Diane Boyle has a new friend, one who is an expert in all things Lego.
Eleven-year-old Cole stops by Boyle’s temporary office in the Ronald McDonald House every day. He talks about what he’s doing in the house and all the things he creates with his Legos.
He likes to look at the cranes outside the house’s second-floor windows and make his Lego cranes imitate what the real ones are doing.
Cole is in Jacksonville for six weeks of proton therapy. His family is staying at the San Marco facility, which hosts families with sick children from around the country.
Those cranes are in the early stages of expanding the facility from 30 rooms to 54, making sure more families like Cole’s have a place to stay when in Jacksonville. More than 33,000 families have stayed there since the house opened in 1988.
The project also will include a rooftop garden, a separate volunteer kitchen so the families can have their own kitchen and the renovation of several areas in the current facility.
Fundraising for the $13 million expansion announced Thursday is well underway, said Boyle, who is executive director of the facility.
Private philanthropy brought in $10.4 million, including from the woman for whom the campus will be named.
Boyle said Mary Virginia Terry continued the legacy of giving by her late husband, Herman, who was chair of the facility’s capital campaign in the late 1990s.
Boyle said Herman Terry helped procure the land on Children’s Way and build the current facility.
“The Ronald McDonald House was very important to Herman just as it is to me,” Terry said in a statement. “I hope others in our community will be inspired to help care for the families who stay there.”
The facility will be named the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Campus, Boyle said. The couple also has a theater named in their honor at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts.
There are other big names who’ve contributed, including Delores Barr Weaver.
And then there’s James Walker, who had no known connection to the facility except he lived in the neighborhood and passed by every day, Boyle said.
But, when Walker died, he left the bulk of his estate to the house.
The rest of the money will be raised through a public campaign, including the sale of memorial pavers for the rooftop garden for $500-$2,000. Visit rmhcjacksonville.org/expansion for more information.
Boyle joined the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Jacksonville about 18 months ago. After owning a consulting business on Wall Street for 10 years, she came to Florida when her husband needed medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic. He has since passed away.
The renovations that have begun at the facility are the reason Boyle’s office has moved to a small room next to the dining room for the next three months.
It’s her window to the world at the Ronald McDonald House, which she calls a “place of hope, faith and compassion.”
A place where a woman from Wall Street and a little boy who loves Legos can become friends. A place that can change both of their lives.
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