ASHBY — Town resident Marya Fonsh-Mielinski was thrilled to receive $3,000 in donations toward her Walk MS fundraising efforts.
Throughout the month of May, Leominster businesses Cutie Patuties and Cutiques collected donations for her National Multiple Sclerosis Society Walk MS team, Miles for Marya, and The Martin A. Turbide MS Foundation offered to match whatever was collected. ECi Stores CFO Neil Abramson presented Fonsh-Mielinski with a $1,000 check on June 25 and then Fitchburg resident Matt Majikas surprised her with a $2,000 check, saying his family’s foundation decided to double their match.
The donations brought tears to Fonsh-Mielinski’s eyes, and she was happy to pose for a photo with the two men in front of Cuties on Central Street.
“I was astounded at the amount of the check from Cuties and more so when I saw that The Martin A. Turbide Foundation had doubled it. That is an amazing feeling,” she expressed, adding that those donations brought her team fundraising total this year to over $16,000.
Fonsh-Mielinski grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts and after graduating from Amherst Regional High School she went off to State University of New York at Binghamton, spending her junior year in Israel and earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She returned to her roots and got her master’s in early childhood education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and began teaching kindergarten in Springfield.
She and her husband Dave live in Ashby along with their rescue shepherd/collie mix Mona. Fonsh-Mielinski has been teaching kindergarten in at Priest Street Elementary School in Leominster for 21 years, where the electronic sign announced World MS Day on May 30. After she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, MS, in 2024, she knew participating in the Walk MS that year “was too soon for me to get my head around it” but she did the walk in Worcester the following year.
“I knew that it was an easy way to get involved with the MS community and support the National MS Society,” Fonsh-Mielinski relayed. “I figured I’d raise a little money and have some fun, but I ended up raising around $11,000 the first year amazed by each donation that came in. My husband and sister kept pushing me to up my fundraising goal and when we topped $10K I was in shock.”
She knew ahead of time she was going to be honored at this year’s Walk MS: Worcester opening ceremony back in May because of her circles of support — orange represents those who are living with MS, green represents those who love or support someone living with MS, including memorials for those who have passed, and yellow represents those who do not have a direct personal tie to MS but support the National MS Society’s mission to find a cure.
“Orange was me, green was my mom and husband, and yellow was a friend,” Fonsh-Mielinski shared. “I knew this was going to be a special occasion, so I wanted to show up for it. I really put myself out there into the community, got brave and went to a billion stores in Leominster and handed out my fundraising flyer.”
She brought the flyer to Susan’s Nails at 1290 Main St. in Leominster, where owner Huong Marosz gave her a very generous $1,000 donation, and then she dropped off a flier with Kim Butkiewicz, one of the managers at Cuties.
“Shortly after that I got a Facebook message asking me if I’d be willing to partner with them as they collected donations in May,” Fonsh-Mielinski said of Cuties and Cutiques, which both fall under the ECi Stores umbrella and they do fundraisers monthly for different charities and organizations.
Her response was “of course!” and she got the ball rolling connecting the Leominster businesses with the National MS Society.
“I knew that the National MS Society had circles of support that you could have donations given and then the location would post them,” Fonsh-Mielinski said. “I offered that to Kim and worked with my contacts at the local office of the National MS Society, Emily Marcoux and Jillian Tartt, who organized the effort with Kim and off it went.”
She loves surprises so she didn’t go to see the orange circles filled out by people who donated that hung in the Cuties and Cutiques windows until the end of May but even then, she had no idea what that mean monetarily.
“When I went that day to see them, Kim told me that she’d had someone come in and offer to match the donations dollar for dollar. I was shocked and touched when she said that had never happened before,” Fonsh-Mielinski conveyed.
She went online later and saw that it was The Martin A. Turbide MS Foundation who had pledged the donation, which turned out to be one of those incredible small world instances.
“When I first moved here my trainer at the gym, Carla Turbide, part of the Turbide family, told me she had MS,” Fonsh-Mielinski said. “When I was diagnosed, she was one of the first people I called so I assumed that was the connection, but it turns out it was her son-in-law Matt who is on the board of the foundation. He went to Cutie Patuties, he knows Neil, and it just went from there.”
She said she is “so thankful” that she and Turbide had that special connection that she could count on when she was diagnosed with MS and is incredibly grateful for the donations from her family’s foundation and Abramson’s businesses.
“Every donation is a gift,” Fonsh-Mielinski said. “I love seeing who donates and what the connection is between the two of us. People come out of the woodwork. You just have to ask, truly. That’s what it boils down to — being brave enough to ask and humble enough to accept combined with the knowledge that I am blessed.”
Through her first two years of participating in Walk MS with her team Miles for Marya, they have raised over $25,000. Sept. 30 is the final date to collect money for the 2026 Walk MS and Fonsh-Mielinski said she appreciates each and every dollar that comes in by people visiting https://tinyurl.com/a7vw2dx7 and donating.
“I am so lucky to have my family and friends’ support and the way this community and all the lines of my life from childhood to high school and college and beyond come together in support of me and the cause, it’s overwhelming,” she said. “I try to always keep in the front of my mind how lucky I am to have the emotional support and the monetary support that I do.
“I know that many people who are diagnosed with MS are not as lucky,” Fonsh-Mielinski said. “It’s a tricky disease to explain and it shows up in everyone in different ways and can look different every day. I want to make sure that because I’m surrounded by such love and support that I pay it forward so the National MS Society can help others who might not be as fortunate to have the support that I have.”
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