​The laugh comes first. It's not a polite chuckle or a quiet office laugh. It's the kind that travels through walls, bounces down hallways, and makes people in adjacent rooms wonder what they're missing. When he walks into a room, he fills it. Not loudly. Just completely. It’s his. He leans in when he talks to you. He makes eye contact. He remembers your name. He looks like a guy who came to stay.

​None of this was planned.

​Adam grew up with one piece of career advice, the same one many kids got: go to college, figure it out later. He liked science and math, so he enrolled at Ohio State, planning to major in mechanical engineering, and figured it would work. A year in, he looked up what mechanical engineers actually did every day.

​"I was like, I don't want to do that," he says.

​So he transferred to Columbus State, automotive technology. He loved studying cars. Hated the shop.

​He answered phones well, so they put him at the service desk, but the tension of upselling ate at him. He wanted to help people. Selling them things they didn't need was close enough to the opposite of helping that he couldn't reconcile it.

​So he went to EMT school. Drove the "woo woo bus.” But most of the serious calls went to the fire department, not the private ambulance company, and he found himself sitting at the station watching TV on the clock, which wasn't for him either. He started running medical transport, taking patients by ambulance to dialysis appointments. He watched the needles, the blood, the organized chaos of the machines. He liked it. He bugged the clinic until they hired him.

​He did dialysis for ten years.

​Along the way, he tried a variety of side hustles to build something on the side. He liked people. He just didn't like the pressure of sales.

​Seven years into dialysis, he was buying his second home and working with his second realtor. He asked the guy, Dave, how many houses he'd show him before he was wasting his time. Dave said he'd show him as many as he wanted. "I figured if he could do it like that, I could do it like that."

​He got his real estate license. The insight that made it work was simple: people who want to buy or sell a house already want to. They don't need to be persuaded. They need someone they can trust to guide them through. That was something he could actually do. So he wore a real estate logo on his shirt so he wouldn't have to announce himself. Let the logo do the explaining. Keep the conversation real.

​While he was building the real estate practice, juggling dialysis, and networking at every chamber event he could find in Westerville, his phone rang. A number he didn't recognize.

​It was a cousin from years past. They hadn't spoken since they were kids. She'd seen a post Adam had made a couple of years earlier, after he and his wife Rachel got the news that they likely couldn't have children. They told people publicly, so they wouldn't have to keep fielding the "when are you having kids?" question at every gathering. His cousin had seen it.

​Her niece’s baby needed a home. Did Adam want a baby?

​"Let me call my wife."

​He'd always wanted kids, and when he asked Rachel, she was a hundred percent yes, on the spot. Adam was the one who hesitated for a moment. Then he called his cousin back.

​"We'll do this. Don't know what it looks like, but we'll do it."

​Despite some initial bumps in the road, Shiloh was placed with them seven days after he was born. Born into a challenging scenario, Shiloh spent his first weeks in the NICU. The medical team was exceptional, and the nurses taught Rachel and Adam, who had never changed a diaper, what they needed to know before discharge.

​"Packages started showing up at the door,” Adam said, explaining that friends began sending them baby supplies and furniture they hadn’t had time to buy, didn’t know they needed, and in some cases, didn’t know what they were.

​They figured it out.

​Shiloh was two months old when Adam went to a chamber event called Blankets and Brew. He knew there would be beer. He didn't know what the blankets had to do with anything.

​He walked in. On the other side of a table covered in soft, colorful fleece blankets stood a woman named Jessica Rudolph. She told him the blankets were for youth in foster care.

​"We just got placement of our son two months ago," Adam said.

Jessica asked him, "Would you like to pick out a print and make it for Shiloh?"

"I can do that?"

​She handed him materials and told him to follow the instructions. He cut the tassels, tied the knots, and filled out the tag. 

​That was October 2022. That was the beginning.

​Time passed. He kept showing up to My Very Own Blanket events. Made blankets. Spoke at a few of them. Stayed to clean up afterward. At a volunteer appreciation event, someone asked if he was on the board.

​He wasn't. But he said he'd be interested.

​Jessica raised an eyebrow. Really?

​Really. He didn’t really know what all that meant, but he was interested.

​Adam began attending meetings, and the board voted him as a new member. Then the chair stepped back, the interim chair had other commitments that needed his attention, and people started looking in Adam's direction. He took over in January 2025.

