Bill Graustein is the recipient of the Barbara Reed Award because of his use of storytelling in the community with diverse groups of people who aspire to civic leadership.
In midlife Bill Graustein started to uncover the power of story. In leading the reorganization of his family’s charitable foundation, he talked to many different people in his hometown of New Haven about their experiences and hopes. Stories flowed out of many of the conversations - the experiences they related revealed both unexpected connections and unimagined differences. The stories that he heard laid themselves next to the stories he remembered of his own family and profoundly changed how Bill understood some of those family stories.
He was struck both by how differently from one another the people with whom he talked saw the world and saw their hometown. He was also struck by how many people yearned work in cooperation with others for the common good of the community – to be a part of something larger and more significant than themselves.
In response to the yearnings he heard, Bill started the Community Leadership Program in New Haven in 2002 to support diverse members of the New Haven community in building trusting and supportive relationships as they work through the disruptions of change. In leading the program, he invited the sharing of personal stories and found that he was far from alone in experiencing the power of story to connect and inspire each other and to fire each other’s imagination. A few years later, he started to host week-long workshops on discovering and working with story.
Bill serves on the Board of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, as well as many other organizations. He lives and bicycles around New Haven, Connecticut.
