Jay Calnan gambled 20 years ago by cashing in his 401K to launch Quincy-based J. Calnan & Associates, a construction management firm that today has clients like Biogen IDEC, General Electric, and New England Sports Network. In 2011, Calnan took another gamble but one he saw as a sure thing when he founded Team IMPACT, a nonprofit that matches children with life-threatening and chronic illnesses with college sports teams, making them part of the team.
It paid off: The program started at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire and now serves 1,200 children ages 5 to 15 from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Many Calnan employees are involved in the nonprofit, he said.
“I had a younger brother with medical birth defects, but he became a bat boy for the Bristol Red Sox,’’ said Connecticut-native Calnan, 51, now of Norwell.
“So I was inspired to put together a group of like-minded professionals who benefited from playing sports as kids, to leverage our network to find kids to benefit from the collegiate athletic community that drafts them to be on teams.’’
The children are matched with colleges or universities in their areas, traveling with sports teams, going to games, functions, and other events, all designed to make them feel part of something, Calnan said.
“These kids might feel like, due to their illness, they’re different or outcasts,’’ Calnan said. “But they’re accepted by a team, and it makes them feel they’re not different, they’ve been accepted. They feel like, ‘I am somebody.’ ’’
In being around the youngsters, he said, college athletes see “there is something out there bigger than themselves. They may have had an injury or struck out to end a playoff game. But they look at the end of the bench and see this kid demonstrating grit as [he or she deals] with far more significant hardships.’’
The nonprofit’s goal is to scale into a much larger organization and have children on every collegiate athletic team in the country.
“It’s a pretty cool concept and not overly complicated to do,’’ Calnan said.
For more information, visit www.goteamimpact.org.
Paul E. Kandarian
Paul E. Kandarian can be reached at pkandarian@aol.com.
