Helena Buonanno Foulkes has always been unflappable. Is she now unbeatable?

Helena Buonanno was 13 years old when the Blizzard of 1978 left her stranded with her toddler sister and their panicked babysitter at the family’s Providence home.

Her three other siblings were snowed in at their elementary school, and her parents were across the country attending a convention in San Francisco, unable to return home for three days.

But her dad, Bernie Buonanno Jr., didn’t worry.

“She was so calm,” Buonanno, now 88, said, recalling hearing his daughter take charge on the other end of the phone, soothing the babysitter who was supposed to be taking care of her.

That unshakable disposition has guided Helena Buonanno Foulkes through many storms, including cancer, a high-powered business career and two runs for governor.

“My husband says that one of my specialties is dealing with complicated men,” Foulkes, 62, said in a recent interview. She and her husband Bill have been married for 37 years.

“He says that as a joke because he’s a complicated man. But I think my whole life I have dealt with complicated men, and I’ve had to be unflappable.”

On every pre-primary debate stage, Gov. Dan McKee hammered Foulkes for profiting off the pain of the opioid crisis during her four years as head of CVS Pharmacy and hurting working families through staffing cuts she oversaw as CEO of Hudson Bay Company. 

Foulkes calmly refuted both claims. In one debate, hosted by WPRO, she pointed out that it was McKee getting “pretty hot” and needing to “settle down” during a tense exchange over the Washington Bridge.

Five weeks later, Foulkes defeated McKee by 24 points, bursting onto a makeshift stage outside Track 15 in Providence to celebrate with her supporters in the cool evening drizzle.

“It’s way more fun to win than to lose,” Foulkes said in an interview.

She lost to McKee by 3 percentage points in her first campaign in 2022. 

“I feel a responsibility when I walk into places where people are genuinely so excited for change, and they recognize me, they’re counting on me,” Foulkes said.

Like the pair of women seated at a nearby table when Foulkes walked into La Casona Restaurant in Central Falls on a sunny October afternoon. They stood, rushing to greet her.

“I’m voting for you,” one declared as Foulkes embraced them.

A friendship forged

Foulkes didn’t spend much time in Central Falls while growing up, despite living a few miles away in Providence. But the tiny city features prominently in her political comeback. 

After her 2022 primary defeat, one of her first calls was to Central Falls Mayor Maria Rivera. The two women had connected during the campaign, even though Rivera made clear from the outset she supported another Democratic contender, then-Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea.

“She used to wear this big Nellie button, so I would go up to her at all the events, and say, ‘Someday, we’re going to work together,’” Foulkes recalled of Rivera.

Rivera acknowledged their instant chemistry and shared experience of being the only woman in a room full of men. Over the next four years, Rivera sought Foulkes’ advice on how to navigate the gender imbalance in her own political career, even calling Foulkes for input before approaching McKee on the topic of returning Central Falls Public Schools to local control.

“It’s been really hard for me, as the only woman leading the city, trying to communicate with so many men,” Rivera said. “With Helena, it was like, ‘Oh my god, I have someone who’s going to pay attention to me, going to listen to me.’”

Foulkes set up an introduction between Rivera and Mike Bloomberg, which led to a $250,000 donation from the New York politician and businessman to Central Falls where one quarter of the city’s population lives below the poverty level, double the statewide average. 

Foulkes graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Her corporate resume features several C-suite positions. She and her husband, a marketing and strategic planning consultant and a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design, own two homes in Rhode Island: an eight-bedroom, six-bath oceanfront summer house in Narragansett, purchased in 2012 for $3.8 million, and a three-bedroom, two-bath home on Providence’s East Side, for which the couple paid $2.3 million in 2023.

Foulkes and her husband reported nearly more than $2.7 million in combined, taxable income (nearly $3 million before deductions) in 2025, according to a copy of her tax return summary shared with Rhode Island Current. More than $1.5 million of that money came from capital gains, along with $450,000 in state earnings, and over $300,000 in dividend payments from stocks, and other investments. 

Her independent opponent Ken Block has refused to release his tax returns, prompting Foulkes’ campaign to criticize her rival for lack of transparency in a statement Monday.

To Rivera, Foulkes’ pedigree and tax bracket don’t matter. The Central Falls mayor said Foulkes has proven she cares about the oft-overlooked city, showing up for meetings, doorknocking and community events throughout the last four years.

“People feel comfortable speaking to her, comfortable approaching her, which is so needed,” Rivera said.

Key to Foulkes’ housing plan is the state millionaire’s tax — something she would have to pay. While the incremental surtax on income over $1 million already took effect as part of the fiscal 2027 budget, Foulkes has proposed designating the revenue for a state-run revolving fund that provides low-interest loans to developers building affordable housing.

“We have millionaires and billionaires who are making more money and richer than anybody at any time since the Gilded Age in our government,” Foulkes said during an Oct. 13 debate on WPRO. She contrasted the rise in wealth with the sudden loss of health insurance coverage under federal Medicaid cuts.

