Rachel & Vinnie Lauria

GOAL-$3,500

Rachel is 36 years old and married to her wonderful husband Vinnie. She is also mom of 4 kids, Vinnie Jr, Anthony, Anna and Sarah ages 10, 8, 6 and 4. Being a parent to these four has been the best experience of Rachel's life!

Rachel believes that connection and community are two of the keys to maintaining wellness and has been blessed to have her family as well as her friends and community to help her stay connected.

To maintain her own wellness, she enjoys exercise and has a small group of friends that keep each other motivated to keep going when it feels impossible. Rachel is active in her faith and church parish as a religious education teacher. She is also a member of the school board, as well as a board member for the HFM Prevention Council.

Additionally, Rachel is a health/life coach where she enjoys helping people focus on their own health and wellness needs to create and maintain a full, satisfying life they feel in control of and comfortable in.

In Rachel's professional life, she is the Bureau Director of Treatment and Recovery at the New York Council on Problem Gambling. She would like to encourage people to include gambling disorder when thinking of mental illness. Gambling Disorder is often co-occurring with anxiety, depression, and alcohol use disorder. It is important to do screenings for problem gambling because it is difficult to detect, often referred to as the "hidden addiction", while the signs and symptoms of the co-occurring disorders are more easily spotted and understood, underlying gambling problems can be missed.

Like with other mental health disorders, gambling disorder is treatable! NYCPG has top notch providers and can connect people (including affected family members) to a variety of services to improve the quality of people's mental health and wellness. Visit nyproblemgamblinghelp.org to connect with help or for more information.

Vinnie is a 10 year old 5th grader at Wells Central school in the southern Adirondack Mountains. Vinnie is the oldest of four children and he takes the role of being the biggest brother seriously.

Vinnie plays soccer and lacrosse as well as participates in downhill skiing. This year he'll be challenging himself by learning to snowboard.

Vinnie is an altar server in his church. He also enjoys helping at the church garage sale every summer as well as pitching in at other community events.

Vinnie enjoys being outside and moving by doing things like ropes courses, skateboarding, sports, kayaking and hiking.

Vinnie is also an avid reader, having completed the Harry Potter series and is now working on the Percy Jackson series.
He also enjoys art-painting, drawing, jewelry making and wood burning. Vinnie learned to play the baritone in 4th grade and is starting a new instrument this year in 5th grade.

View Rachel & Vinnie's progress HERE.