NEW HAVEN, CT - If you miss a phone call from Wendy Hamilton, make sure to get back to her.

 

Hamilton, a straight-talking, left-leaning activist appalled by the country’s wealth gap wants to do two things — help house the homeless and help kids with educational opportunities.

 

And she wants to do more than just talk about it.

 

With about $1 million to give away, she has been showing up at a local high school, calling the city’s parks department, looking for property to build affordable housing and sending generous checks to friends in need.

“I have no children. I have no responsibility. I don’t want any more jewelry, clothing, housing. I’m going to live and die here,” Hamilton, 66, said looking around her modest 750-square-foot condo where she lives with her husband, Jim Duarte.

 

She is going public with her plans because she wants to be an example to others with much more money than she has to encourage them to step up and make a difference.

 

“I’m trying to force the really rich to give to New Haven,” she said. “I’m concerned about the poverty here. There are so many problems.”

 

Her first public foray into local philanthropy was a $100,000 contribution to keep the Sunrise Cafe, which provides breakfast and respite for the homeless, running for a year.

 

It was a check that floored John Bradley, who operates the cafe, when she pushed it across the table to him at a local coffee shop.

 

Larry Conaway, the principal at New Light High School on Wooster Square, had many visits from Hamilton at the alternative facility which takes in public school students “over-aged and under-credited.”

 

They have had second and third chances at school before they come to New Light.

 

“They haven’t liked school and school hasn’t been kind to them,” Conaway said of his 60-member student body.

 

Conaway thought Hamilton was interested in donating a few hundred dollars to New Light. 

 

“When she said she wanted to give the school $20,000, my mouth dropped,” he said.

 

Those funds are now being used for a new Macintosh computer for the art and science departments, drivers education classes and other extra curricular and graduation activities. 

 

New Light holds graduation five times a year as the students add on the credits they need.

 

Hamilton has passed on copies of Edward Boland’s book, “The Battle for Room 314,” to the 10-member staff to read and she will teach a Native American history class this summer at the school.

 

Boland’s book talks about his disastrous year as a new teacher, while also devoting some insight into how the admission’s office at Yale University, where he used to work, makes decisions. 

 

Conaway said Hamilton has offered to pay for a dancer to teach a class, but he is leaving it up the students who may prefer someone to come talk to them about construction and electrical work.

 

There is another $30,000 waiting to be given to the school, but Conaway has to find someone to match it.

 

Hamilton came to New Haven in 1984 to work at Yale-New Haven Hospital as an intensive care nurse, retiring in 2009.

 

She has given generous checks to an artistic couple going through some hard times, to her ex-husband and most recently handed $20,000 to the New Haven Scholarship Fund for needy students. 

 

Her desire to give away a large portion of an inheritance from her grandmother, she said, started with a generosity she learned from her parents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I have told people ... I am an angry black man trapped in the body of an old white woman,” Hamilton said.

 

 

 

 

 

Hamilton’s concerns are not all about poverty.

 

As part of her donations to New Haven, she said she wants to rent the carousel at Lighthouse Park to be used by city residents seven days a week from noon to 5 p.m. in July and August.

 

Rebecca Bombero, the director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees, said weddings at the carousel have been booked for every Saturday and Sunday through the fall, and some on Thursday and Fridays.

 

She said she is working on a schedule when it would be open for the public prior to the set up time for the weddings and on other days. Bombero said they want to give Hamilton a realistic budget, where she would cover the cost of the staffing, but not pay a rental fee.

 

“It’s public property. I’m already paying maximum taxes on my apartment and these little kids at the park can’t get a ride on the carousel?” Hamilton said. 

 

Hamilton’s biggest issue is finding a building that could be converted to apartments for the homeless, a facility that would also incorporate a health clinic and a social worker on site.

She and others have looked at a former nursing home on Winthrop Avenue, but she would need partners in something of this magnitude.

 

“I just don’t have that kind of inheritance,” she said. While it is closer to $2 million, her husband wants her to save a good portion of it for their later years. 

 

Hamilton said Yale Medical School students could help staff the kind of housing she has in mind for the homeless and she suggested that Yale School of Management students manage it.

 

Hamilton grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a wealthy bedroom community outside Springfield, where her Jewish mother experienced anti-Semitic prejudice and her father was not allowed to join any country club because of his “mixed marriage.”

 

She said she was clueless about poverty until she moved to New York City in high school.

 

While her parents essentially were atheists, she did attend a Congregational church on Sundays with them as a young child.

 

“Everybody in Longmeadow went to temple or church because it was part of the deal. It was a business thing. Everybody had a religion ... They hadn’t invented atheism,” Hamilton said.

 

As a teenager, Hamilton made a very early decision not to have any children, something she never regretted. 

 

She said she was “too neurotic” and “I didn’t have enough common sense. I knew that parenting was a lifetime serious career, although no one else I knew took it very seriously.”

 

Hamilton said she saw many instances of “terrible parenting” in the rich white town of her childhood.

 

Sitting in her living room, surrounded by books, she said the furnishings are from Home Depot or Ikea. She said she has no interest in looking affluent.

 

“I don’t want flash or glamour or multiple homes,” Hamilton said.

 

Hamilton is a big Sen. Bernie Sanders fan and went with a friend recently to New Hampshire to work the telephones for the Democratic primary contender, a win that left her energized.

 

She is no stranger to political fights, having famously confronted Gov. Dannel P. Malloy when he came to town to campaign for Mayor Toni Harp in 2013 and she regularly protests Yale University, which she thinks should get involved in helping the homeless.

 

The former nurse is just recovering from a hip replacement, the second in five years, but it is not expected to slow her down too much.

 

“I should be out of the house in a month,” she said, but she can still work a phone.