When you meet Joyce Rheingold, you receive a cheerful greeting, a direct gaze, and a sense of warm energy.

By Whitney Clark

When you meet Joyce Rheingold, you receive a cheerful greeting, a direct gaze, and a sense of warm energy. She is a no-nonsense lady who has raised four children, worked hard for her community, and yet had time for and interest in many friends, theater, and travel.

Joyce is a wonderful cook, an excellent gardener, and a good reader. A longtime Rye resident, she has spent many summers enjoying free time at a lakeside home in New Hampshire with her extended family. She has also spent a great deal of time raising money for her favorite charity of the past 20 years, The Open Door Foundation, Joyce Bagley Rheingold grew up in Townsend, Massachusetts, and graduated from Spalding High School, Connecticut College, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration. Utilizing the skills she gained there, she went on to manage the accounting department of her husband Paul’s New York City law firm for 20 years.

She was one of the founders of the Children’s Blood Foundation of New York Hospital, Westchester Division. She has been on the boards of the Rye Free Reading Room and the Twig Organization, enthusiastically working to raise money for the library, United Hospital, and, after the hospital closed, Port Chester-Rye-Rye Brook EMS.

The passion for her work, fundraising for Open Door, is clear in her sympathy for families in less fortunate circumstances trying to maintain healthy standards in very difficult times. Open Door provides health care advocates, doctors, dentists, wellness instructors, and specialists of all kinds to underprivileged communities in Port Chester, Sleepy Hollow, Mount Kisco, Brewster, and Ossining.

Open Door’s unique model of care has had a positive impact on patient health while offering system-wide savings and generating significant economic returns for the entire community. Since opening in 1990, Open Door has demonstrated how to be a vital safety net for the underserved individuals and families in Westchester and Putnam Counties. So no wonder that an efficient and empathetic fundraiser like Joyce Rheingold would gravitate to joining the Open Door Foundation board from 2003 to 2014. She has served as secretary, vice chairperson, and leader of the Gifts Committee.

 Just returning home from a trip to Berlin, Amsterdam, Cornwall, and Cambridge, Joyce will be celebrated as the energetic fundraiser she is at a “Harvest Hoedown” party in her honor. The party will include bluegrass music and square dancing on November 6 at Brynwood Country Club in Armonk. We can just imagine Joyce kicking up her cowgirl boots and swinging her partner, Paul, in the name of charity and good times for everyone.

Do-si-do, Joyce!

 

For ticket information, go to www.opendoormedical.org/foundation/events.