'A generational gift': Couple donate house to fund Flagstaff Boys & Girls Club

Aug 09, 2023

Mark Cox, chief executive officer at Boys & Girls Club of Flagstaff, talks about the impact of Jim and Toni Pugliano donating their Flagstaff home to the organization.

Jim and Toni Pugliano are donating their home to the Boys & Girls Club of Flagstaff.

The Boys & Girls Club of Flagstaff received a “generational gift,” one that may help them expand to serve more youth within Flagstaff.

Jim and Toni Pugliano, who have lived seasonally in Flagstaff for decades, donated the home they built themselves in the neighborhood of Amberwood to the club earlier this month.

The house, which was appraised at $750,000, has already sold for $760,000, said Mark Cox, the Flagstaff club’s chief executive officer.

And all that will go back into the organization, furthering its efforts to provide after-school and summer programs for school-aged youth.

“A donation like this is, to me, a generational gift. We're able to give back to the communities and in a big way,” Cox said. “It’s so great. But it’s also a testament of their hearts. Like if they're able to give joyously and just give big, it also hopefully is an encouragement and motivation for others in our community to be able to give like they do: freely, joyously, joyfully.”

Surrounded by beautiful woodwork reminiscent of a log cabin, Jim and Toni Pugliano are a picturesque couple sitting in the living room of their home they donated.

But they said the decision to donate the house was an easy one.

Both have had a long history of involvement with both the Boys & Girls Club in Flagstaff, as well as the club in Scottsdale.

“One thing about this is Boys & Girls Club is a great organization,” Jim said. "It does so much for the City of Flagstaff, because it takes those kids and supervises them. When they get out after school, they have a place to go that's safe. I mean, it's tremendous and in today’s environment, that’s really important."

The donation comes as Jim and Toni said they are preparing to move into a retirement community in Phoenix and will no longer be coming up to live in Flagstaff each summer.

Toni said donating it to the club was the easy choice as they considered what to do with their home.

“We came up here at the end of June to see how we felt about staying and continuing to come up or not, and, well, this will be our last summer. And then we just naturally thought of the Boys & Girls Club,” Toni said. “We have a big family. We raised three kids and we have seven grandchildren and 13 great grandchildren. ... They've had advantages that so many of the kids in this area [don’t have] and that's why the club is so important.”

Jim said they are hoping the donation will help the club expand in Flagstaff, and inspire and encourage others to donate and support the club.

Jim and Toni Pugliano want the children of the Boys & Girls Club of Flagstaff to have the same opportunities that thier children had, and have decided to donate their Flagstaff home to the organization to help Flagstaff children.

A second club within Flagstaff is in the cards, according to Cox.

For years, the club has largely been based out of the Cogdill Center in Pine Knoll and Brennan Homes, and Cox said it has expanded in recent years.

The club has added a STEM lab and a teen center, and this year is serving about 150 youth and about 75 teens, he said.

Additionally, Cox said this year it is starting its new school pickup service after grant funding allowed it to purchase three new 15-person vans. That allows the club to pick kids involved in their programs up from school and bring them to the club, and parents can later get them from there.

But the next big step is a second club facility.

“We have on our vision board: to build another facility. The bigger the facility, the more reach we have, the more kids that we can serve, the better,” he said.

This donation is a real game changer on that end, Cox said, and it is one that is unusual, especially for the club in Flagstaff.

Cox said the vast majority of donors are not residents of Flagstaff, instead residing in the Phoenix area but still donating to support the Flagstaff club.

“We don't get a lot of support from the local community in terms of big gifts. Usually, it's folks that are actually in the Valley. The majority of our individual donors, the makeup of that, I would say probably 80% come from everywhere but Flagstaff -- which is crazy,” Cox said. “They say, ‘Hey, we see that there's a need in Flagstaff, can we redirect dollars from this town back to Flagstaff?' Because there's a huge need for Flagstaff.”

Of course, not everyone has a spare house to donate. But Cox says the size of this particular donation shouldn’t discourage others who may not have the same level of resources from giving what they can.

“I don't want that to deter folks from giving financial gifts. It can be $1. We’ve got folks that are reoccurring monthly donors of $10. We have reoccurring monthly donors of $50,” Cox said. “I just don't want that to scare people who might think, ‘Well, I can’t give like that.’ No, just give however much that you know you can, because that’s going to impact the kids in our community and just the community in general.”

Boys & Girls Club CEO Mark Cox stands outside the Flagstaff center.

And he said there are many other ways community members can contribute without giving financially.

“Time, talent and energy. So we have events that they can volunteer for. We have mentor programs where folks can come in and teach kids or mentor kids or even do after school homework with them and tutor them,” Cox said.

Actress, writer, producer, director and founder of Color Farm Media, Erik Alexander sat down with the Daily Sun's Sierra Ferguson to talk about her childhood in Northern Arizona, and what a return to Flagstaff this weekend means to her.

Reporter Adrian Skabelund can be reached via email at [email protected].

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