Wayland Town Crier 9/15/10: Wayland Community Fund helps local residents in need. Even in an affluent town such as Wayland, it doesn’t take terribly long to hear about a household in financial trouble. It could be illness. It could be unemployment. It could even be the result of a natural disaster such as a flood or a hurricane that damages a family home. Suzanne M.A. Leavitt knew this. A Frenchwoman who came to the United States as a young bride after World War I, she lived in Wayland for many years. When she died in Florida in the early 1990s, she found the town’s needier residents worthy of a bequest in her will, representing generosity to a community and a country that were not even her own. Thus, since 1997, the Wayland Community Fund (formerly the Wayland Charitable Committee) has quietly been lending a hand to provide help to residents temporarily down on their luck. So quietly, in fact, that, according to Mike Patterson, chairman of the fund, many Wayland residents don’t even know of its existence.