Once a bustling police substation and recreation center for teens, a city-owned parcel on a prominent stretch of Albany Avenue is now envisioned as a neighborhood park replete with a new basketball court, walking trail, covered seating and ornate landscaping.

The substation was razed seven years ago to make way for a new police satellite office. But the idea to rebuild the structure — first on the same spot, then later on Coventry Street — was scrapped after Mayor Pedro Segarra left office in 2015.

Last year, members of the community joined city officials and planning and zoning commissioners to give input on the future of the mostly vacant Albany Avenue parcel. Only a basketball court with tall, rusted fencing remains. The rest of thelot is covered in weeds and broken concrete. Litter and dead leaves lay scattered about.

But the group of city leaders and neighborhood dwellers who rallied behind plans for a park are optimistic that the upgrades will help revive the desolate area. They see the park as a space for elderly people to take a brisk walk and children to play after school.

“It’s going to make a big difference,” said Denise Best, a resident of the Upper Albany neighborhood who is chairwoman of the local revitalization group. “Just having people out there, especially our seniors, will bring a vibrancy. We are working to make it a place of destination.”

The state bond commission authorized $1.5 million for the project Tuesday. The funds were originally approved to build the new police substation, but were never used. Organizers say the park will probably cost between $1.5 million and $2 million, but any additional money would be solicited from private investors.

Work on the 1-acre site between Magnolia and Irving streets could begin as soon as this spring. A Hartford firm, Amenta Emma Architects, has been doing pro bono designs for the redevelopment, including several renderings that show sprawling green space with freshly planted trees, a gleaming new basketball court with stadium-style seating on one side, chess tables and a quarter-mile walking trail that makes a loop around the parcel.

The section facing Albany Avenue features rows of shaded seating, planter benches and sculptural landscaping.

Supporters say the project will not only create an outlet for people in the neighborhood, it will also spruce up a blighted space. Albany Avenue is a main city thoroughfare, and the lot is not far from a crucial gateway to the North End.

The corridor is getting significant improvements as part of a streetscape effort, with new traffic signals, lighting and curb extensions underway. Backers see the transformation of the vacant parcel as a complement to those upgrades.

“Whenever you drive down there, it’s an eyesore,” said Nicole Porter, a city resident and public schools employee who was part of the community group offering input on plans for the lot. “You want to do something to improve the area, keeping in mind that we also want to make sure it brings additional development.”

Marilyn Risi, head of the nonprofit Upper Albany Main Street, a community revitalization group in North Hartford, said she was concerned about the park being so close to a busy street. Fencing around the basketball court and other barriers between the recreation space and the cars that whiz by on Albany Avenue are crucial, she said.

“The distance from the play area to the street, it’s not that deep,” Risi said. “We don’t want little ones chasing a ball into the street.”

She praised the idea to move the basketball court, now located at the front of the property near Albany Avenue, away from the road and into the center of the parcel.

Mayor Luke Bronin said more community input will be sought before final designs are agreed upon.

“We’re trying to make it a place that’s more welcoming for businesses, that feels safer,” he said. “I do think there’s a connection between combating blight and public safety, and the way a neighborhood looks and feels matters to people.”

You can read the Hartford Courant Community article here.

A stylish nonagenarian, George Scott, owner of Hartford’s premier Jamaican bakery, sports handsome good looks, a full head of white hair, and an intermittently functioning hearing aid that requires a guest to speak up. Scott himself speaks quietly, his Jamaican cadences singsongy but precise. Asked what year he was born, he grins.

“You will have to figure it out,” he says. “Subtract ninety-one from wherever we are now.”

Scotts’ Jamaican Bakery, which he and his wife, Pauline, opened 40 years ago this November, has grown from a mom-and-pop operation into a business with 50 employees and $3 million in annual sales. In the living room of his family’s Windsor home, Scott sits surrounded by mementos of a life divided into two halves — his long stint as a meat-patty maven in Hartford, and the earlier part, in Jamaica, where he was a teacher and headmaster.

He talks about his childhood outside 1930s Kingston, where his father worked in the tax office. “We lived in an old house raised up on brick columns. I spent a lot of time beneath the house, exploring.” Scott recalls traipsing into the woods with a slingshot to hunt birds, and taking the electric tram along Red Hills Road to school. A standout student, he landed as an apprentice teacher at Knox College, a Presbyterian high school founded by a Scottish minister. After four years he went to St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, to study psychology and philosophy.

The courses he took in Scotland have faded, but not the adventures he had there. Working on a farm. Hitchhiking around the country. Making a solo canoe trip up the River Ness and into the Loch, where he looked for the monster. At the close of the academic year, graduating students would hold a cèilidh — a party with Scottish dancing — and the men would wear kilts. “The tradition was that they didn’t wear anything under their kilts.” Scott chuckles. “I wore underpants, of course. I wasn’t that risqué.”

