Cover Story | by PAMELA DEY VOSSLER | photos by: BAMBI RIEGEL | riegelpictureworks.com
from left: Liza Smith, Bert von Stuelpnagel, Chris Filmer, Erin Noonan, Suzanne Mulliken, Fiona Leonard, Kim Adams, Susan Graham and Elisabeth Drew
A YEAR AGO, the Darien Community Association (DCA) at 274 Middlesex Road had the hottest ticket in town. It was for an event they created, a phenomenon really: The 203 Project. It was an extraordinary show of gorgeous effort and philanthropy from 15 local interior decorators and a range of suppliers, artists and sponsors who combined sustainably to “glow up” nearly every inch of the 10,000-square-foot 1929 Georgian Colonial Revival mansion that has been home to the DCA since 1950. It was as much friendraiser as fundraiser, a chance to show Darien and the surrounding area what the DCA is all about while generating support for its programs.
What the DCA is all about is community—ways to find it, build it, grow from it, and thrive within it through the programming they offer. And there could have been no better way to put that on display than with The 203 Project, attracting as it did a sold-out, multigenerational crowd connecting and reveling in the beautifully updated space at each of the six events held under its four-day umbrella. It was the first big act by Erin Noonan, who had joined the DCA in September ’23 as Executive Director (ED), succeeding beloved, long term DCA ED Amy Bell who had retired the previous June.
“For many people, the DCA has been that rather nice white historic building that you drive past on Middlesex Road,” said Caroline Burke, past president and current member of the DCA Board. She was also part of the search committee that hired Erin. “What we really had to work out with a new ED was the programming and events that would encourage them up the driveway into the house.”
Chris Filmer leading a nature walk in the Bird Sanctuary
Since The 203 Project, that is precisely what Erin and her team have done, regularly selling out nearly all of their events and other offerings, increasing membership 64% in the last year alone and becoming one of the most popular wedding venues in Darien while they were at it. Not bad for a nonprofit organization that has been around for more than 100 years.
Welcome to a primer on reinvention, regrowth and taking the best of what you have and building on it.
“The good bones were here,” said Darien resident Flavie Lemarchand-Wood, DCA marketing and communications lead who, with her husband, is raising three children in town. “It was just about amplifying that,” she added.
left: the DCA’s formal garden, right: a view to the Secret Garden
When you’re tackling the reinvention and regrowth of a legacy nonprofit, it helps to work from a strong launchpad. With a newly installed AC system (a game changer for the opportunities it opened for events during the warmer months at the DCA), a lovely formal garden and a parking lot repaved shortly before she arrived, Erin had the infrastructure for a full range of program possibilities. But, which legacy programs to keep, to add, to reimagine or retire? (Sometimes you have to pinch back a bud to bring forth a new bloom.) For all this, you also need the right team for the tasks at hand, and different times call for different talents and choices.
While Erin, who has lived in Darien with her husband, a Darien native, and their three children for the past 10 years (minus the year they took their lives on the road to travel around the world in 2022), had no background with the DCA or nonprofits, she knows how to create things people want. She knows marketing, communications and how to build a strong team. She learned that at Ogilvy & Mather where she began a career in account management, building on a sensitivity for belonging developed throughout many family moves while she was growing up. She learned even more at Wieden & Kennedy working on the Nike business, then at Anomaly where she helped launch Virgin America Airlines in the United States. It was the right experience at the right time for the DCA.
“Erin had the perfect combination of energy and ideas. Her marketing background was a big appeal to us,” said current DCA Board President Liza Smith. “She’s done a great job balancing legacy programs and events and creating new programming and events to bring more people in.”
“The beauty of someone who arrives with no history with an organization is that they can come in and say, ‘Why do we do that?’ and ‘Do you know why we do that?,’” added Caroline of the fresh eyes Erin has brought to her role.
Erin and her team also know that the best ideas come from the ground up. They rise with an irresistible energy, fed by the community, which expands to embrace them as they gather steam which was a big part of the lift behind The 203 Project—great ideas beget great appeal.
The DCA Board of Directors
Throughout its many ages, stages and changes, community has consistently been at the root of DCA programming – from when it was founded in 1923 “to keep the town neat” (thank the DCA for the trash cans around town—getting them placed was one of their original goals), secure home delivery of the mail, support the library, provide scholarships to Darien High School (DHS) students and open a Thrift Shop (programs that are still going strong) to all on offer there now: the book talks, mah jongg instruction, the global issues lecture series, the Bird Sanctuary – a four-acre expanse west of the DCA house (if fairy dust could be a place, it would be the DCA Bird Sanctuary and nature trail), the Greenhouse Group, Secret Garden supper club, jazz brunches, and the connective fun at events grand, granular and yet to be imagined.
