By Tyler Amorando
By the time Toni Boucher hit “save” on the final draft of her latest book, The Husky Effect: How UConn Is Creating the Entrepreneurs of the Future, she had completed a journey that started more than two decades earlier—and, really, much longer ago than that.
“This book is actually twenty years in the making,” she said. “Actually, it started with a cousin of mine who sent me sixty seven pages of notes about our early life in Italy before we immigrated.” That manuscript, filled with wartime memories, rural farming life, and family resilience, eventually became Stone Doll: A Memoir, due out this November. But The Husky Effect—released earlier this year—was the book that unexpectedly came first.
Boucher, a former Connecticut state senator and now First Selectman of Wilton, never intended to release the books out of order. But when co-author Josh Young—who helped organize her sprawling three hundred page draft—saw a story-within-a-story about business, entrepreneurship, and UConn, he had a bold idea. “Josh said, ‘We’ve got to release this one first. And we’ll do it during March Madness.’” With UConn’s basketball program surging to national prominence again, the timing felt right. “The title The Husky Effect made more and more sense,” Boucher said.
Indeed, the book is part memoir, part institutional celebration. It explores how UConn’s culture, particularly through its athletics, has catapulted its reputation and applications—from 12,000 to over 63,000 annually—and how that success is influencing the next generation of entrepreneurs. “The national branding this university has gotten from its sports teams has been a game changer,” Boucher said. “And I hope some of the work I’ve done with the business school has helped shine a light on its entrepreneurship program.”
Her investment in UConn is deeply personal. After a long career in public office and a successful tenure at a thirty billion dollar investment firm, Boucher chose to honor her late husband Bud’s entrepreneurial spirit by endowing the Boucher Management & Entrepreneurship Department at UConn. “He worked so hard for so many years, and three months after his business finally became a success, he passed away,” she said. “He never saw a penny of the financial reward. But I had to finish what he started.”
Boucher’s life is one of unlikely arcs. She arrived in the United States as a child from war-torn Italy, speaking no English and with illiterate parents. “My earliest memory is wrapping a stone in a dishcloth and cradling it like a doll. That was my only toy,” she recalled. From that humble beginning came a tireless work ethic—something her father, who had just a fourth-grade education, insisted upon. “Education is everything,” he would repeat. “It’s the way out of poverty.”
She took that lesson to heart, earning an MBA, running seventeen political campaigns (winning fifteen), and mentoring young people at every stage. Even in her losses, she found ways to teach. “Do not be afraid to fail,” she tells students. “The learning you get from failure is what makes you stronger.”
That message runs through both The Husky Effect and the upcoming Stone Doll. While the former is focused on institutional innovation, the latter is deeply human—a story of perseverance through war, migration, discrimination, and loss. “It’s a Cinderella story,” her CEO once told her. “And Cinderella stories do come true.” Boucher, still amazed by her journey, agrees: “Every day I wake up and wonder, is this a fantasy?”
Despite the accolades and achievements, Boucher said her motivation remains the same: to inspire others. “Most people write books to run for office. I’m doing this because I want people to know that if I could come from where I came from and make it, so can they.”
And with Stone Doll set to arrive for the holidays, she’s not slowing down. “We’re already in the final edits,” she said, noting that it’s a race against time. “I recently hit a big birthday. The hourglass is running, and there’s still so much to share.”
From a childhood marked by hardship to a life shaped by public service, family loss, and entrepreneurial triumph, Toni Boucher has lived many lives—and now, finally, she’s writing them down.
