A Message from Our President & CEO | July 4, 2026
As a bicentennial baby and proud daughter of Philadelphia who has made her home in Connecticut, the nation’s semiquincentennial has given me cause to contemplate our country’s declaration, direction, and destiny. Here in Waterbury, a city literally set upon a hill, I am honoring the invitation, or perhaps the demand, to look back while simultaneously looking ahead.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, 56 men signed their names to a document that began with a promise, not to a government, nor to a king, but to each other. The closing words of the Declaration of Independence are not the ones we quote most often. We reach for the self-evident truths. We lift up the unalienable rights. But at this particular moment, their closing words may be the most consequential reminder of our sacred responsibility to one another. They chose to end not with a declaration of independence but with an act of profound interdependence: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Having pledged, they did not linger in the grand halls and cobblestone streets of Philadelphia. Instead, they carried it home where it needed to be lived out in the towns, neighborhoods, and communities where every person had to decide what type of neighbor and caretaker of this great American experiment, they would be.
Our pledge to each other must be renewed, in every generation, in every community, by the people who live there.
We still have that choice. A choice that requires something from all of us. I do not take such a pledge nor responsibility lightly because I know what is at stake. More than 170,000 Connecticut residents risk losing Medicaid. Nearly 360,000 neighbors depend on SNAP to put food on the table. The health centers, the food pantries, the home visiting programs for new mothers – these are the places our neighbors go when they have nowhere else to turn. And the organizations that run them are being asked to hold what many others have chosen to put down. The safety net is not just fraying. In many places including our own backyard, it is disintegrating. And yet, we are called to remember and honor our pledge.
Dr. King warned us that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” What happens to one impacts all of us, for we are connected. We have always been connected. The Declaration says so. The Constitution says so.
I recognize and understand that our founding documents are imperfect. And yet they planted something enduring and beautiful. A set of ideals ambitious enough to last and demanding enough to keep calling us forward. We hold these truths to be self-evident. We the people. A more perfect union. These words may not have been fully true when they were written but they are an assignment. Still unfinished, passed from generation to generation.
Connecticut Community Foundation has been part of that assignment for 103 years. Today, we step away from the backyard cookouts (maybe not in this heatwave) and the dazzling fireworks, to reflect on our role and work of carrying the pledge ever forward. This mutual pledge is a living demand. It asks something of us right now in the way we deploy our dollars, in the organizations we stand behind, in the communities we choose to see and serve.
On this commemoration of our nation’s founding, may we lift the stories of shared humanity that still surround us, the neighbors still caring for neighbors, the communities still showing up, the quiet and persistent proof that ordinary people, choosing each other, can still change everything.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the pledge endures.
— Kathy K. Taylor,
President and CEO, Connecticut Community Foundation
