Four years ago, in the May/June ‘22 Women in Business Issue, B&NC Magazine featured Dede Thompson Bartlett and her 26 year career as the highest ranking woman at Mobil Corporation, the predecessor of ExxonMobil, and at Philip Morris Companies Inc. when it was the world’s largest company. Today, at 82, Dede is busier than ever with major philanthropic projects in New Canaan and around the country.
Dede and her husband Jim focus their philanthropy on education, health, women’s empowerment, historical preservation, and community improvement.
The Bartletts champion many local organizations, including the New Canaan Community Foundation, The New Canaan Library, the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society, and the Navigator Program at Waveny LifeCare Network. “Our hope is to inspire others to give to these worthy organizations which are improving the quality of life in our town,” Dede says.
Dede and Jim gave three million dollars to fund the auditorium of the newly constructed New Canaan Library, as well as the half-million dollar investment in the Rooftop Terrace of the new, green building. This fall, Dede launched an annual lecture series on moral courage in The Jim & Dede Bartlett Auditorium, which featured Dr. Georgette Bennett, a Holocaust survivor and noted humanitarian, speaking about her most recent book Half Jew Full Life: The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream. As Dede said, “In these tumultuous times, we need to be uplifted by people leading lives of inspiration and hope.”
In addition to supporting the New Canaan Library, the Bartletts have also made a series of significant gifts to the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society. Two years ago, they enabled the museum to create a permanent exhibition space on the history of New Canaan, and last year the Bartletts helped the museum to buy the St Michael’s Church adjacent to the museum’s campus to ensure the preservation of God’s Acre in perpetuity and to expand the campus. They most recently gave a $500,000 matching gift as part of a capital campaign to integrate the Museum’s newly expanded five-acre campus. Dede explains, “I believe that preserving the past helps us to better understand our place in the future, and it is my personal view that in times like these, people find comfort and joy and inspiration in coming together to celebrate a common good.”
The Bartletts are literally a dream team who seek to transform the philanthropic landscape by investing in people and ideas. Those of us who have been so fortunate to experience their visionary brand of partnership know just how much inspiration their personal commitment can provide.”
Ellen Sullivan Crovatto, CEO, New Canaan Library
A Legacy of Giving
“Dede is a visionary,” Nancy Geary, Executive Director of the New Canaan Museum shares. “She not only proposes wonderful projects that she is willing to support financially, but she also rolls up her sleeves and gets involved so that they get done, and done well. She can dream big while remaining pragmatic and understanding of an institution’s capacity. I am grateful she cares about history because it has given us the chance to collaborate on transforming this campus and developing programs that explore all aspects of the rich history of New Canaan. The Museum would not be the place it is today without Dede.”
“I got involved with the Historical Society when I restored the 250 year old barns on our property here in New Canaan. I worked with Executive Director Nancy Geary to curate seven programs at the museum including one honoring ‘Women Leaders Of New Canaan’, in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. I’m thrilled the Museum is becoming a vigorous cultural campus with activated gathering spaces and more opportunities for exhibits and cultural enrichment,” Dede beams.
“And in keeping with my interest in historical preservation…” Dede explains, “I recently donated many pieces of my family’s two hundred year old Danish West Indian furniture to the Museum of Danish America. My father’s family came from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, and I inherited a large collection of porcelain, maps, photographs, paintings and hand-made mahogany furniture - including the 1805 four poster bed in which eight generations of my family have slept and where my great great grandmother and her twelve siblings were born.” The collection will be featured in an exhibit which will open in the fall of 2027. It will represent the first time the complex history of the Danish West Indies will be told in the United States.
Dede went to the all-girls Spence School in New York City, and was one of three, out of twenty-eight girls in her graduating class, to go on to Vassar College. One of the prestigious ‘Seven Sisters’, Vassar was still an all-female college at the time, renowned for its liberal arts education. “I majored in French and minored in Spanish and European history, and studied in Paris during my Junior year. I loved my time at Vassar and was awed to be studying in the same library as so many great women who’d gone before me, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackie Kennedy and Jane Fonda! And I treasured being around so many really bright classmates. But I was vaguely disquieted by the prevailing sense that after college, as a woman, you were supposed to work for a couple of years and then get married and start raising a family. No one ever advised me to think about preparing for a profession, nor was there much in the curriculum to prepare you for a career.”
