Q&A with Jim De Maria of Ronald McDonald House Charities

Wheaton resident Jim De Maria was part of the Chicago Blackhawks organization for 25 years, serving as the team’s vice president of communications.

These days, De Maria is an integral part of a new organization. He’s the senior director of development and marketing for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicago and Northwest Indiana, which supports four houses located near children’s hospitals in Chicago that house the families of seriously ill children who are receiving medical treatment.

Ronald McDonald House Charities has already raised just over $20 million for a new $30 million Ronald McDonald House—the largest of its kind in the world—that’s scheduled to open next summer near Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.

De Maria addressed a number of topics related to Ronald McDonald House Charities, and also talked about his days with the Blackhawks. Here are excerpts from his interview with Wheaton Patch:

Patch: Tell us a little bit about your role with Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicago and Northwest Indiana.

De Maria: I joined the charity when the McDonald’s All-American basketball games were awarded to Chicago last November (2010). I specifically worked on sponsorships and creating some media coverage and some awareness of the games. We were very fortunate. We set the record for the largest attendance ever for the All-American games: 20,018 at the United Center (Wednesday, March 30). It was a four-day event. Tuesday night was our awards banquet at Navy Pier in which the players were given their All-American rings We raised $300,000 from the banquet that evening, and then the games were the following night—the girls game and the boys game. We received a check from McDonald’s for the games for $325,000, so the total raised for the charity was $625,000.  The games were awarded back to Chicago for 2012—the first time the games have ever been played in the same city two consecutive years.

P: What is your role with the Charity now that the All-American games have concluded for this year?

De Maria:  On completion of the games, I moved over to the capital campaign as senior director of development and marketing. My main function now is to try and raise funds for our capital campaign. We’re in the process of building the world’s largest Ronald McDonald House in downtown Chicago—a $30 million capital campaign project of which we’re currently at around $20.5 million, so we’ve got a ways to go yet. We’re in the process of meeting with corporations, companies and individuals to see if there are those that are interested in perhaps learning about the charity if they don’t already know about it. We try to get them to visit one of our houses to get a feel for exactly what services we provide for the families.

P: You currently have four Ronald McDonald Houses. Would the new House in downtown Chicago be the fifth house?

De Maria: No. What’s happening is the house near Children’s Memorial in Lincoln Park is closing. We’re building our new House to be closer to the new Lurie Children’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, so we’ll still have four houses. The new House will have 86 guest rooms—almost double the amount of families we’ll be able to serve. Our houses are associated with pediatric hospitals and pediatric care.

P: When is the new house scheduled to open?

De Maria: The house will open around this time next year, July of 2012.

P: How has the economy affected raising funds for Ronald McDonald House Charities, in general, and the new house, in particular?

De Maria:  Everybody knows that the economy is a little tough right now. There are a lot of worthy causes out there; individuals, companies and corporations are associated and affiliated with different charities. Obviously dollars are tight. It’s not that people don’t want to give. It’s that they don’t have as much to give. When you’re affiliated with one cause, you sometimes can’t be affiliated with more than one because the dollars just aren’t there. Corporations and foundations also have guidelines, and if we don’t fit within those guidelines, we don’t qualify for those funds. It’s a challenge, but we’ll get there.

P: If someone were to ask you, “Why should I donate specifically to Ronald McDonald House Charities?” what would you tell him or her?

De Maria: If you look at what our mission is, we keep families together. We provide care and comfort for families in their time of need. When a parent has a child who is seriously ill, what we try to provide is a home away from home—not only for the parents, but for the siblings as well. A warm bed, a hot meal, a hot shower.  Things that we take for granted, but things that they don’t have to worry about. It’s a place for them to stay so they can focus their attention on their child who is ill.

Studies have shown that children who are ill will recover 31 percent faster when they have their family around them. We try to provide that care and comfort so that families can stay close together. That’s the main goal and the main focus of what Ronald McDonald House Charities is all about. Our staff and our volunteers do an unbelievable job providing for families who are really in need. Their lifestyle is going to change when a child has an illness, but the services we provide will allow those families to focus on the most important thing: the well-being of their child.

P: Tell us a little bit about a couple of the fund-raisers you have coming up at Ronald McDonald House Charities.

De Maria: We have a series of events that we put on throughout the course of the year. We just completed a 3-on-3 basketball tournament at Grant Square in Hinsdale. We had over 100 teams and 400 players from the fifth grade all the way through the Men’s Open 35-and-over which was very successful for us. We raised around $65,000 from that tournament. We also will have our 25th annual golf tournament coming up on July 20 at Cog Hill. We will use all four courses at Cog Hill, and hopefully be able to raise significant funds from that event. We also have a Sporting Clays Tournament Aug. 27-28, which is a shooting competition. That will be our last major event of the year. I understand it’s a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to it.

P: What do you think the future looks like for Ronald McDonald House Charities, short-term and long-term?

De Maria: It’s continually growing. Not only are we building the world’s largest Ronald McDonald House, but we’re also working with Edward Hospital in Naperville. We’re going to be opening up a family room at Edward in January, 2012. But I think our main focus right now is being able to get the new house built. We have $9.5 million still to raise. The house will open, but it would be nice to have it all paid for by the time it does open. When the new house opens, we’ll be able to accommodate nearly double the amount of families we’re able to accommodate at this time, so obviously our operational costs will also go up. We have to be prepared to meet those challenges as well. 

P: We have many Chicago Blackhawk fans in the area. Looking back on your career with the Blackhawks, what are a couple of memories that come to mind?

De Maria:  Having the opportunity to work with the late Bill Wirtz, who I thought was a great business person, and I learned a lot from him. He may have taken a lot of heat, but there was a method to everything he did and a reason for it. Whether you agreed with it or not, it was irrelevant. There was a reason he did what he did. He was one of the great businesspeople, and a great sportsman. He was probably a little bit ahead of his time in terms of being able to foresee the future; i.e., the collective bargaining agreement, the salary caps and so on. Salaries have skyrocketed now higher than anyone thought they would. But he had foreseen that back in 1994. Unfortunately, no one took him seriously.

Another great memory is being able to work with a great group of players throughout the years, some of whom I’m still friends with. I was ecstatic to see the team win the Stanley Cup a couple of years ago. A lot of those young players were guys that I knew when they first came into the league. I’m happy for them and I wish them all the best moving forward. I think they did a great job this summer retooling their team and adding the grit and the size that they needed. Hopefully they’ll do very well in the upcoming year.