​He had no nonprofit background. He didn't know what a board was supposed to do.

​"The only position I probably had any grasp of was treasurer. And that's just because it sounds like money."

​What he had was Randy Gable, the former chair who'd been there nine years, who taught him how to run a meeting. And Scott Marier, a consultant with 17 years of nonprofit experience who was working with Jessica on board development. Scott sat with Adam and explained something that changed how he saw the whole operation: the board's job is governance. Set the direction. Let Jessica run the organization. The board had authority and responsibility, and it needed to step into both.

​"Jessica, to her incredible credit, gave me incredible space to adjust direction and make decisions," Adam says. Before, meetings were mostly Jessica updating the board on what was happening. The board existed, functionally, to check a legal box. If something happened to Jessica, My Very Own Blanket would have been no more.

​That bothered Adam.

​"At that time, we had no succession plan, if Jessica were to disappear, my very own blanket would cease to exist."

​And now? Adam said the organization would struggle, “But I think we could hold it together as a team."

That's not good enough for him. He has at most eight years left in his term. His goal at the end of those eight years is an organization strong enough to sail without him or any of the current board, or even Jessica. Not held together by any one person. Built to carry the mission forward on its own.

​The changes since he took the chair have been real. The board has its own identity now, its own sense of purpose. Committees have clear roles, so members don't burn out doing too much. Task forces work through the hard problems before they get to a full board meeting, so governance stays sharp and time gets respected. Board meetings are for decisions, not status updates. Those can be emails.

"The folks that are moving the needle are usually very busy people. I want to honor their time."

A new space is coming. My Very Own Blanket is exploring a move into a larger, more versatile space, and since JoAnn Fabrics closed, MVOB has started selling fleece directly to volunteers who want to make blankets on their own at home. The new space makes that more possible.

​Adam knows the last time the organization was in a bigger space, it drifted. Jessica has been honest about that. More room meant less focus. Adam's answer is a single word he uses more than once when you ask him about it.

​No.

​"Hard saying no when somebody says, 'What if we did this? This would be good.' Well, it would be good. But it doesn't fit."

​He also wants better agency relationships. MVOB has worked with agencies across the country for 27 years, but the connections are uneven. Turnover in the social services sector is brutal. He doesn't want a volunteer to carry a stack of handmade blankets to an agency where nobody knows who they are or why they're there. The blanket deserves better than that. So does the volunteer. MVOB is working to implement a more intentional approach to communicating with agencies that deal with youth in foster care and can distribute blankets.

The longer dream is digital. Every blanket MVOB makes has a tag with a note area. Jessica added it years ago after a young girl at an event asked who would care enough to make her blanket. Adam wants to take it further. A QR code on the tag. A child or caregiver could scan it if they want to. They see who made the blanket, that there's a real person who cares on the other end of this thing. And if they do scan it, the person who made the blanket gets a notification that a child in foster care received a gift of their blanket.

When asked, Adam didn’t hesitate about what he wanted readers to take from his story.

"I don't want to be the hero. I want my blanket to be the hero."

He meant the organization. He meant the mission. But also the actual blanket. The one he made for Shiloh at a chamber event two years ago, cutting tassels and filling out a tag for a two-month-old who had no idea what was happening. Shiloh doesn't care which blanket he sleeps with now. He's got options.

That blanket means more to Adam than it does to his son. He knows it. He says so. That's why you'd want him running the board.

​He's in it for what it means. Not what it gets him. ​

​■
​​​Story by Mac Cordell

​Today, we know My Very Own Blanket as a powerhouse that delivered more than 29,000 blankets last year alone. But the history of this organization is built on what Jessica lovingly calls "being foolish enough for God's glory."

But what might look like stubbornness to some is actually a profound, unshakeable perseverance. It is the grit required to turn a "little idea" into a global movement.

​​Story by Mac Cordell

We are grateful for the faithful support of Sunbury Christian Church. The Women's Winter Gathering made blankets for children in foster care at their February event. ​

Group leader Cheryl H. told us, "We were honored to make 75 blankets during our Women's Winter Gathering on February 22! What a wonderful organization right here close to home! We look forward to contributing again in the future and pray these blankets are a blessing to the children who receive them."