She has overcome her own significant challenges. At 35, with four young children, Foulkes was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She underwent surgery at Rhode Island Hospital and has remained cancer-free.

Rejected the first time she sought an internal promotion to lead CVS’ retail arm and put into a public affairs position she viewed as a dead-end job, she took it anyway. She was her family’s primary breadwinner at the time, with four kids in private school. She ended up loving the job — and later got the promotion she wanted.

“It wasn’t a straight path to the top,” she said. 

Nor a straight path into politics.

Politics in the family

Foulkes has fond childhood memories of attending the campaign events and swearing-in ceremonies for her Uncle Chris. That’s former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, Connecticut’s longest serving senator. His dad, and Foulkes’ maternal grandfather, Thomas Dodd, also served in both chambers of Congress after working as executive counsel in the Nuremberg trials. Foulkes’ mom, Martha Buonanno, was former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s college roommate, and Pelosi visited Rhode Island to raise money for Foulkes in both gubernatorial primary campaigns.

Yet Martha Buonanno dissuaded her children from following in the family’s political footsteps because of the personal sacrifices and public criticism involved.

Her mother died before Foulkes’ political career began but is frequently mentioned in campaign ads and speeches. Bernie Buonanno believes his late wife would be thrilled to see how Foulkes has performed on the campaign trail and the debate stage.

“Once she got going, she was an absolute natural,” Bernie Buonanno said of his daughter. “My god, she was perfect.”

Foulkes’ elementary school adviser at Henry Barnard School in Providence predicted as much, telling her parents she would be president someday, her father recalled.

But beyond several years as class president at the all-girls Lincoln School in Providence —- alongside captaining the tennis, basketball and softball teams her senior year — Foulkes’ career aspirations leaned toward business, not politics.

Foulkes frequently references her “cubicle days” to describe her professional ascent at CVS Health. While she may have worked in a cubicle for the Woonsocket company when she began, it was not in an entry-level role. Recruited directly by the company president, Foulkes was tasked with managing the rollout of a home delivery program for prescriptions. The venture failed, but it launched Foulkes’ 25-year career at CVS, culminating in four years as president of the retail pharmacy.

“I loved retail,” Foulkes said. “It was the merger of my math background, and it’s like, there’s a whole bunch of data coming, but also, what makes people tick.”

Not so different from government, according to Foulkes. 

“Every single day, you know how you’re doing,” she said. “Is it working? It is not? What’s the crisis of the moment.”

Yet a string of local lawsuits and federal investigations allege CVS leaders were complicit in, or even perpetuated, the opioid crisis by improper dispensing, fake prescription filling and record-keeping violations. CVS spent $2 billion on legal settlements and paid more than $70 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice while refusing to admit any wrongdoing.

Foulkes is not named in any of the complaints but presided over the retail pharmacy arm during some of the years covered in the lawsuits.

She has denied any role in the crisis, while defending the company’s work to address the opioid epidemic through drug takeback programs, cutting off pill mill doctors and legislative guardrails. A Rhode Island Current analysis of her claims found some of the statistics were exaggerated, while other reforms were driven by market trends and lawmakers, not company executives.

The focus on Foulkes’ alleged connections to the opioid crisis initially faded with McKee’s defeat. Her general election opponents, independent Block and Republican Aaron Guckian, focused more on policy and ideological differences than Foulkes’ professional resume.

Until Oct. 13, one day before early voting, when news broke of a $315 million federal settlement to resolve a 2024 Department of Justice lawsuit alleging that CVS filled unnecessary opioid prescriptions. The company did not admit wrongdoing as part of the agreement, which also does not name Foulkes.

But Guckian’s campaign quickly seized the moment, holding a press conference outside the State House the next morning to call on Foulkes to “answer questions” about her leadership. Block followed suit with his own campaign statement pressing Foulkes to address the public directly.

Angelika Pellegrino, Foulkes’ campaign spokesperson, reiterated previous talking points about Foulkes’ efforts, and the work of the company, to cut off pill mill doctors and launch a drug takeback program.

“It wasn’t so much personal for me as it was wrong about the true work of all the people at CVS,” Foulkes said during an interview at La Casona. 

She dips a chip into a white ramekin of guacamole while reflecting on her ability to not let opponents’ attacks get under her skin.

“They were navigating all this complexity, and to see my opponent attack not just me but really the whole company, yeah, that was stinky,” she added.

Will she smell victory on Nov. 3? If so, Foulkes believes she can make a difference for the people she’s met on the campaign trail: parents unable to afford childcare, seniors struggling to pay their energy bills, immigrants and women who believe their basic protections are under threat by the Trump administration.

“Four years ago, I feel like I was just memorizing a lot of facts,” she said of her first campaign. “This time, the stories are just deep inside me.”

Rhode Island Current published a profile of independent gubernatorial candidate Ken Block on Monday. Republican Aaron Guckian was unavailable for a sit-down interview despite multiple requests. The governor’s race has a total of five candidates. Also running are independents Jasjit “Jay” Gotra and C.D. Reynolds.

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX.

Courtesy of Rhode Island Current