“When I graduated from Vassar in 1965, they had absolutely no career development department. There was just a nice lady in a small office with a box of 3x5 cards, with the names and phone numbers of alums seeking administrative assistants. After graduating Vassar with honors, all I could get was a job typing envelopes at the Far East America Council, while every young man coming out of Princeton or Yale with my educational background was getting offers from banks for management training programs at twice my salary. I was determined that one day I would give young women the career options I never had.”
“That opportunity occurred at the end of my corporate career when I became a Visiting Fellow at the Council of Independent Colleges and lectured at 30 colleges and universities and saw some of the best practices in career education. This led me to underwrite 140 summer internships at Vassar. The internships were named after my mother, who was denied a college education by her father despite having graduated from high school at age 15 with the highest grades recorded in Delaware… My mom earned her degree thirty years later when my dad took a second job to pay her tuition. I was 13 when I took this picture the day she graduated from New York University with honors. She said it was the happiest day of her life,” Dede said.
A Legacy of Giving
This past March, the Dede Thompson Bartlett Center was unveiled at Vassar - built to house Vassar’s Office of Admission and Career Education, as part of a ten million dollar gift to the school from Dede and Jim. At the dedication ceremony, it was announced that the students had already christened the building ‘The Dede’.
“Having my entire family there to celebrate the occasion was tremendous, but the real joy was celebrating with my two granddaughters, 16 year old Alexandra and 13 year old Charlotte. Charlotte is the same age I was when I saw my mother graduate from NYU. It changed my life.”
Having my entire family there to celebrate the occasion was tremendous, but the real joy was celebrating with my two granddaughters.”
A Legacy of Giving
Jim and Dede have also supported 138 internships in STEM at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. The program is named in honor of Dede’s father, George Thompson, a graduate and instructor at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, the predecessor of Tandon. In 2024, Dede was the Commencement speaker at Tandon’s graduation where she asked the graduates “What are you going to do with these gifts that Tandon has given you?... The answer is very simple and very profound: learn, earn and return.”
Jim has also supported 86 scholarships at Boulder High School in Colorado for students majoring in STEM and economics. They are named after Jim’s Dad, J. Perry Bartlett, a prominent businessman and former Mayor of Boulder.
Jim has also underwritten 56 college scholarships for children of enlisted United States Marine Corps veterans majoring in STEM and economics. In addition, Dede and Jim have partnered with their son Jay in sponsoring internships in energy and environmental research at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.
Jim’s passion has been helping the caregivers of loved ones with Alzheimer’s and dementia. He founded the Navigator Program with the Waveny LifeCare Network, and partners with the New Canaan Community Foundation to administer it. The program helps caregivers in New Canaan manage the evolving needs of ailing loved ones living at home, and provides 24/7 access to dedicated Alzheimer’s and dementia specialists, an exclusive respite apartment, social adult day programming, expedited access to Waveny’s services, access to trusted resources outside of Waveny, wellness check and safety assessments, education on disease progression, assistance with insurance and public benefits, emotional support, and a dedicated mobile app.
And, maybe most passionately, Dede is extremely active on the frontlines of domestic violence - locally and nationally. She first became acutely aware of the scale and scope of the issue when she was Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Philip Morris and a coalition of prosecutors, social workers, judges and advocates came to her and described domestic violence as a workplace issue that affected the health, safety and productivity of employees. “I knew absolutely nothing about it at the time, but was horrified to learn that 1-in-3 American girls and women of all backgrounds will be a victim of partner violence.” Dede said.
She founded and co-chairs the New Canaan Abuse Prevention Partnership, is on the Advisory Board of the Domestic Violence Crisis Center of Stamford and Norwalk, and is a former Chair of the Advisory Board of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. She received the Women Who Make a Difference Award from the International Women’s Forum for her work in helping survivors of partner abuse. “This year we have made a substantial matching gift to the National Domestic Violence Hotline to deal with rising rates in abuse,” Dede says.
And, in response to the increase in domestic violence incidents in New Canaan, Dede helped spearhead, along with the New Canaan Community Foundation and other community organizations, the formation of a fund to help local survivors of abuse meet urgent financial needs not covered by existing assistance programs.
Jim and I feel very lucky to be able to invest in the dedicated change makers who are carrying out all this important work. It enriches us in so many ways and we hope to continue doing this for as long as we can.