John Donahue is retiring, again, for the third time, reports the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
First, he completed a 40-year career as an attorney for Robinson & Cole in Hartford. Then, having decided he wasn’t ready to give up working entirely, he volunteered two days a week at the foundation. That lasted 11 years. Now, he’s ending a 17-year association with the foundation’s professional advisory committee, a group he helped found in 1993.
In honor of his philanthropic and legal contributions, the Hartford Foundation has established a new fund in his name.
Besides helping to organize the first professional advisory committee, Donahue helped the foundation’s philanthropic services department with several key projects. He helped create gift acceptance policies, forms for planned gifts, assisted attorneys whose clients were planning gifts to the foundation, and assisted donors who wanted to transfer their private foundations into the Hartford Foundation.
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According to Pauline Kezer of Old Saybrook, baseball and breast cancer awareness is a winning combination. So when Kezer learned that the Connecticut affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the New Britain Rock Cats were teaming up to raise money for breast cancer on Mother’s Day, she volunteered herself and her husband Ken as honorary chairs of the May 9 event.
Kezer has a history of service to the State of Connecticut, and is a long time breast cancer advocate. An 11-year survivor of the disease, Kezer was co-founder of the Komen Connecticut Race for the Cure and is also a past president of the Connecticut affiliate. Kezer also ensured that breast cancer policy was a key issue at the state level when she served as secretary of state in the early 1990s.
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A $140,000 gift from SimplexGrinnell will provide scholarships to engineering and business students and support experiential learning at the University of Connecticut.
“UConn students and graduates demonstrate a high skill level and a great desire to succeed,” says Jeff Brasure, district general manager of SimplexGrinnell’s Hartford area office, located in Berlin. SimplexGrinnell, a subsidiary of Tyco International, is an industry leader in life-safety systems.
In addition to scholarships, the gift will support the senior design project program at the School of Engineering. Through UConn’s program, engineers from corporate sponsors mentor seniors as they design their projects, explained Marty Wood, assistant dean of undergraduate education at the school.
