Christopher Swift — chairman and CEO of The Hartford, one of the largest property-and-casualty insurers in the country — is a major Hartford booster.
When former GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowksi wrote a scathing op-ed about the city of Hartford in the Wall Street Journal last year, Swift responded with a strong defense of the city his company has called home for more than two centuries.
“Prior to the pandemic, there was a palpable change in Hartford’s mood, a discernible shift in how the city thinks of itself and of its future,” Swift’s op-ed in the Hartford Courant read. “The cloud that has hovered over the city since the late 1980s was lifting. Together, I know we will recapture that momentum as we finally put the deadly coronavirus behind us.”
Swift is another corporate CEO who has significantly ramped-up his civic engagement in recent years. He was one of three insurance executives in 2017 who declared that his company would give the city of Hartford millions of dollars over five years, to help with its dire financial issues. He was also a member of the state legislature-backed Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth.
Swift also spearheaded a multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign for the Boys and Girls Clubs’ new recreation center in Hartford’s South End. And last year his company provided a $1 million grant to help restore and rehabilitate 27 blighted homes in the city’s Asylum Hill neighborhood.
Swift was in the middle of a national business story in 2021, after he rejected several multibillion-dollar acquisition offers made by competitor Chubb Ltd.
The proposed deal put Hartford and Connecticut political, business and civic leaders on edge, even prompting Mayor Luke Bronin and Gov. Ned Lamont to raise concerns about its potential impact on the city.