Mary Wade Home is grateful to be the 2017 Recipient of the Corporate Heritage Award presented by the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce which will be presented at the Chamber's 223rd Annual Meeting on April 13 at the Omni New Haven Hotel.
We are receiving the Heritage Award as we plan for ground breaking of a major addition to our senior campus in Fair Haven. www.marywade.org
Mary Wade’s Mission of Service
Mary Wade is planning to expand its mission to meet the growing needs in the community. Connecticut is undergoing a permanent and historic transformation in its demographics - it is aging. Between 2010 and 2040, Connecticut’s population of people age 65 and older is projected to grow by 57%, with less than 2% growth for people age 20 to 64 during the same period. Moreover, residents born in Connecticut today can expect to live to be 80.8 years old—the third highest life expectancy in the nation. This unequalled long life, combined with firm increases in the number of older adults, has profound implications for everyone in Connecticut.
In addition, the State of Connecticut has been actively engaged in rebalancing their Medicaid long-term care services from institutional settings such as skilled nursing centers, toward more emphasis on home-and community-based services and settings, for example, home care and adult day centers. The State has invested a significant amount of resources toward creating an environment where Medicaid recipients with a skilled nursing center level of care designation are aware of their options, including the opportunity to receive home and community based services (HCBS). In 2013, 56.6% of CT Medicaid recipients were utilizing HCBS and with State intervention it is predicted that by 2025, 75.1% of these individuals will be utilizing HCBS.
Mary Wade’s Programs and Services
Mary Wade has a longstanding and proven record of responding to the needs of the community, and in particular with the needs of seniors and their families. This is evidence by the fact that Mary Wade’s Senior Care Campus has an array of services available to seniors from:
Home and Community Based Services, such as, (1) transportation, (2) adult day health center, (3) homemaker and companion service, (4) community navigator, (5) outpatient rehabilitation, and (6) primary care.
Institutional Senior Care Services, such as, (1) assisted living (Residential Care Home), and (2) short term rehabilitation including pulmonary rehabilitation, innovative treatment modality for dysphagia, (3) chronic long term care, (4) hospice & palliative care.
Housing, such as providing low income housing to workforce families.
Mary Wade has been able to continue to expand its services and programs, improve its campus, while intensifying its relationship and role in the urban setting by engagement of the neighborhood. By working closely with our neighbors and neighborhood association (in particular Chatham Square Neighborhood Association) we build a stronger community. www.marywade.org
Mary Wade’s Naming Origins
Mary Wade’s name originated from Lucy Boardman and her sister, Mary Wade
In 1866, a group of women founded this organization initially to serve women and children following the Civil War, and named it the Home for the Friendless. In 1897 Lucy Hall Boardman made it possible to begin new construction on the previous building when she contributed $20,000 in honor of her sister, Mary Wade. Lucy (1819-1906) was born in Poland, Ohio, into a family that had originated in Connecticut. In 1857 she married William H. Boardman, a New Haven man whose family owned land in Ohio. She came to New Haven, and she and her husband, who was both a judge and member of Congress, lived at 46 Hillhouse Avenue. She became Connecticut’s leading female philanthropist, giving away more than $750,000 including $125,000 to Yale for the construction of Kirtland Hall (Kirtland was a family name), $100,000 to Christ Church, and $83,000 for the building of the Boardman Training School. The last-named gift was made in 1894 in memory of her husband.
Her sister, Mary P. Wade (1816-1908), also was born in Poland, Ohio. She married Edward Wade of Ohio, who was also a judge and congressmen, and they lived in Washington, D.C., during the Lincoln administration. He died in 1866, and she lived thereafter with the Boardmans on Hillhouse Avenue. When Lucy died, Mary Wade moved to 331 Temple Street. She, too, was very charitable. Neither Lucy nor Mary had children. They are buried at the Grove Street Cemetery in the Boardman Plot.
Mary Wade’s Goal over the next ten years
Over the next decade, Mary Wade will continue its commitment to serving the needs of the Greater New Haven Community from our original address at 118 Clinton Avenue and as an integral part of our community. As a senior care community, it is the goal to continue to link a venerable history of care with a commitment to energetically offer a continuum of coordinated, innovative and high quality care in which compassion, human dignity, diversity and social responsibility are primary concerns. It is the intention of this organization to endeavor to expand this philosophy in the broader community
Two immense challenges to be faced in the future
One of the biggest concerns in the future is to have the pool of skilled individuals to employ in order to sustain the mission and services. This is a concern among all providers of health services as we see the increase of the older population while birth rates have been steadily decreasing. Financial resources is another challenge since both State and Federal Governments struggle to balance these budgets, and funding for social services continues to increase and strain the economy. This is the reason Mary Wade is focusing on philanthropic initiatives in order to fund vital services and maintain the level of quality we are best known to provide.
