Faces of Rochester

The Gala Goer

By Laurie Mona

If you’re asking yourself why Laura Ventura’s face seems so familiar, it may be that you’ve run into her at one of the countless charity events she’s attended over the past year. Or that you’ve noticed her regularly gracing the pages of this magazine’s “Scene About Town” section. Or maybe you’ve seen one of the billboards, print ads, or buses featuring her smiling face promoting the United Way.

It might seem impossible that until recently, she wasn’t even living on the same continent as the rest of us, much less in Rochester. A native of the small town of Crysler, Ontario (population 400), the well-traveled Laura (she’s visited more than 80 cities in 21 countries) was living and working in Amsterdam until moving here in early 2007 to work as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch and join her fiancé (now husband) Ray, an intellectual property lawyer at IBM.

Ray and Laura share a love of meeting new people, and there’s no better venue for that than community involvement. “There are such an incredible amount of charity events here, so many opportunities to be engaged. For the size of the community, it’s phenomenal ... there’s no excuse for someone not to be involved, because there’s a long list of opportunities,” she says. Like when Laura worked with the United Way to line up Christmas calls at Merrill Lynch—opening up the office to let people call anywhere in the world. One thing led to another, and a few months later the United Way asked Laura to be one of the faces of the “Live United” campaign. “Now everyone says, ‘I saw you today—on the side of the bus!’” Laura says.

Laura—who most recently served as co-chair of the Boys and Girls Club’s A Chair Affair—doesn’t know how many charity events she and Ray have attended since they’ve been in Rochester, but it’s “enough so that my husband is now buying a tux. I’ll go to any event once to support it.”