History Honored At ConnCAT Jazz & Gospel Brunch

Top: Lisa Bellamy Fluker with backup singers Beatrice Cano, Esther Kennerly, and Letrice Sturdivant. When she sings, "I feel like I'm serving the souls of the people as an instrument [for God ]," she said. "Service is at the core of ministry for me." Bottom: Chef Jenna Martim with members of Cohorts 13 and 14. Lucy Gellman.

Lisa Bellamy Fluker was taking it to church. Gazing out over Winchester Avenue, she rolled back the clock to her childhood, remembering the days when her mother would set extra places at the table, and welcome anyone who was hungry or needed a place to stay. A carpet of keys, soft and bell-like, rolled out beneath her. It felt, she said, like a simpler time, when neighbors looked out for each other and could have more honest, down-to-earth conversations. 

Years later, she’s wondering how to get back to that sense of community. 

“What will it take for us to see / That we need each other? / Like a fam-i-ly? ” she crooned, and the audience nodded along, ready to join in on the hook. “What will it take to open our eyes? / Hey! / We need each other to survive.” 

Sunday afternoon, Bellamy Fluker and her husband, the jazz musician and educator William Fluker, tapped into that steadfast love for community at ConnCAT and ConnCORP’s  second annual jazz and gospel brunch, presented at ConnCAT’s 4 Science Park home. Designed as a fundraiser for ConnCAT’s culinary arts program—which turns 10 this year—the event also honored Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown, NewAlliance Foundation Director of Programs LaKisha Jordan, and Karen McIntosh, director of community affairs at Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs. 

All three are champions of both ConnCAT and its for-profit subsidiary, ConnCORP (the Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program) and of New Haven, where they have spent years pouring into the community. Sunday, all three also took time to recognize the weight of the moment, in which ConnCAT is less than a full year away from moving its offices from Science Park to the soon-to-be ConnCAT Place on Dixwell. That is set to take place in May of next year. 

The event raised $5,000 for the program, said ConnCAT Director of Operations and HR Opal Harmon. “These funds will provide our current culinary students with hats, chef jackets, pants, blue shirts, and cover a two-week supply of food,” she said. 

“It feels so incredible to bring different ages, different cultures, different ethnicities together for the expressed purpose of honoring these three incredible Black women while also honoring jazz and gospel,” said ConnCAT President and CEO and ConnCORP CEO Erik Clemons, who was referred to at turns as a big brother, a little brother, a life-saving force in the community and simply “E.” “To see these people, who would not be together otherwise … it’s amazing.”  

Top: MC Steve Griffin. Bottom: Elsie Chapman, Beverley Barnes, Ella Smith and Erik Clemons. 

It’s also bittersweet, he added as strains of music from Fluker and his all-star jazz band made their way through the Orchid Café. The building at 4 Science Park has been ConnCAT’s home since 2011, shortly before it opened its doors with programs in phlebotomy and medical billing and coding in 2012. That same year, ConnCAT launched its first youth programs, which have since become a vibrant and year-round cornerstone of the work that the organization does. 

Upstairs, artwork lines the hallways, with student designs that share the walls with black-and-white photography from the Civil Rights movement and the final years of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life. A computer lab has given birth to countless works of digital art, and recently a number of fresh beats that are part of The Breed Academy. Downstairs, Orchid Café sits next to a sprawling industrial kitchen, where hundreds of students have learned to chiffonade, deglaze, butterfly, and proof until they are ready for kitchens across the city and the state. 

It’s also where the ConnCAT family has continued to blossom—although The LAB at ConnCORP now shares that honor—with a growing staff that works to champion Black arts, culture and innovation in all the work they do. Since those early years, ConnCAT has added initiatives in the culinary arts, construction, and biosciences, creating a multi-pronged jobs pipeline that is meant to keep up with changing workforce demands.

Top: Brown and Alisha Crutchfield, who has also worked to build community through her small business, BLOOM. Bottom: Hank Bolden, who is also part of New Haven jazz history, on sax. 

And now, it’s literally moving on. As people bobbed along to the music and tucked into brunch—crisped, glistening bacon, fragrant sausage, browned potatoes, shrimp and grits, pancakes and fruit, chicken and waffles, and French toast casserole, all steaming beside an omelet station prepped with chopped veggies—Clemons outlined ConnCAT’s plan to move to ConnCAT Place on Dixwell in May of 2026. Next year, that space will house staff from ConnCAT and ConnCORP, as well as its programs.  

The $220 million undertaking will ultimately also include mixed-income housing, a child mental health and family center operated by Cornell Scott-Hill Health, a community-focused childcare center from the Friends Center for Children, a grocery store, multi-purpose arts hub and retail space. Sunday, Clemons noted, the site felt significant for a separate reason: it is revitalizing Dixwell, once a self-sustaining Black business corridor that is often synonymous with the history of jazz in Connecticut and on the East Coast. 

If Sunday was a nod toward that future, it made time to acknowledge many of the people who made it possible (or as Clemons said, “the team did not do this alone.”) Out on the café’s warm, sun-kissed patio, the sound of sax and flugelhorn chased each other in a playful banter, making space for drums and cymbals and keys before giving way to gospel. 

When Bellamy Fluker took the mic for “I’ll Go,” she lifted her voice to the heavens, eyes fluttering open and closed as she sang. As Bellamy Fluker’s voice climbed and the words wrapped around the audience, McIntosh beamed in her seat, standing before the song had ended. In one hand, she held a handkerchief that became an extension of her applause. She later said she was humbled to share the day's honor with two other New Haveners she thinks of as community builders.   

