Around Town

New Canaanites Help Drive ‘Fairfield County Hospice House’ Project

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STAMFORD—New Canaan’s Julia Portale stood on the grass verge just off of this residential road in Stamford on Tuesday afternoon, the Douglas fir frame of a new structure rising on the 1.3-acre lot behind her. Known in New Canaan as a longtime Girl Scouts leader who taught Sunday School at the Congregational Church and now serves on the New Canaan Land Trust’s board of directors, Portale holds master’s degrees (from Yale) in both public health and business administration. For the last few years, she’s been running a home care hospice program in Fairfield—and, next year if all goes as Portale and a host of advocates for this project off of the Merritt Parkway’s Exit 33 are planning, she’ll be running a new type of hospice program that will serve New Canaan and other area families. “This is the setting that is the next best thing to home for people who are dying and who do not need intensive care, do not need facility-level care and can’t stay at home,” Portale said from the future site of Fairfield County Hospice House (see rendering at right), where she will serve as executive director. “If patients cannot stay at home, it is an opportunity for them to be in a home environment, a house that allows family to come in and spend quality time with loved ones in a home setting.”

Founded and governed by a nonprofit organization that’s been actively fundraising, site-seeking and otherwise galvanizing support for four years, Fairfield County Hospice House is expected to meet a pressing need that affects scores of area families.

Around Town

Land Trust Finalizes Plans To ‘Complete the Loop’ on New Public Greenway

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More than one year after town officials approved a subdivision on Weed Street with an attendant conservation easement—a strip of land that provided the “missing link” in what advocates have called a “dream greenway,” connecting the New Canaan Nature Center to Irwin Park—the architects of that project say they’re poised to take a final step toward realizing their vision. The greenway—essentially a loop that would include a new walk through the woods between Oenoke Ridge Road and Weed Street—includes Nature Center property as well as the easement and separate pieces of New Canaan Land Trust property. The open question that Land Trust Board of Directors Secretary John Engel and others have grappled with for a year is: How to traverse the wetlands that stand between the easement and Weed Street itself? Now, Engel said, the Land Trust is working with a wetlands scientist “to give us a report so that we can make a raised walkway through the wetlands that will, on the one hand, be the least impactful on the environment and yet it has to be sufficiently substantial so that it is safe for the public.”

If completed, New Canaanites would be able to walk a loop from downtown New Canaan—say, up Elm to the intersection at Weed Street, then to Irwin Park (which itself may connect via a sidewalk to the top of Elm), then through the “new” walkway, across Land Trust and Nature Center property through the woods, then out to Oenoke Ridge Road and down toward God’s Acre and the heart of the village again. “What is important is that we are completing the circle,” Engel said.

News

Letter: Andrew Clarkson ‘A True Champion of Philanthropy’

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Dear Editor,

Our community lost a very special citizen with the passing of Andrew Clarkson. I will miss him as a professional inspiration as well as a unique colleague and mentor to me in my role as the Executive Director of New Canaan Community Foundation. Andrew was a true champion of philanthropy and challenged us all to do the most good for our community. He believed that we all have a role to play in nurturing our community resources and led by example. Andrew was generous with his time, talent, and treasure and has left an incredible charitable legacy.

Around Town

New Canaan-Darien Turkey Bowl: Where Loyalties Lay For Those With Ties To Both Towns

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New Canaan’s rivalry with next-door neighbor Darien finds perhaps its rawest form of expression in the Turkey Bowl, the annual Thanksgiving morning football game between two ultra-competitive and athletic high schools. Set for 10:30 am. this Thursday, at Stamford High School’s Boyle Stadium, the 2015 Turkey Bowl again doubles as the FCIAC championship game (both teams are undefeated this season) and follows a shocking comeback victory for the Blue Wave one year ago. The Rams would regroup and post their own late-game win vs. Darien in the 2014 state final, though many would say there’s something extra-special about the Turkey Bowl itself—a local tradition that sees thousands of NCHS and DHS alumni gather during the family holiday.

Around Town

Three New Canaan Organizations Collaborate on Art Therapy

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Silver Hill Hospital has launched an integrated art therapy experience this summer for patients from its Adolescent Transitional Living Program at the Silvermine Arts Center, thanks to a $5,000 grant by the New Canaan Community Foundation. The program, a collaboration between Silver Hill Hospital and the Silvermine Arts Center, enables patients to leave the Silver Hill campus once a week in order to learn new visual artistic skills, as well as enhance preexisting skills, according to those involved in it. “We started prior to the grant working with Silvermine Arts Center, because they are the preeminent arts guild in Fairfield County and they are right up the street from us, and I was struck by the fortuitous colocation of our two facilities,” said Dr. Aaron Krasner, chief of the Adolescent Transitional Living Program. “I was also developing our internal art therapy program at the time, and I thought it was match made in heaven.”

Krasner found the arts to be an important part in his patients’ recoveries, a conclusion grounded in scientific basis and study. Thanks to the NCCF grant, Sunday sessions will see participants work in various media, including hand-built ceramics, printmaking, sculpture and multimedia painting. “Creative expression and what I like to call adjunctive therapeutic activities are very important for adolescents who are engaged in serious psychotherapy and other psychosocial interventions,” Krasner said.