“Community is at the heart of our mission,” affirmed Erin, sustainability, learning and green spaces too, she added. They form the four pillars of DCA programming but to Erin, it comes back to community, always.
“Because we value community, we want our community to come together and learn about global issues. Because we believe in community, we want to bring people together to learn a new skill or to enjoy a glass of wine or to play a game of mah jongg,” offered Erin as examples of the tie to community that exists in all the DCA programming pillars. “Because community is at the heart of our mission, we are going to support the students at DHS who need help going to college,” she continued.
Mah jongg at the DCA
“The Scholarship Program is all about community,” agreed Terrie Van de Graaf, a DCA Board member since 2017 and past co-president who also serves on the scholarship committee with Co-chairs Kate Larson and Tammy Sload. “Scholarships are awarded to public school students in our community, community donors support the funding, the DCA staff administers the program and community volunteers serve on the scholarship committee – it’s really multi-generational,” she explained of the program which was started in 1941 and has awarded more than $2 million to nearly 2,000 DHS graduates to date—Darien High School seniors as well as, uniquely, those who return to reapply for continuing aid as they move through their college years.
“The DCA scholarship program is one of the largest providers of need-based community scholarships in Darien,” added Terrie. “It shows the generosity of the community to support and invest in the future of the youth of today.”
In the welcome and community they extend in all their programs, the DCA delivers a sustaining “magic,” as Erin calls it. No wonder people are so drawn to it.
Caroline attributes the pull to community in part to “the degree of loneliness that came out of COVID,” she said, and the need for community that followed it, along with “the realization that a huge number of families in Darien have lived here less than three years. How do they form their networks? How do they form those communities?” she continued.
“I’ve lived in many different places in my life, and I have not encountered an organization like the DCA,” said Liza, who moved to Darien from North Carolina with her husband and two young sons just six weeks before COVID shut down everything. “It’s a special place,” she added, calling the DCA greenhouse and the group that runs it, which she joined shortly after arriving in town, her “lifeline” during lockdown. “The DCA Greenhouse Group became my family.”
Plants in the DCA Greenhouse prepped for the annual DCA Plant Sale and (new this year) the Meadowlands Market which will take place on May 9th.
To truly refresh and reinvigorate a legacy nonprofit takes courage to hold fast to the right convictions so that you pass forward things that will keep you strong for generations. This is what longtime DCA volunteer and past two-term president Marge Harrington did when the DCA Thrift Shop was nearly sold in the 1960s. Located in the center of Darien at 996 Post Road, the Thrift Shop was on the chopping block, as impossible as that now seems given how it has become a cornerstone of the revenue that supports the DCA and its programs, as well as a lead example of the DCA’s commitment to sustainability in the items it keeps out of the landfill. Back then, it was flagging.
“My mother was very involved with the DCA,” recalled Susan Hamill who grew up in Darien and, with her husband Jeff, raised her three children here as well. She too is a longtime, committed DCA volunteer and past board member. “(My mother’s) baby was the Thrift Shop. She felt strongly about its purpose in town, for the community, for the volunteers, for the DCA.”
As the story goes, the leaders at the time gave her a quota. “They said ‘If you can make this much money, we’ll keep the store open,’” recalled Susan, and she did. “She blew it out of the water and the Thrift Shop is thriving at a level that is beyond imagination,” she added. “I think my mother must be doing an Irish jig up in heaven to know it is doing as well as it is,” said Susan who lost her mom in 2023.
When you’re tackling the reinvention and regrowth of a legacy nonprofit, it also helps to come from a long line of committed volunteers.
“The women my mom worked with were such diehards,” continued Susan. “I was up in the attic (of the DCA)cleaning out, and the volume of communications and records (I found) that the women before us had generated spoke volumes about them. It’s always been a really strong group who have been involved,” she said. Along with the four full-time employees and nine part-time and seasonal employees, more than 100 volunteers currently power the DCA throughout each year—tapping into a new generation as programming continues to expand to welcome every demographic in town.
“The DCA has something for all the seasons in your life,” said Liza. “There’s something for toddlers and young children with our Spooky/Not So Spooky trail at Halloween, Storytime for preschoolers in our Bird Sanctuary. There’s a talk for moms trying to figure out how to enter the workforce. There are classes that you can take on many things. And we have things for seniors, too. It’s extraordinary that it can help anyone find their community,” she continued—naming just a few of the DCA’s many cross-generational programs.
Supported entirely through private donations, the Thrift Shop, events and, to a lesser extent, membership dues—no grants, no funding from the town or state, the DCA exists for the community because of the community.
“Every single thing that we do is fueled by our community, by the active participation, by the membership, by the donations,” said Erin. “But it’s also for the benefit of the community,” she added.
Together we grow, in so many ways.
For more information about the DCA, visit dariendca.org.
