Smith said no prior experience had prepared him for his first meeting in the program, which gives participating teens a unique look into the nonprofit world by putting them fully in charge of grant allocations for area human services organizations. “I saw basically that it wasn’t grownups leading it—it was purely a teen-led thing, the teens were the actual leaders,” Smith said from a table at Starbucks overlooking Park and Elm Streets on a recent evening, describing what hooked him into a program that has become an important part of his life. “Grownups tell us where to meet and organize meetings, but we were making the actual decisions about who gets what.

Faces of New Canaan

Faces of New Canaan: Cynthia Gorey

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The NewCanaanite.com Summer Internship Program is sponsored by Baskin-Robbins, Connecticut Sandwich Co., Joe’s Pizza and Mackenzie’s. In this installment of “Faces of New Canaan,” we sat down with Cynthia Gorey, executive director of the New Canaan Community Foundation (which has some “I [Heart] New Canaan” magnets left), to learn a little more about everything from how she got to be where she is today to a trip to Spain with her sons that affirmed her beliefs about soccer’s popularity in Europe. Read all of this and more in our transcribed interview below:

NewCanaanite.com: So, where are you from originally? Cynthia Gorey: Originally I’m from Massachusetts. I’m from a town called Marblehead which is kind of similar to this area.