After four years Scott returned to Knox College to teach, and eventually rose to become principal. By then he had married Pauline — a former student — and begun a family. But education salaries in Jamaica were paltry; and so, at nearly 50, he embarked upon a new life in another country.

He had no training as a baker, but food had always loomed large. During his childhood, his mother started a business making guava jams, cooked over a fire in the yard. “They were made in an open copper pot, and there was a Jamaican woman who would mix it with a big wooden paddle. My mother would be inside, and the woman would yell, ‘Missus! Missus! It ready! It ready!’ And mother would go chasing out to test it.” The Scott house was filled with bottled jams for his mother’s startup. “The memories of that are very vivid. You weren’t afraid of starting something new.”

The new thing Scott and his wife started in 1978 helped put four children through college. They run the business now, and Scott spends his days relaxing and reading. A lifelong love of poetry persists. Pauline and the Scotts’ daughter Rachel, home for a visit, produce a sheaf of poems Scott wrote, back in the early 1960s. The former teacher recalls his habit of reading poetry out loud in class. “Some poems, you have to read them aloud, with feeling,” he says. “I was good at that.”

Rachel Scott laughs. “Do you know why my parents are together? My father was substitute teaching our mother’s English class, and he read poetry. My mother was just 15, but she turned to her friend and said, ‘I’m going to marry that man.’ And that’s what happened! So when Daddy says he’s good at reading poetry, he’s really good at it!”

The principal-baker smiles, recalling a life perfectly balanced between feeding people’s minds and feeding their stomachs. “One of my students, I’ll never forget — there was a poem by an English poet, and I read it in a poetry class. And years later, when he was in college, he came across it, and vividly remembered it. That was what I enjoyed about teaching. You strike a chord, and a student remembers it years and years afterward.”

As for meat patties, the passion remains there as well. “A patty and a coca bread is as filling a lunch as you could want. I love the taste.” Scott twinkles sheepishly. “The doctor says I’m not supposed to eat them — but whenever Pauline and I go out for a drive, I say, let’s stop and get one. And we do.”

Dollie McLean is a passionate, admired, inspirational soul. Together with her husband, Jackie, she turned a remarkable idea into a state-of-the-art facility, the Artists Collective, on Hartford’s Albany Avenue in 1999. But, the nonprofit’s new headquarters was doomed from the start.

It took the Artists Collective funders 20 years to realize the organization was undercapitalized, lacking experienced administrators and existing without a fundraising strategy — a perfect recipe for failure. But now, help should be paramount, starting with proper and strong governance from the board of directors.

To turn this valuable asset around and support the incredible outcomes it can achieve, the board should be firm in asserting its duty of care, requiring a reassessment of the purpose, operational plan and feasibility of the organization including, most important, a financial projection on revenue generation that goes beyond “If you build it they will come.”

Millions of dollars are being requested by the Collective, dollars that could be used more effectively by other organizations with equally remarkable ideas and appropriate strategies and operational acumen. In order for the Artists Collective to prove its case, it needs to focus not only on its historical program success, but on its business plan for sustainability, specifically philanthropy.

A nonprofit must have a balanced strategy for philanthropy, to ensure it can weather the economic, social and political storms that are sure to arrive. This balance is designed through policy and through professional leadership. If an organization’s executive director doesn’t have the expertise, then a professional needs to be hired.

Contributions from individuals, starting with the board and some invaluable high profile alumni and supporters, are paramount. Relying on corporate and government funding as the sole development plan is a death knell.

As early as 2003, the industry was sounding the alarm to the more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the US: seek individual giving for sustainability. Nonprofits must identify individuals who find their purpose and mission valuable and then prove their worthiness for support. Stewarding those donors is essential to a nonprofit’s success. This means personally inviting them to visit the organization (please, no letters), showing them the accomplishments and demonstrating that the administration can be trusted to perform in a fiscally prudent way. That is the key to philanthropic sustainability.

Funders begin to balk when nonprofits hit the rocks. The hard truth is no one wants to fund a sinking ship no matter how remarkable it is, which is one reason to avoid crisis campaigns for donations. It’s like telling potential donors, “I need a year’s worth of mortgage payments because I bought a house that was too big for my budget, and even though it’s a temporary fix, I’d like you to consider giving me money for it anyway. I’ll figure out how to keep it funded later.”

Instead, the strategy for a turnaround is to develop a solid and justified business plan with financial models showing what is possible with donor support, when it can be realized and who will be in place to lead it.

I believe in the Artists Collective. I think the founders’ idea is remarkable but the organization needs help. Fortunately, the Hartford region has a broad pool of qualified executive directors, experienced board members and successful consultants to guide and bring the Collective back to a stable financial base and become the whole and balanced asset the region needs.

To read the full story, click here:  http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-dellaripa-artists-collective-management-20180906-story.html

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