Regina Winters-Toussaint To Be Inducted Posthumously Into CT Women’s Hall of Fame

While a student at the Yale School of Architecture in 1992, Regina Winters-Toussaint created her own summer internship. As one of the first counselors for LEAP, then a new youth enrichment program in New Haven, she moved into Westville Manor public housing, where she mentored the young people living there.

That willingness to steep herself in the experience of those who would live and work in the structures she built is among the reasons for the induction of Winters-Toussaint, who died of cancer at 47 in April 2016, in the CT Women’s Hall of Fame, according to its executive director Sarah Lubarsky. 

Winters-Toussaint ​“could have gone to a major design firm, but she made the choice that was for the greater good, and that’s a pattern she repeated throughout her life,” Lubarsky said.

As one of four 2023-themed ​“Women Who Build” inductees on Thursday, Oct. 26, Winters-Toussaint, who would go on to play a vital role in New Haven programs geared toward neighborhood revitalization, community development, and urban planning, was a natural choice, Lubarsky said.

“Every year we have a posthumous inductee, which gives us an opportunity to tell stories that might get lost in the dust of time,” she said, of the nonprofit, which has as its mission, ​“to educate girls and women (as well as men and boys) about the accomplishments and contributions of women from Connecticut.”

Winters-Toussaint grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, ​“the daughter of a single woman on welfare.” That’s from the New York Times, which featured her in a Jan. 18, 1987 article headlined ​“From New York’s Poor Areas to Private Schools.” She was 17 at the time.

“Her mother taught her to read early, and by the eighth grade, she had a 99 average and was class president,” it reported. It was that performance that would qualify her for a scholarship to attend the George School, an elite Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania.

“This combination of intimately knowing the tough side of America and our nation’s opportunity was a big part of Regina,” LEAP founder and executive director Henry Fernandez wrote in 2016.

Fernandez said he first met Winters-Toussaint when they were undergraduates at Harvard. ​“I think it is fair to say that Regina was one of Harvard’s top recruits — indeed, even the New York Times said so,” he said, referring to another New York Times mention, this one in an April 27, 1986 feature on ​“The Dwindling Black Presence on Campus.” 

“She was artistically and from a design perspective, immensely talented,” he said of Winters-Toussaint, who earned her degree in Visual and Environmental Studies. When it came time to pursue a graduate degree in architecture, ​“there were virtually no Black women who went to Yale School of Architecture or any other architectural school. She was willing to take on challenges and excel at them.”

“She built consensus,” Kenneth Boroson said in a tribute film to premier at the induction ceremony; Winters-Toussaint worked at his New Haven firm as part of her architect license requirements. ​“She built consensus as an LCI director, as an interim housing director, and working in our firm with our clients.” 

From there, ​“she built her own company from scratch and located it in the heart of Fair Haven,” Fernandez said, of Zared Enterprises, becoming the first Black woman to own an architecture and planning firm in Connecticut. 

She did that ​“despite the fact that African American women made up much less than one percent of architects in the U.S,” he said. 

There, Boroson said, she was key in developing the ArLoW (ArtsLoftWest) project for artist housing in Westville, McConaughy Terrace, an affordable housing development, and the Mary Wade Home, a nursing home and assisted care facility. 

Regarding the Mary Wade Home, ​“it took an extraordinary kind of personality and warmth and leadership to convince a community that was kind of initially against it, to completely support it,” Boroson said.

“She helped people along the way in her path, she uplifted them,” Lubarsky said. ​“And at the same time she literally left her mark on New Haven in her 47 short years.” 

She said Winters-Toussaint’s story will be incorporated into her organization’s curriculum, which includes STEMfems, MS.Story, as well as its ​“See It Be It” program, which offers 4^th and 5^th graders, as well as adult learners, in New Haven and around the state a 45-minute history lesson and creative ways to bring that history to life. 

Perhaps the crowning achievement of Winters-Toussaint’s career was the rebuild of the Dixwell Community House, known as the Q House. 

Hired, together with Kenneth Boroson Architects, to design the center, she included African motifs and designs in both the exterior and interior tailored to different portions of the community, from kids to seniors, and activities ranging from socializing to mental health support to sports programs to job readiness training. 

“We heard you,” Winters said in 2014, adding that the architects worked off a​“site, a budget, and a list of things the community wanted,” a seeming echo of that early self-created internship.