By Anne W. Semmes
APRIL 28, 2017
It took a few weeks but we finally convinced Greenwich’s Peter Barhydt to consent to an interview. He does not normally make the headlines, but behind the scenes he’s been making significant contributions to his town in high profile rescues of nonprofit initiatives, such as the 9/11 Memorial in Cos Cob Park, the YMCA, Safe Rides for our teenagers, and others.
He readily receives praise from our town’s top management. First Selectman Peter Tesei says of him, “He has an uncanny ability to develop wide-ranging community support for every project he takes on. He exemplifies a positive can-do attitude in fulfilling a mission. He is able to bring together varied perspectives and produce consensus. His skills and talents have proven invaluable to a myriad of causes and organizations he has chosen to work with.”
Barhydt, as president of his marketing and public relations firm, Aberdeen Associates, can be found in his office tucked into a quiet corner.
Barhydt’s skill set was gathered from the political arena and corporate world, with an ethical grounding of giving back inherited from his family. He’s a definite soft touch when it comes to nonprofits. He says, “it’s very difficult to say no when they need help.”
Take the YMCA, now thriving under CEO Bob DeAngelo’s leadership, when it was floundering a few years back. “It was going through financial and construction difficulties and there were rumors that the organization was going to disband, and the building would revert back to the original heirs,” says Barhydt. “There were a lot of negative stories in the newspaper.” Those negative stories were making it difficult for the Board to do its job. Barhydt got the distress call, then quickly created a scenario to engage the local media in a positive way. Part of his strategy involved an unlikely structure: the wooden staircase that had become a symbol of an uncertain future for the YM.
“The YM had this wooden stairwell on the outside. The stairwell was supposed to come down. We said, let’s put a banner on it that says, ‘What goes up must come down.’ Let’s leave it there to build curiosity of what it’s all about. When it was time to come down we invited all the local town officials and politicians and people that had a stake in the YMCA to come. And some of them had sledge hammers, and some had chain saws. And we all started the process of dismantling that stairwell—and the media picked up on it. We turned a negative into a positive.
Sometimes it is just how you look at it.”
“Peter was great,” says Jim Cabrera, who took on chairing the Y’s board during this difficult time, and chose Aberdeen Associates to help out. “We had an operating loss of $100,000 a month. The renovation project was only half financed. We had no money and a large debt of $30 million dollars. We put together the message for the 5,500 Y members and prospective donors. We took it to the banks, to the constituency of the Y. When I left as chairman, the operation was positive. We came from losing money to breaking even with the money, and able to raise money. We paid off the debt with donations.”
Around this time, a grand plan to create a 9/11 Memorial in Cos Cob Park was also floundering. Donations to the Greenwich Community Project Fund targeted for the Memorial were not coming in. “The people involved were good people but they just didn’t know how to build the community support and do the fundraising for it,” says Barhydt. Aberdeen was tapped “to help them complete the project.” “And the first thing we decided to do was to get on the phone and I called every community leader and asked them to support publicly, to be on a list of community supporters for the Memorial. I am grateful for their trust and confidence. We couldn’t have done it without their willingness to help.”
But Barhydt had to put some fires out first. There were those misspelled names on the 9/11 memorial plaque on Great Captain’s Island needing to be corrected and assurances needing to be given to the town and a particularly unhappy First Selectman Peter Tesei that going forward this wouldn’t happen again. Barhydt made the promises and, working closely with Gervais Hearn, the professional he helped recruit for the Cos Cob memorial project, would go back to each family member with a written statement of how they wanted their loved one’s name to appear.
“We needed to be sure so we took the time to get it right. We still have those signed letters on file,” says Barhydt. Barhydt was no stranger to these 9/11 families. At the time of 9/11 he was working for Congressman Christopher Shays as a senior staffer and was “heavily involved” in bringing help to family members in Shays’ 4th congressional district. “We created a large three-ring binder that had all sorts of information including how you file a death certificate when there are no remains and how to access benefits and information. And we went to each family and sat with them and went through this book.” On behalf of Shays, Barhydt would attend seventeen of the countless funerals for those lost in the district. As the Cos Cob Park attests, the 9/11 Memorial became a triumph in the town. “We had to demonstrate to the town that we had raised over a million dollars to pay for and maintain the Memorial going forward, before presenting the project to the RTM.”
“Peter didn’t stop there,” says Ed Dadakis, who serves on the Board of the Excelerate Foundation, the largest financial contributor to the Memorial. “He oversaw the Memorial’s construction, worked with the families of those lost to make sure the Memorial was meeting their needs, and finally worked hard to assure an extraordinary dedication, which brought our town together with tears and gratitude. Others played critical roles, but I am convinced that without Peter Barhydt this much-needed Memorial just would not have happened.”
Barhydt represents the modern evolution of a businessman. He pulls in “team” members as needed from across the country: a graphic artist from outside Philadelphia, PR assistance from San Francisco, assistants, sitting close by. He adds, “Beth [his wife] is the other side of everything I do.” The Barhydts are high school sweethearts, dated through college, with marriage soon after. They moved to Greenwich from their mid-state Connecticut roots in 1990. After 15 years in politics, eight on the staff of Chris Shays, plus a couple of years in the World Trade Towers with Oppenheimer Mutual Funds, Barhydt, with Beth, decided to form Aberdeen Associates.
“With Peter and Beth, you can’t have one without the other,” relates their friend Jim Boutelle, the executive director of TAG. “They are the go-to people in Greenwich if you are running a local not-for-profit. Through Aberdeen and the Sentinel they have been responsible for raising well over $100,000 for TAG and Safe Rides. Whether it is quietly opening doors to donors or actively promoting a benefit, Peter has been invaluable to keeping TAG in the black. When I started running TAG 18 years ago, Peter was one of the first people I called.” Boutelle did express surprise his friend Barhydt, “as humble as he is,” would consent to being featured. But there’s no doubt that Barhydt is proud of the work.
He also helped build some early community support for his wife’s newspaper. “But this is Beth’s paper,” he says. “She felt very passionate about it. It is a completely female-owned business.”
“In community building, it’s all about doing what’s right and working with a team to create consensus. It’s marketing,” notes Barhydt. “It’s all about public relations. It’s about crisis management. It’s about branding. You need it all.” He says he is most grateful for, “the relationships that I have and maintain that allow me to take on new projects. I couldn’t do anything without them.”
