Above and beyond

Jimmy DiBenedetto didn”™t see it coming at the annual Easter Seals New York meeting in December. He was expecting the nonprofit agency serving disabled adults and children to honor his longtime employer in White Plains, Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker L.L.P., with its corporate award.

Then he heard his own bio and history of service to Easter Seals being recited to the audience at The New York Botanical Garden. In the audience was Daniel J. McMahon, Wilson Elser”™s chairman, who had flown in unannounced from Chicago.

“They hid my family in the back,” said DiBenedetto, who was about to be honored with the state Easter Seals board leadership award. The annually conferred honor has been renamed the James M. DiBenedetto Award as a “perpetual honor” to the hard-working volunteer. His wife and four daughters were in on the secret.

“I was totally surprised,” DiBenedetto said in Wilson Elser”™s 3 Gannett Drive office, from which he oversees the law firm”™s finances and facilities nationwide as administrative director. “It was a very, very humble experience.”

A native of Fitchburg, Mass., DiBenedetto joined the Wilson Elser firm in New York City 34 years ago this month. Two years later, he organized the firm”™s softball team in a fundraising tournament for Easter Seals. “That”™s basically how it started,” he said.

Several years later, a visit to an Easter Seals school in Port Jervis gave him “the opportunity to see where the monies were going.” The encounter with disabled children left him watery-eyed. “That was the line and sinker. I was hooked.”
DiBenedetto joined the Easter Seals state board in 1997. Started by an Ohio businessman in 1919 as the National Society for Crippled Children, Easter Seals in New York was a $1-million organization and “desperate” for funding, he said.

DiBenedetto in 2001 took over as chairman of the state Easter Seals board. He started regional boards in the Hudson Valley, Manhattan and Albany and recruited a cross-section of professionals and parents of special-needs and disabled children to serve as directors and target regional Easter Seals projects and facilities in fundraising drives.

The regional approach made for more effective fundraising, DiBenedetto said. In 2011, Easter Seals in the Hudson Valley raised $6.3 million for client programs and $362,000 for development, including personal and corporate donations, government contributions and insurance payments.

The nonprofit organization has revived and grown in New York. Its total state budget has risen to $27.6 million, including government funding. Administrative overhead accounts for 10 percent of the budget and the remainder goes directly to Easter Seals programs in communities.

“Now we”™re opening the door wide open for military,” DiBenedetto said. “That”™s really a whole new ball game in the last two years or so as a mission.”

Following a three-year term as state chairman, he served successive two-year terms as chairman of the Hudson Valley board and of the Albany regional board.

DiBenedetto said he was influenced in his volunteer work by the example of his father, a blue-collar worker who pitched in on clothing drives at their parish church. The award namesake has passed on that family legacy to his daughters. “Each one of my kids is involved with some kind of fundraising to this day” for Easter Seals.

Getting graduation-day hugs from disabled kids who arrived frightened and withdrawn at Easter Seals schools has been a primary reward for the 32-year volunteer. Then too, “You get to meet a lot of celebrities.” The framed photos of pro athletes that line his office walls testify to that.

Celebrities come and go. Wilson Elser, the largest law firm in Westchester County, offers more reliable opportunity for a fundraiser.

“A lot of my fundraising is the partners in the organization,” said the winner of the James  M. DiBenedetto Award.