Making wishes come true

As IT director for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America, Jim Toy lives a dreamy job

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Perhaps Jim Toy's destiny was to become a child's wish maker. In his 10 years as IT honcho for the nonprofit Make-A-Wish Foundation of America , Toy certainly has fulfilled that role. Laid-back and soft-spoken, the 36-year-old New Jersey native has helped the Phoenix-based foundation grant some 90,000 wishes to severely ill children in the U.S.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation has 45 chapters and averages 11,000-plus wishes a year (and has granted about 120,000 since its inception 25 years ago). Toy and his staff of five operate the 15-server network, in-office wireless LAN and half-dozen critical databases that support the chapters. More importantly, IT staffers use their creative energies for a wide variety of fundraising projects. They design countless custom Web applications for sponsors, as well as write the foundation's mission-critical applications, such as WishMaker Pro, a secure Web database application built on Microsoft SQL that tracks the details of even the most complex wish, and Wish Café, a wish-tracking database.

"What I love about my job is that no two days are the same - there are always new projects, new sponsors, new creative ideas for benefiting Make-A-Wish," Toy says.

He also enjoys the can-do attitude that permeates the organization, from its people to its sponsors. For instance, Toy is embarking on a project to build a custom credit-card ordering application to interface with Bank of America's security systems. Among other functions, the interface will enable Make-A-Wish chapters to give families prepaid, co-branded credit cards for wishes involving a shopping spree or other expenditures. Toy's interface work is necessary because Bank of America's security systems are not designed to allow the kind of ordering procedure that Make-A-Wish will need, in which one person orders the card, payment comes from somewhere else and it ships to yet another address. "Typically, sponsors will go a long way to do as much as they can do, but rarely is there a project where IT is not involved," he says.