That honor—and the history it held—was clear as Clemons introduced awardees, telling stories about each of them before ceding the mic. For years, he explained, McIntosh has both secured support from Yale and helped find a presidential public service fellow to help with ConnCAT’s multi-media summer youth programs, which focus on Black arts movements like the Harlem Renaissance, birth of hip hop, and evolution of soul and funk. Along the way, she’s become family—a word that floated between awardees, attendees and ConnCAT staff at least half a dozen times before the afternoon was over. 

Top: Awardee Karen McIntosh with Clemons. Bottom: Lindy Lee Gold, awardee LaKisha Jordan, and NewAlliance Foundation Executive Director Maryann Ott. 

When it was her time to speak, McIntosh kept it brief, thanking members of both her nuclear and her chosen extended family, from church sisters to Clemons himself. In many ways, her gratitude mirrored the ethos of ConnCAT itself, where every student and staff member go on to lift others in the community up. 

So too for Jordan, who grew up in Louisiana, then attended Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. In the years after she graduated, “Erik has watched me grow up,” she said with a slight catch in her voice. After jobs at Bank of America and KeyBank—always focused on the community, but never quite as in the community as she wanted—she made her way from the American Eagle Financial Credit Union to NewAlliance. 

Along the way, she has been a steadfast supporter of ConnCAT (in 2018, she helped facilitate a $1 million grant to the organization through the KeyBank Foundation’s marquee grant program), just as she has showed up for board leadership at the Shubert Theatre, FaithActs for Education, and the SCSU School of Business Executive Council. 

“Thank you all so much for pouring into me,” she said Sunday as attendees listened with rapt attention. “We are built and rooted and grounded in service. Service to our community and our babies.”

Top: Michael Spencer and Diane Brown. Bottom: Stephanie Barnes with a student artwork paying tribute to Stevie Wonder, which ultimately went to Jacqui Glover. 

Nowhere, though, was Sunday’s focus on beloved community clearer than when Brown took the mic, trying not to cry as she called culinary student Michael Spencer to stand at the podium with her. Close to two decades ago, Spencer was a self-described “knucklehead” growing up in New Haven, and going to Stetson with his sister helped keep him out of trouble. 

“She tried to steer us in the right direction,” Spencer said. “The right way. She raised the whole community.”

For years, the two lost touch, then reconnected at a gathering where he was performing under his musical sobriquet, Lil Peedi. At first, he held back, embarrassed that the song had some four-letter words that he didn’t want Brown to hear. Then Brown urged him to do his thing.

She was proud to see that he was still thinking creatively, she said. Then when she walked in Sunday, she was even prouder to see him dressed in his Cohort 14 uniform, taking the first steps toward his dream of opening a food truck with enrollment in the culinary arts program. 

“This young man right here beat all odds and I’m so proud to be a part of this village,” she said. When he enrolled at ConnCAT, “little did Erik know that I had him as a little boy. Now Erik has him as a man.” 

Clemons, in turn, heralded Brown as a community hero Sunday, crediting her with the very existence of ConnCAT Place On Dixwell itself. Years ago, when ConnCAT’s team first approached the owners of the various Dixwell Plaza commercial properties, the proposal was a non-starter: the owners assumed that ConnCAT was acting on Yale’s behalf. 

Then Brown, who ran the Stetson Branch from the plaza for years, stepped in. She kept stepping in, attending every meeting that ConnCAT had with the owners of the plaza. She made ConnCAT her business. And she helped them succeed. “It wasn’t our ingenuity. It wasn’t our money. It wasn’t a great business plan. It was Diane,” Clemons said. 

Both outdoors and inside the cafe, that bright, sometimes divine sense of something blooming into being extended to attendees and staff alike. There with friends Elsie Chapman and Beverley Barnes, Ms. Ella Smith remembered growing up beneath the wing of Brown’s mother Lillian, a Newhallville matriarch who became a second mother to dozens, if not hundreds, in the community. Years later, Smith was thrilled to become a regular at Stetson as the branch flourished under Brown’s leadership. 

While the building is now across the street, Smith still goes faithfully, stopping there as she makes her way to the senior center at the Dixwell Community Q House. Sunday, there was no question in her mind that she would make the event. 

“And ConnCAT does such wonderful work in the community,” she added.

Carolina Marquez, who came out with her mother, Maria Roche to celebrate her birthday, said she was feeling that spirit from first strains of jazz to an impromptu and deep, soulful performance of Gregory Porter’s “Take Me To The Alley.” In December 2019, Marquez graduated from ConnCAT’s culinary arts program, going on to work for the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital (YNHPH).

“It’s a really wonderful program,” she said. While Marquez learned to cook as a kid growing up in the Hill—she credits her mom for that—she credits the culinary program with giving her the skills to be a professional chef. 

Chef Jenna Martin, who runs the culinary arts academy, said that she’s savoring these last few months in the building. Sunday, she was especially proud of students in the current cohort, a group of eight aspiring chefs who “are really, really good,” in part because they’re willing to rise to every challenge that she throws at them. 

That was especially true as they prepared for the brunch, she said. At the beginning of the week, they hadn't known their way around a loaf of bread or tin of muffins. By Sunday, they’d prepared not just a hot brunch but a whole table’s worth of baked goods, from chocolate-studded muffins to challah with nuts and dried fruit. 

“It’s bittersweet,” she said of the move, nodding to the way Chef Eric Blass helped prepare her to take on the mentorship role. “I literally came here when it was a dirt floor and I watched it get built from the ground up.” 

For more about the brunch, about ConnCAT and about jazz history in Dixwell, listen to the episode of "ArtsRespond" from WNHH Community Radio linked to above.