A small gesture with a huge impact

Alumnae share how Canvas For a Cure shaped their careers

By TOM DONAHUE, ’76

Gone fishing is a sign you might expect to find on the office door of Dr. Todd Palmer, associate professor of Management in the School of Business at SBU, and executive director of the school’s Foster Center for Responsible Leadership.

Through Enactus, an umbrella organization for projects that build campus-community partnerships and develop the next generation of leaders, Palmer lures students who want to be difference-makers.

“The best thing we can do is give students the opportunities and the resources, and let them find their way,” he said. “I’ve created projects and different things for students to do over the years, and sometimes you just throw them out like fishing lines and wait for a bite.”

He’s had some prize catches over his 24-year career at SBU, none more so than a handful of past and present students connected with Canvas For a Cure, an Enactus program that raises money for the C.U.R.E. Childhood Cancer Association of Rochester and brings joy to young cancer patients at Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester.

While admiring this Canvas trophy case, Palmer was struck by a common thread running through this “tapestry of caring.” Not only have these students been involved with Canvas For a Cure, but four are alumnae whose Canvas experiences altered their career paths, and who now work for cancer nonprofits or in cancer research.

Stephanie (Dolliver) MarcusThe Canvas story begins with Stephanie (Dolliver) Marcus, a native of Rush, New York, a suburb of Rochester, who followed her brother to SBU, arriving as a freshman in 2012.

Marcus is no stranger to cancer. A survivor herself, the disease has claimed a number of her family members. So as a summer camp counselor in high school, she was drawn to a young camper, Sara, who’d been diagnosed with pediatric leukemia.

“We were 10 years apart, but we were very close and spent lots of time together,” Marcus said. “I visited her in the hospital and did anything I could to help her parents, who had two other boys as well. Then I went to Bona’s and just missed being able to hang out with her.”

On trips back home, she’d volunteer at C.U.R.E. “I knew what they were doing for Sara’s family and I wanted to give back,” she said.

An Education major, Marcus was looking for ways to get involved on campus when she bit on Palmer’s Enactus hook, joining what was then an annual Christmas break service trip to the Bahamas.

One day she told Palmer about her special relationship with her young camper Sara. Palmer put her in touch with a former student, Holly (Gendron) Dutcher, who’d recently been named executive director at C.U.R.E.

Dutcher, a 2009 graduate, had been a student in the five-year BBA/MBA program, worked as Palmer’s graduate assistant, and twice helped organize the annual Bahamas trip, experiences that planted a seed of service in her that would grow over time.

After graduating, Dutcher went to work for a Big 4 accounting firm, then as an accountant for a regional railroad in the Rochester area.

“But I just felt like something was missing,” she said.

Dutcher started looking for volunteer opportunities within the sea of Rochester nonprofits numbering more than 5,000. She learned that C.U.R.E. was seeking volunteers to help with a holiday party.

It was all that seed inside her needed.

“I fell in love with their mission,” Dutcher said, so much so that she got friends involved and organized her own event, Cutting For a Cure. Salon stylists donated their time to harvest ponytails. The event raised more than $30,000 and collected hundreds of ponytails for wigs for cancer patients.

She was asked to join C.U.R.E.’s board of directors, and when the executive director’s position opened up in 2014, she applied for the job.

“I’d fallen so in love with this organization, and I was worried that somebody would come in and ruin it, make it too corporate and stuffy, so as a 27-year-old kid I threw my hat in the race,” Dutcher said. She got the job, and has been there ever since.

When Palmer reached out to her about Marcus’ involvement with the young cancer patient and as a C.U.R.E. volunteer, Dutcher needed no arm twisting to serve as her mentor. “Because, you know, there’s nothing like a Bonnie,” Dutcher said. “We’re all a big, wonderful family, so the fact that a student wanted to get involved in the community I was a part of really meant a lot to me.”

Looking to create a campus project that would aid the battle against cancer, engage students, and stand the test of time, Marcus came up with Canvas For a Cure, a program in which Bona students, staff and community members come together to paint small canvases with uplifting pictures and messages for young cancer patients. Participants pay a small fee, and organizers solicit donations from the community, with all proceeds going to C.U.R.E.

“The idea behind it was that kids could pick out a canvas when they were diagnosed, and bring it with them when they had a hospital visit,” Marcus said. “Hospital rooms are bleak and scary in some ways, so this was a way to help make their room a bit more cheerful.”

It’s a small gesture with a huge impact, Dutcher said.

“The kiddos love them and get so excited about picking which one they want,” she said. “They put them in their rooms and give them to each other as gifts. It’s a wonderful program.”

Just like Dutcher, Marcus found herself questioning her goal of becoming a teacher.

“Being involved with Enactus, whether it was through the Bahamas trip, Canvas For a Cure, or other initiatives, really opened my eyes to doing something different, on wanting my career to be in the space of giving back, so that at the end of the day I could feel that I made a difference,” Marcus said.

She’d earn an MBA from Bona’s, then land a job with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, she’s a senior assistant director for The Jimmy Fund, a community-based fundraising initiative supporting the work being done at Dana-Farber.

