Gaffney starts his days at 5 a.m. so he can work on Covenant House projects before he heads to the office. When he returns home at 8 p.m., he works on securing new donors. As a participant and mentor for Covenant House’s Home Team, he runs marathons to raise money (he’s personally raised $31,000) as well as awareness about homeless kids. He visits Covenant House shelters wherever he travels. He arrives early and leaves late whenever he attends board meetings, graduations, and other events at Covenant House so he can spend time with the kids and the staff.
Covenant House kids cheer Gaffney on prior to a race.
Since Gaffney helped organize the first Executive Sleep Out fundraiser in New York in 2011, that movement has spread across the United States and Canada and expanded to include young professionals, mothers, students, and more. To date, the events have raised more than $25 million for Covenant House. Last year, Gaffney personally arranged for more than 30 people in Philadelphia; Atlantic City, N.J.; Orlando, Fla.; and Detroit to participate in the November Sleep Out and raised $286,000 in Philadelphia alone. He helped recruit a team of Toll Brothers executives from Michigan that raised $21,500—more than double its goal—during Detroit’s inaugural Sleep Out. That same year, Gaffney’s work for Covenant House was honored during A Night of Broadway Stars Sleep Out, the second-best fundraiser in Covenant House’s history (Jon Bon Jovi’s event the year before made more, not surprisingly).
The kids of Covenant House are always on Gaffney’s mind, and his passion has become a family affair. His daughter, Erin, is on the Young Associates Board at Covenant House New York and has slept out on the streets and run half-marathons on his teams. When he and his wife, Kathryn, got married two years ago, they asked wedding guests to donate to Covenant House in lieu of gifts.
Matthew Kaplan, CEO of interdisciplinary green building company and Toll Brothers client ReVireo, was so inspired by Gaffney’s devotion that he joined a New Jersey Sleep Out in 2013 and is now chairman of the Covenant House New Jersey Associate Board. Whenever he or anyone else tries to praise Gaffney, Kaplan says, he deflects it and asks people to focus on how the kids of Covenant House have persevered through severe hardships.
Naturally outgoing and interested in people, Gaffney knows someone almost everywhere he goes. He’s effusive when talking up his kids and his cause, but he struggles when it comes to talking about himself. He credits family, friends, colleagues, and peers for his success in helping the Covenant House mission, and he would much rather talk about the kids’ achievements than his own. He’ll tell you about Hollywood Anderson, a young man who learned to play guitar at a Covenant House and charmed the American Idol judges two years later. “It’s an incredible thing when you get to see a kid blossom over the years,” Gaffney says. “And that’s just one success story. There are so many.”
