Granting wishes is his job

Dennis Covelli was working on Wall Street in 1983 when he first read about the Make-A-Wish Foundation in a local newspaper.
The organization, which was founded in Phoenix, was starting up a chapter in New York to grant wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Intrigued by their mission of bringing hope, strength and joy to sick children and their families, he contacted the fledgling New York chapter to find out how he could help.

“At the time, New York was the 10th chapter. It was only volunteers. There were 10 or 15 of us. We all did a little bit of everything –– raising money, talking to hospitals to identify children with life-threatening conditions, stuffing envelopes,” he recalls. “We did a grand total of two wishes and raised $16,000 in that first year, and we thought that was phenomenal.”

Today, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has 67 chapters in the United States and international affiliates in 21 different countries. The Metro New York Chapter raised more than $9 million and granted more than 500 wishes during the past year, plus facilitating 238 more wishes from other chapters where children came into New York to have their wishes granted.

“It’s been absolutely wonderful watching the organization grow,” says Covelli, who served as a volunteer for 22 years before taking early retirement from the New York Stock Exchange to become chief operating officer of the Metro New York Make-A-Wish chapter in 2004.

Covelli first got involved in the Make-A-Wish Foundation because he saw it as a way for someone not in the medical profession to help children who were sick. When he witnessed the amazing impact the wish-granting organization had on those children and their families, he was hooked. But he soon learned that taking a personal role in the granting of wishes was too emotionally draining for him to handle.

“I was able to help on physical and business things for quite a while and was very busy getting chapters set up, but the time came when I said, ‘Let me do that one.’ It was a little boy, and his wish was simply to go back to his home in another country to see his bothers and sisters. He had been brought to the U.S. for treatment, and that was his wish. We sent him home, and he was there for about three weeks when he passed away. He had also thought clearly enough to send us a book of pictures from his trip. That was probably the smartest 11-year-old I ever saw,” Covelli says, choking back tears at the 25-year-old memory.

“I went to our CEO and I said, ‘There are two things I can tell you after that experience. Number one is I could never do that again, and number two is find something else for me to do.’” And in the following 25 years there has always been plenty of work to do.

He continued to volunteer locally, while serving on the Board of Directors of the New York Chapter for 14 years and on the national board for seven years. “We were getting very big very fast and needed good business people to set up the infrastructure, so I spent a number of years helping to accomplish that,” he says.

Though not personally involved in wish granting, Covelli is happy to recount some favorite wishes:

• A non-communicative 8-year-old girl whose only pleasure was listening to her parents’ opera music from a famous Italian performer. Her wish was to go to Italy for a concert and visit with the opera singer, who was only too happy to spend some time with the child;
  
  
• A 16-year-old who would design cars in the solitude of his illness, and whose wish was to be the CEO of a major car company for a day. So, off to Detroit, and during his wish, the company built a prototype of one of his designs for him to see; and
  
  
• Another boy who simply wanted to announce “Gentlemen, start your engines” at a NASCAR race.
  

The many trips granted to Disney World are heartwarming as well, along with celebrity meetings that make up about 5 percent of wishes granted. “One of the things that helped us in the beginning was the graciousness of some of the celebrities that children wanted to meet,” Covelli says. “In the beginning, there were some tremendous wishes and we said, ‘How are we going to do that?’ And the celebrities were so supportive and gave freely of their time, making our wish kids very happy.”

The Metro New York chapter now has 28 paid staff members and more than 700 volunteers. Its two core businesses are granting wishes and raising money. Everything else supports those businesses as part of the operations end that Covelli now oversees, including information technology, accounting, administration, human resources, volunteer services and outreach.

“We have weekly staff meetings like every other business. You just have to consider the fact that we are not building cars, we’re granting wishes to children. But a good portion of the rest is like any other business,” he says. “The only thing that’s different here is sometimes the staff is crying. Laughing and crying at the same time.”

For more information on the Make-A-Wish Foundation, visit [www.wish.org].

—Sharon Huss Roat AS ’87

Dennis and Robin Covelli live in Oceanside, N.Y. Their son, Anthony, is a UD freshman majoring in music education.