A few years ago when her son Carpenter was about 5, he and some of his peanut-size pals were trundling a little red wagon down Bayview toward town. In the bottom of the wagon lay six lonely cookies and a little sand. 

Someone asked: "What's with the cookies? Taking them for a ride?" 

Car said: "No, selling them for the Fire Department."  

"How much?"  

"50 cents." 

Two cookies were then purchased for somewhat more than a dollar, and the kids went on their way.

So, it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  

His mom, Gina Garan didn’t set out to be either a fundraiser or a community organizer par excellence.  In fact, she wanted to work in television.  But we all noticed her fundraising talents when she organized Sandy vs. Cherry Grove on Facebook in the fall of 2012 right after the hurricane hit us. Read on and we’ll even tell you how Carpenter got his name.

  “Here I was in Brooklyn,” says Gina, “flooded out of my home there and unable to find out if my Grove house was okay. I felt so worried, cut off and isolated. So I started asking friends on Facebook to give me news. That’s how it started; that’s how I set up Sandy vs, Cherry Grove.”

Her Fundrazr campaign took in about $30,000 for the Dune Fund in a matter of days, but even more impressive, it drew more than 800 members who stayed in touch with each other for the same reason as Gina: they wanted news and to be in it together. Literally thousands of posts were tracked -- news and pictures about the damage, overhaul efforts, warnings, official notices, and do’s and don’ts about coming back into the community and to one’s own home. For many of us, Gina’s Facebook page was the only news nerve center we had, and we checked it daily or more to find out if our little slice of paradise still stood.  It was a textbook example of how the Internet builds “virtual communities.”  It united us literally every day with our town, our properties and maybe more important, with each other.  

All told, Gina has been behind efforts to support EMS, the new fire truck (with the equally indomitable Sofina Terzo), and has raised close to $100,000. Sandy vs. Cherry Grove has morphed into Cherry Grove Untucked on FB which now has some 1,300 members, most of whom have a lot to say about everything, but then that’s Cherry Grove for you. (Gina also started many other crowdfunding campaigns for her other friends and interests, but that’s another story.)

So how did this dynamo come to be?  Gina grew up in Ardsley in Westchester County, the oldest of four girls born to a NYC Fire Department captain and a stay-at-home mom.

”We had an amazing childhood,” she says.  “My dad always had 100 projects going at once in addition to his day job. So, I guess I inherited a stay-busy gene.”

Her first entrepreneurial venture was photographing the now-retired Blythe doll who ended up starring in 12 books. She’s just now finished a new doll book, Susie Sad Eyes, with her friend, the performance artist Justin Vivian Bond.  She has a “day job” too as a producer for corporate videos mostly in the pharmaceutical field. 

“I’ve traveled all over the world doing corporate shoots and I love it,” she says. “But then again I love everything I do.” When she’s not doing that, she’s hanging out with some of her other loves, Cherry Grove’s drag queens.

But there is one who she loves the most: her 10-year-old son Carpenter.  Carpenter? What is that, a family name? The street he was born on?  Oh no, no. He’s named for Karen Carpenter, her all-time favorite performer.  “My ex-husband Asa drew the line about naming him  ‘Karen’ so we compromised.”

“If I could have designed the kind of kid I wanted, it would be Carpenter,” this proud mother says. “He’s smart, quick, busy and engaged, generous, caring, sweet natured, and very charming.” He’s also pretty cute.

Gina says Carpenter’s as entrepreneurial as her and her dad. “One day in Williamsburg I looked out the apartment window and saw that he’d set up a sales table on the sidewalk.  He will sell anything and make a profit. He once turned down a $10 a week allowance because he said he made more by selling stuff. When I mentioned that he still had to clean his room and make the bed, he told me that an allowance was too much pressure.” Carpenter is also a coin collector and to Gina’s amazement, knows more than a few of the coin dealers in Manhattan.

Gina bought Tara on Aeon Walk about eight years ago, even though it’s her 30th summer out here.  That’s where she met Jackie Carlson. It was “love at first sight.” Jackie is a classically trained dancer who now performs with STREB which bills itself as an “extreme action company that stretches the limits of the human body.”

Here’s hoping we will not need any more catastrophe money, but if we do, we can rest assured Gina will raise it for us.