From the left: Richard and Anna Laidlaw, and their son, Jack, make signs for one of this week's Taylor Swift Concerts in their home in Stittsville, Ont., on Nov. 12.Kaja Tirrul/The Globe and Mail
When Ottawa’s Anna and Richard Laidlaw began raising money for their son Jack’s rare genetic neurological disorder, they were met with cascading gestures of unexpected kindness, ending with the seven-year-old getting a chance to see Taylor Swift in Toronto this week from one of the best seats in the house.
After years spent bouncing between medical specialists and physical therapists dealing with inward-pointing toes, Jack was diagnosed last December with hereditary spastic paraplegia type 4 (SPG4), which can weaken and tighten a person’s legs. The diagnosis was devastating to the young sports lover’s family, especially as symptoms are generally expected to worsen with age and there is no known cure.
While working with a pediatric neurologist who focuses on the disease at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Laidlaws learned that scientists at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School were trying to develop a gene therapy for the disease. They decided to help the researchers raise as much as US$3-million to bring the therapy to clinical trial and eventually, hopefully, be able to treat Jack.
The Laidlaws began fundraising in March, eventually raising about US$60,000, which, along with the help of some foundations, will allow the UMass scientists to begin their work. “It seems like every weekend there’s a fundraiser,” said Anna Laidlaw, a policy analyst with the federal government. It was at one of those events that Swift tickets inadvertently got involved.
“It still doesn’t seem real,” Anna said.
Two daughters of a family friend, 13-year-old Ehvah and 10-year-old Adalee, offered to give their tickets for the first of Swift’s six concerts in Toronto to help the cause. They were highly coveted floor seats, no less, close to the long catwalk seen in countless social-media posts and the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film.
In an e-mail through a family member, Ehvah and Adalee said that helping Jack’s quest for treatment was more important than attending a Swift concert. “Seeing her is a want,” they wrote.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the girls by their surname at the family’s request.
The tickets were to be auctioned off, and an anonymous donor offered to match the winning bid, Anna said.
When CTV published a story about the ticket auction, Melissa Kruyne, a mental-health advocate and the co-owner of the Ottawa lumber and framing-material company KOTT, was immediately stirred. “I needed to be involved,” she said.
So she put in a bid of $20,000 and, last weekend, won the tickets.
Discussing the win with her husband, Kruyne decided to turn the sisters’ generosity around: She’d give them back. “They did something so generous,” she said. “The tickets are great tickets, and I just thought it was spectacular for them to do that.”
But then Ehvah and Adalee decided to take Kruyne’s generosity a step further: They’d give the tickets to Jack.
Now Jack and his father are preparing for the trip to Toronto for the show. And with the anonymous donor matching Kruyne’s bid, the Laidlaws have raised another $40,000 to get the UMass researchers closer to clinical trials.
“The silver lining has been the community rallying around us, seeing all the good, all these acts of kindness and generosity,” Anna said. And “just seeing how excited he is for this concert, it really keeps him lifted up, too.”
People and organizations across Southern Ontario have used the Eras Tour to rally for their causes. With the minimum ticket price for the Toronto dates hovering around $2,300 on secondary markets as of Tuesday – for an obstructed view – they’re hoping to use the massive demand for good.
Epilepsy Toronto hosted a raffle last month for two private suite tickets to the Thursday show at the Rogers Centre. The Joan Rotondi Hope & Empowerment Foundation, an ovarian-cancer assistance and research organization, raised $6,000 using suite tickets for the following weekend. And after the Humane Society of Kitchener Waterloo & Stratford Perth threw a pair of Eras Tour tickets into a Swift-themed 50/50 raffle, the pot wound up topping out at more than $360,000.
Swift has been making regular, major donations to food banks at cities she’s performed in. Her gifts have sometimes paid for the equivalent of tens of thousands of meals, including 30,000 for a Minnesota food bank and 75,000 for one in Denver.
Though she hasn’t announced publicly if she’ll do the same in conjunction with her upcoming Toronto and Vancouver dates, numerous Toronto-based organizations are holding auctions and events to benefit the city’s Daily Bread Food Bank, which runs 207 programs in the city.
The “Taylor Swift Way” street signs dotting Toronto’s downtown to celebrate this month’s concerts are being gradually auctioned off for the food bank and have already raised more than $23,000. Rogers Communications has offered to match the money raised up to $113,000 – a nod to 13, Swift’s lucky number.