Why We Started the Foundation — In Our Own Words
Grief does strange things to time. The weeks after we lost our dad in April 2024 moved slowly and all at once. Arrangements to make. People to call. A house full of his things. And underneath all of it, the same question, circling back.
What do we do with this?
Not the estate. Not the logistics. Him. Everything he was to this community, to his friends, to the people whose lives he quietly made easier without ever asking for credit. What do you do when someone like that is gone and you’re the one left holding the weight of who he was?
We didn’t have an answer. Just a feeling that wouldn’t leave. That the way he lived was worth continuing somehow. That the instinct he had, to just show up for people, didn’t have to end with him.
The feeling didn’t go anywhere. It followed us through that summer, into the fall, into the next year. We had no idea what to do with it.
The answer didn’t come from a meeting, or a lawyer’s office, or a late night going through his things. It came the way most real things in my life come. On the phone with Mark.
Mark is my best friend. Every morning, on the drive to work, I call him and we talk about everything. We have for years. It’s the most ordinary part of my day.
One of those mornings, more than a year after we lost my dad, he said we should do a golf tournament for him. Not once. Every year. Something with his name on it that actually did something. Mark knew Joe. He loved him. And he handed me the idea on a regular drive to work like it was nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. It was the first time in over a year that the grief had somewhere to go.
My dad had a friend like that once. Turns out I do too.
It grew from there. My brother, my sister, and I came together around it and started asking what else it could be. A tournament, yes. But also a way to find people close to home who need a hand and show up for them. Quietly. Without fanfare. The way he always did.
We incorporated in March 2026, nearly two years after we lost him. It took that long to get it right. To make sure what we built actually reflected who he was, not just who we wished we could keep.
I don’t know what this becomes in ten years. What I know is that people in southeastern Massachusetts will know his name. Not because we put it on something. Because of what gets done in it.
That’s enough for us.
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— Christina, Joey, & Anthony
The Joseph P. Niccoli Sr. Foundation