David V. Hunter, President & CEO
Mary Wade
July 19, 2016
From 1866 to 1966, Mary Wade Home, now a community for seniors in Fair Haven, was called the Home for the Friendless.
It wasn’t a refuge for the socially inept. “Friendless” was a euphemism for “vagrant, idle, and homeless girls,” many of whom became pregnant out of wedlock and were then “betrayed” by the father, according to a 1992 edition of the Journal of The New Haven Colony Historical Society. Given the sexual politics of the day, such women were considered pariahs. Their old friends might refuse to associate with them. Their own families, too. With no one to take them in, little viable employment opportunity and a child to support, these women and girls were pointed to the Home, where they would receive shelter, food and vocational training in the hope that the girls might one day find husbands or, at the very least, a self-sufficient livelihood.
The Home for the Friendless had its beginnings on September 8, 1866, when a group of ladies from various Protestant churches in the area gathered in the residence of Henrietta Edwards Whitney, widow of the famed inventor Eli Whitney. The women assembled there for the purpose of starting a home to provide both shelter and training in “all branches of domestic service and needle work.” At their next meeting, they elected their first president, Maria St. John Sheffield, along with the Board of Managers and other staff—all Protestant, and all women.
In 1866, with $6,000 in donations, the group bought the house on Clinton Avenue where the place still stands. All residents, some 50 at any given time, were expected to participate in chores. The Home sold milk and eggs from livestock kept on the property, and with donations of food, toys and clothing, they managed—albeit without central heating.
In the mid-1890s, the Home—with more residents and children than originally anticipated—was in need of a new wing, which a $20,000 gift from philanthropist Lucy Hall Boardman funded. The wing was named for Boardman’s sister, Mary Wade, though Wade’s name wouldn’t represent the home in its entirety until 1966, when “Home for the Friendless” was deemed sorely out of date.
Early on, there was a hard religious bent to the Home. In reports from the time, some newly arrived girls were called “sinners” or were said to have “darkened souls.” One young woman, after some sort of transgression, was forced to stay in bed for a number of days until she became “penitent and respectful.” Another who struck a matron with a broom was simply arrested. Roman Catholics, although not officially excluded, were at times turned away because of their faith.
By the turn of the century, some of the girls at the refuge were no longer young. For women who couldn’t find a husband or job, the Home—which would typically house girls for six-month stays—became a permanent one. Over time, the Home began accepting a larger number of elderly women and, by WWI, almost all were older—many of them 70 and above.
When David Hunter, current President and CEO, began at the Mary Wade Home in 1981, most of the residents were in their 80s, and all were still women. It was Hunter who began Mary Wade’s transition to a place for men, too.
“Yale was going co-ed. We followed suit,” Hunter says. Not everyone liked the idea. “There was one woman who said, ‘First man who comes in these doors, I’m leaving,’” he recalls. But one of the first men, an Irishman and a retired railroad employee, was a charmer. “He brightened up the day,” Hunter says, and soon enough things were rolling smoothly.
The Mary Wade Home is now nearing 150 years old, and it’s a far cry from the destination for wayward girls it once was. Today, Mary Wade provides a continuum of care for the elderly—day programs, short-term rehab, full-time assisted living and full-service nursing home care. One of the largest employers in Fair Haven, the facility has a staff of about 270 looking after 94 total beds, which are nearly always occupied. It has a fleet of eight vehicles that make a combined average of 800 trips a month, bringing residents to church, to grocery stores and to doctor’s and dentist’s appointments.
For entertainment, Mary Wade doesn’t confine residents to an endless limbo of Bingo games. It contracts with iN2L (“It’s Never 2 Late”) to deploy a system of computer hardware and software geared towards the elderly, providing access to the internet, music, photography and games, including a version of Family Feud that’s particularly popular with residents. Of course, Bingo is available, too.
Each year, the Home has two major public-facing fundraisers: a wine dinner, the next of which is coming up on April 30, and a golf tournament in October. Besides these events, revenues come through payments for services, private donations and money dedicated from residents’ wills—presumably a gesture of appreciation to the place that made their final years lively and comfortable.
I met one particularly lively, comfortable resident whose love for the Home needn’t be presumed. First, while waiting for the elevator, she said in a sing-song sort of way, “I used to be old and bald and sexy. But no more. Now I’m old and bald and fluffy.” But as the elevator doors closed, she called out to me, so that there’d be no doubt: “My name’s Rachel. I love Mary Wade.”
Mary Wade Home
118 Clinton Ave, New Haven (map)
(203) 562-7222
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Written and photographed by Daniel Shkolnik.