Two other Bonaventure alumnae have similar tales of their Canvas For a Cure involvement altering their career aspirations.

Taylor Douglas arrived on campus as a freshman in 2013 to pursue her lifelong dream of being a doctor. “I always wanted to go to med school, but that first year I felt like I wanted something more, something outside of science,” she said. “I’d heard of Enactus, and knew it was a leadership program, so I walked into the School of Business.”

She met professor Palmer and learned about Canvas For a Cure.

“I was like, oh my gosh, jackpot! This is perfect, so up my alley,” Douglas said.

She helped with community fundraising for Canvas and stayed with the program through her four years at Bona’s, her skills as an organizer evident to all, particularly Palmer. So in her junior year, as she was preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), Palmer threw her a curve ball.

“Palmer brings me into his office one day, sits me down, and says, ‘Taylor, don’t take this the wrong way; you will be an amazing doctor, but I think you have more potential. You’ve built such amazing administrative skills through Canvas and the Bahamas trips, and I think you can take those skills and put them into something else. I think you can make a bigger impact in some other way.’”

Douglas accepted Palmer’s offer to do a post-graduate year at Bona’s as his graduate assistant, earn an MBA, then decide if med school was the best choice for her.

“By the end of my senior year, I was like, you know what? I really do like the project management side of the health care world,” she said.

Douglas graduated and went to work as an assistant administrator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “My job was focused on improving operational efficiency, and it was such a natural transition for me, similar to everything I’d been doing in the Enactus/Canvas world,” she said.

Douglas moved to Rochester, New York, in 2018, where she worked for the University of Rochester’s bone marrow transplant team, then for a private health management firm, where she focused on optimizing cancer care. Last year, she joined Cylinder Health, an innovative virtual health platform focused on digestive health and digestive cancer detection, as a product manager.

Back at Bona’s, Canvas was still an annual student-run initiative when the COVID pandemic closed the university in March of 2020, Allison Lefebre’s sophomore year. Lefebre had worked on Canvas as a freshman, but the campus closure and suspension of normal activities had put many such programs in limbo.

Palmer worried that the disruption had dealt a death blow to Canvas.

“But no,” he said. “Allison and two other students came to me their senior year and said, ‘Palmer, let’s do Canvas.’ They had worked on it as freshmen and wanted to bring it back. They essentially started from scratch.”

Lefebre had come to Bona’s intent on becoming a physician assistant. “I was dead set on it,” she said. But while taking her first biology class, she had second thoughts: “I was like, I like this, but I don’t love it.”

Palmer, seeing a parallel between Lefebre’s career uncertainties and those of his former graduate assistant Douglas, put the two in touch.

Lefebre’s experiences with Canvas and Enactus, which included organizing a trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, for students to network with alumni there, opened her eyes to other career options in health care.

“You don’t realize there are so many jobs that don’t require that medical degree, but are needed in the medical field,” she said.

With Douglas as her mentor, Lefebre changed her major and career path, earning a bachelor’s degree in Individual Studies in 2023. She joined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s hematology and oncology new patient coordination team, and, while there, completed the online MBA program at SBU. In October of 2024, she left Dana-Farber for a position with GRAIL, a biotech company that developed a groundbreaking screening test for early detection of more than 50 types of cancer.

Lefebre works with providers in the Boston area to share and promote the technology, and get patients involved.

Canvas For a Cure isn’t the biggest student-run Enactus program on campus, but it’s an example of what happens when students are challenged and provided with the tools they need to succeed, Palmer said.

“These are four incredible people. I’m just happy I could put them in situations and places where they could take advantage of their talents, to give them a chance to lead,” he said. “I tell students that their only job at Bona’s is to become the very best person they want to be, and I think these four women did that. They just took something, ran with it, and built something that turned out to have an impact on their lives.”

Canvas For a Cure not only endures because of their work, but “is in better shape than ever,” said Ryan Forsythe, a sophomore Management major from Buffalo, New York. He and a classmate, Julia Bottino, a Marketing major from Wareham, Massachusetts, were challenged by Palmer to take Canvas to another level.

Previous program managers had moved the canvas-painting day gathering from campus to The Burton, the popular alumni-owned bar and restaurant in Allegany. All agreed it was a brilliant move. For $17.50, attendees got a canvas to paint while enjoying a Burton burger and fries.

To increase attendance at the event in November of 2024, Forsythe and Bottino ramped up promotion efforts on campus and in the community. They also created an online donation campaign.

“We had 71 people at our event and raised close to $2,000,” Forsythe said.

Other steps have been taken to strengthen the organization as well, Bottino added. “We set up a board and a whole system for when things should be completed to make it easier for students coming in,” she said.

The two will continue their work to grow the program.

“Canvas for a Cure is now very healthy, and it’s going to keep happening, hopefully forever,” Forsythe said. “It’s a great event.”

(Learn more about C.U.R.E at curekidscancer.com. The Foster Center for Responsible Leadership seeks the involvement of alumni. To learn more, email Dr. Palmer at tpalmer@sbu.edu)