GUILDERLAND — At a fundraiser for the local Rodino family — who are struggling with Huntington’s disease — Thursday night, organizers of the event announced that C. M. Fox Real Estate will cover the family’s monthly mortgage payments for the next year. The announcement was a surprise to the Rodinos.

C. M. Fox owner Troy Miller said that the idea for the fundraiser came from Kathy Burbank, who is one of the firm’s real-estate agents and a personal friend of the Rodinos. He said that she became a friend of the family through all the fundraising efforts that she spearheaded for them when she was president of the Guilderland Chamber of Commerce.

“I had known about the Rodino family,” Miller said, “but when someone tells you what is really going on with them, it’s just heart-breaking.”

Miller sent out an email to all of his agents to gauge their interest in the idea of covering the family’s mortgage for a year, he said. “They all said, ‘Let’s do this,’” he recalled.

All of the firm’s agents are going to pledge to donate a certain amount from every closing, which the firm will then match, Miller said, and in that way will be able to cover Lori Rodino’s mortgage for one year.

The Rodino family has been dealing with Huntington’s, a neurological disease that results in the death of brain cells, for eight years, since its youngest member, daughter Rachel, was diagnosed with it. The family then learned that the disease was hereditary, and that father Rick Rodino had it. Rachel died of complications of Huntington’s in 2010 at age 8.

The family’s two other children, Anthony and Gianna, were diagnosed in 2011, when they were 19 and 17, as carrying the mutated gene that causes the disease; people who carry the gene will eventually develop symptoms.

Wife and mother Lori Rodino is the only member of the family who does not have the gene; she is caregiver for Rick Rodino, who is living at home and in the advanced stages of the debilitating illness.