Dalio Education gives $5.1M to Nuvance Health, teams up to train ‘disconnected’ young people for health jobs

Greenwich Time – Wednesday, June 25, 2025
By Liese Klein

One of the state’s highest-profile foundations is teaming up with a major hospital system to offer job training to Connecticut’s growing number of “disconnected” young people.

Dalio Education, the family foundation launched by Greenwich billionaire couple Barbara and Ray Dalio, announced a $5.1 million gift on Wednesday to fund a training program with Nuvance Health that aims to engage, train and employ at-risk young people.

“This is really a dream come true,” Barbara Dalio said. “Investing in the human capital is the most important thing that one can do.”

An estimated 119,000 Connecticut residents between the ages of 18 and 26 have dropped out of school and are at-risk of long-term unemployment, according to a 2022 Dalio Education report.

“Connecticut is facing an unspoken crisis that is holding our young people and economy back,” Dalio wrote in an op-ed on the report.

The Dalio Education funding will go to Nuvance’s Academy for Career Readiness program to expand enrollment of young people and provide them with the mentoring and support needed to advance to a job in the health system. 

“We’re really trying to give the young people opportunities,” Dalio said. “They can do it. They want to do it, but they need the support to succeed.”

Nuvance, which is now part of Northwell Health, sees job training programs as both bolstering its employee pipeline and helping its communities, said Katie Cullinan, chief human resources officer.

“We’ve been experimenting across the system and have learned with our partners over that time what makes a successful program,” Cullinan said. “The goal is always to get them ready for a job, and to get as many of the participants as possible into a job and then support them through that journey.”

“This is a perfect partnership,” Cullinan said of the new collaboration with Dalio Education. “The funding that Dalio is going to provide us is going to make this real and allow us to do it at a much larger scale.”

Nuvance works with community organizations to identify young people who could benefit from the program, then prepares them with social and job skills to succeed and move up within the workplace. The program also employs “peer navigators” who offer support in the form of encouragement and a ride to work if their car breaks down, for example.

“That can help support them and keep them at work, keep them on the job, and then also help them navigate careers as well,” Cullinan said.

Nuvance plans to continue its job training efforts as it completes its merger with New York-based Northwell, Cullinan said. “The intention is to spread it at this scale across our geography, and it aligns with Northwell’s programs and mission as well,” she said.

For Barbara Dalio, expanding the foundation’s efforts into job training makes sense after 18 years of support for educational programs in collaboration with local nonprofits. She hopes the Nuvance model will be adopted by manufacturers and other large employers to extend efforts to engage disconnected young people.

Dalio said has seen the impact of mentorship and support on at-risk young people up-close as a volunteer, and plans to remain actively involved in the Nuvance programs.

“It’s a learning experience for me, so I have to get on the ground and understand how it works,” Dalio said. “This is a big investment for us.”

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