The Grace Fund

When Jim Kenny moved to New Haven to work in development for Yale University after working at universities around the country, it felt very much like home. He loved the Wooster Square neighborhood. He got involved in civic groups and became co-chair of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. 

Then he began thinking about creating a fund that would make a lasting impact for people in the Greater New Haven community, and he knew the focus would be education and it would be named the Grace Fund to honor his grandmother. 

Grandma Grace spent her life teaching English, and, in her later years, she found a new calling teaching English as a second language to immigrants, working with them on reading and writing and making certain they were connected to the resources they needed.

He talked often with Grace about all that education can bring to a person’s life and how vital it was that everyone had access to it. “She felt no one should ever be overlooked and no one should ever not have an opportunity for education because of the type of life they were dealt or where they were born,” Kenny said. “She always spoke about how all people are deserving of respect, care, love and support.”

He also knew he would establish the fund at The Community Foundation. As Yale University’s Assistant Vice President for Development, Schools and Units, and in his role co-chairing the festival, he’d seen The Foundation’s impact. 

“The Community Foundation is a very responsible financial organization and it’s very clear the staff have an incredible ethos of being involved in the community, not sitting behind their desks and just handing out checks. They know the community,” he said. “In the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, they created an economic investment vehicle focused particularly on businesses in the Greater New Haven community created by Black and Brown founders. Those were very strong decisions, and it made me want to be part of it,” he said. 

“The reason I believe so strongly in education is I have seen firsthand through my father’s life and many of my uncles and cousins that after receiving an education the pathway for their lives was transformed,” Kenny said.

When Kenny’s father was a boy, he was one of nine children living in rural Connecticut. Because of his family situation, had to support himself starting at the age of 11. So, he worked hard, first with a paper route, then at restaurants. He wanted to go to college but had no way to get there, so he hitchhiked each way to a community college, until a neighbor saw what he was doing and helped him buy a used car. 

When Kenny was growing up, he “didn’t have everything I wanted but I had everything I needed,” he said. His father and mother both said that no matter what they would help pay what they could for their children to go to college.

He saw how college shaped his own life. “I was a very quiet, reserved kid when I started my undergraduate degree at Castleton State College in Vermont,” he said. “But I had the good fortune of being part of a campus community that encouraged students to become involved.” By his senior year, he was the student body president of the college and the entire Vermont college system. He learned how to lobby the state legislature and the governor for funds for education.

He went on to graduate school at Colorado State University, affording it thanks to a graduate assistantship and a position as a hall director.

He chose his career – working in development, raising funds for college and universities – because he wanted to center his life around making the college experience available to as many students as possible. “I believe in the mission of Yale because we admit students regardless of their ability to pay so the entire undergraduate experience at Yale is access-based,” he said.

While the Grace Fund is in its formative stages, Kenny has been talking with his family about which non-profits it will support. “My mother was also a teacher for 30 years and my sister is a teacher. Fundraising for Yale, I know the importance of giving to nonprofit organizations,” he said. “There are lots of great organizations in Greater New Haven focused on education that are receiving support from The Community Foundation and we want to learn more about them and others we don’t yet know about. I feel very strongly that access to education is critical to allowing someone to live a transformational life.”