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.