MARBLEHEAD — Alyssa Prince and Liz Steinfeld raised $25,000 at the Cure By The Harbor benefit for lung-cancer research.
Cure By The Harbor was founded to honor the memory of Prince’s husband, Kevin Prince, who died at the age of 44 of an aggressive form of lung cancer that affects nonsmokers.
The funds were allocated to support research conducted by Dr. Zosia Piotrowska, Kevin Prince’s physician at the Mass General Cancer Center.
Before the inception of the Cure By The Harbor benefit, Steinfeld had mentioned to Alyssa Prince, who is the commodore at the Dolphin Yacht Club, that she would like to hold a fundraiser for cancer there. She had no idea that Alyssa Prince’s husband had recently died of cancer.
Alyssa Prince said fundraising for cancer research was something that she had never thought of before.
“I had just kind of focused on raising my kids and dealing with that, like heads down,” Alyssa Prince added. “I just couldn’t get myself there. But in talking with Liz, it just sounded like such a fun idea. Like something I would really enjoy doing, and then also raising the money is just obviously the best part of it.”
The pair decided to hold an event at the club in the spring called Cure By The Harbor, which Alyssa and Kevin Prince’s daughter, Callie, designed the logo for.
“We landed on May 22. The crazy thing was that it was Kevin’s birthday week, so it just worked out,” Alyssa Prince said.
They created a website, sold tickets online through Steinfeld’s store’s website, asked local businesses to sponsor raffle baskets, and even held a fashion show at the event.
“Liz wanted to do this fashion show with lingerie and bathing suits. And I was like, first of all, my husband would kill me,” Alyssa Prince said.
Steinfeld held the auditions and curated the fashion show out of her shop, Liz Steinfeld Lingerie, on Atlantic Avenue.
“I called a couple of friends for models and I had to interview them to make sure they could fit in the swimsuits and in the lingerie and that they felt comfortable in it,” Steinfeld said. “They came into the store and we fitted them here and then we were ready to go.”
Steinfeld said she then went “door-to-door” to many local businesses, and that all of them stepped up to donate money or raffle baskets.
She added that the James family walked into her store and wrote a $1,000 check for the cause.
They received roughly 25 local sponsors and two platinum sponsors — Kevin Prince’s company, MBRAUN of Stratham, N.H., and his fraternity brother Brian Giordano’s company, Goodnow Insurance of Danvers — each of which donated $2,500.
More than 200 tickets were sold for the event.
Before Kevin Prince was diagnosed with cancer, he was “a big runner and he was starting to have back pain,” Alyssa Prince said.
He went to get an MRI, which revealed a small fracture on his spine and a small spot on his lung.
“We had young kids and we find out he has stage 4 lung cancer,” she said.
Kevin Prince was able to receive “targeted therapy” for his cancer in the form of a pill that he could take daily.
“As long as his body doesn’t reject it, he can live a normal life. But the studies showed that typically, bodies will reject it within five or 10 years, could be sooner, could be less, Alyssa Prince said.
Kevin Prince was able to live “a normal life” for approximately a year and a half after his diagnosis.
“He hiked Tuckerman Ravine in Washington with my kids. It was crazy how we were able to then live a normal life,” Alyssa Prince said.
But after a year and a half, Kevin Prince’s body started to reject the medication and he had to start chemotherapy. He died on Aug. 19, 2021.
“I feel so strongly that this money will go to that research that will make them figure out why targeted therapy stops working after a certain amount of time,” Alyssa Prince said.
