Even before last fall, Rob Blosio Jr. held an abiding respect for community and volunteerism.
The 2007 New Canaan High School graduate had volunteered as a New Canaan Lacrosse Association coach, did the same with NCHS fall league ice hockey, gave of his time with the Red Cross and mentored inner-city kids as a University of Richmond student-athlete.
New Canaan’s Holly Donaldson and Rob Blosio Jr. are two architects of Battle with a Paddle, a Saturday, March 7 fundraiser for AmeriCares, an international nonprofit organization that was founded in New Canaan. Credit: Michael Dinan
Over time, the 25-year-old town resident—a business analyst for Conair and Realtor in New Canaan—decided to help youth while directing his energies to helping in disaster recovery.
“If I cannot make big monetary contributions, then I can start something that will lead to that,” Blosio Jr. said.
Enter global health and emergency response organization AmeriCares, a nonprofit agency founded in New Canaan in 1982 by the late Bob Macauley.
Blosio Jr. knew of AmeriCares through longtime friend Holly Donaldson, who works out of its Stamford headquarters, and had attended some of the organization’s fundraisers in the past.
‘Battle with a Paddle’ will be held March 7 at Country Club of New Canaan. It’s the inaugural fundraiser designed by the New Canaan-founded organization’s Young Leaders Group, and is the brainchild of New Canaanites.
In November, he signed on when Donaldson began forming the Young Leaders Group, a committee of about one dozen 22- to 40-year-old professionals who began to brainstorm on ways to engage similarly situated people and raise awareness of AmeriCares.
Led in part by Blosio Jr., an active platform tennis player at Shorehaven Golf Club in East Norwalk, the group began developing “Battle with a Paddle” (Facebook page here).
To be held 12 to 7 p.m. at Country Club of New Canaan, the fundraiser is designed to leverage a hugely popular sport in the area while offering supporters a fun day out, Blosio Jr. said. For $100, participants will get lunch, dinner and drinks, a day of paddle and a chance to benefit AmeriCares. Local sponsors include Franco’s Wine Merchants, Blosio Jr. said.
Donaldson grew up in New Canaan, attended Country School and has been working for AmeriCares for 3.5 years, most recently as a senior associate overseeing community and donor engagement.
The organization has an older donor base, Donaldson said, and one need that prompted the creation of the Young Leaders Group was to get more young people from New York City and Fairfield County involved. Plans now call for the Young Leaders to meet in person quarterly and design two to three events per year.
“Our goal is to engage people of all ages and through this event, we’re hoping to get back into New Canaan,” Donaldson said. “Since we were found here, it made sense to do an event and re-engage people who are there and may not know about our connection to New Canaan. A lot of people may not know that we were founded in New Canaan and used to have an office there [on Cherry Street],” she said.
The New Canaan connection—particularly as the organization continues in the spirit of Macauley and does so by embracing values shared by many in the town—is critical to the identity of AmeriCares, said Board Chairman Dean Maglaris.
“From very humble beginnings with next to nothing, Bob with his tenacity and charisma got it going,” said Maglaris, a town resident for 40 years and board member for 12, noting that Macauley’s widow, Alma Jane, serves as the board’s vice chairman.
“The group was very much a New Canaan group in the beginning. Its board of directors was all from the New Canaan area, and it’s expanded since then but there’s still a large contingent of New Canaan residents on the board of AmeriCares.”
The group has relied heavily on New Canaan and on its roots here, Maglaris said, and not just in a narrow financial sense. The “essence of who we became, which is a humanitarian organization that provides aid to people in crisis anywhere in the world, regardless of race, color or creed or any other orientation, are a reflection of Bob Macauley’s values and those of New Canaan.
Asked for his thoughts on the idea of Young Leaders, Maglaris said that, having raised two children in New Canaan, it’s “vital to the value of our country that the children of New Canaan take part in leadership programs and understand what the rest of the world is like beyond our borders, and with a sense of values that they get by being brought up in New Canaan.”
“If those values can be further developed by experiencing organizations such as AmeriCares—it doesn’t have to be AmeriCares, it could be any organizations with a true humanitarian focus—then the sooner they can get involved and understand that they can make a difference, it’s worth all the money in the world. It’s a truly wonderful thing.”