Mental-health research got a big boost Wednesday when retail company Big Lots announced a $50-million donation to create a pediatric behavioral-health center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
The center, scheduled to open in 2020, will include 48 inpatient beds and house programs for crisis evaluation and stabilization for children and teenagers with mental illness.
“Behavioral health does not discriminate. All of our kids are susceptible to behavioral-health challenges,” said Tim Johnson, chief financial officer at Big Lots. “We’re all touched by it in some way.”
Successful Stewardship
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Americans aged 10 to 24, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet mental-health research and treatment programs tend to be underfunded, both by government and philanthropy. That is due in part to the stigma surrounding mental illness and the complexity of treating it, experts have told The Chronicle. Another rare, significant gift to promote good mental health came two years ago: In 2014, Connecticut businessman Ted Stanley gave $650 million to the Broad Institute to support mental-illness research.
Big Lots, headquartered in Columbus, came to the cause after several years of supporting Nationwide Children’s Hospital in smaller ways. The relationship started with the retailer donating water to the hospital’s fundraising marathon event. Next, employees started participating in the hospital’s reading program, handing out books and bagels to patients and their families.
When Big Lots hired a new chief executive, David Campisi, in 2013, hospital fundraisers took notice of his interest in the institution’s work and his “heart toward kids,” said Jim Digan, president of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Foundation.
“After meeting with him so many times, we thought, ‘He’s a guy worth having a long conversation with,’ " Mr. Digan said of Mr. Campisi. “He gave us a green light, saying, ‘I am intrigued.’ "
Under Mr. Campisi’s leadership, Big Lots created a charitable foundation for the first time in its nearly 50-year history. In 2015, the company raised $2.2 million for Nationwide Children’s during an in-store point-of-sale campaign. Fundraisers thought it might be time to propose an even more significant gift: $50 million to establish the behavioral-health center.
After some deliberation, Mr. Campisi and the Big Lots executives agreed.
“They were looking for a corporate partner, and we had the guts to do it,” Mr. Johnson said. “It didn’t take a whole lot of deep thought to know what the right thing to do was.”
Mission Over Marketing
One motivating factor for the company was a desire to dismantle the stigma around mental illness, especially for children, Mr. Campisi said.
“We need to help people figure out how to talk about it openly like you talk about cancer,” he said. “The hope is other people will see this, take a pause, and decide they need to get involved, too.”
In addition to its large size and the cause it will support, Mr. Digan said the gift is remarkable because of what he described as Big Lots executives’ “humility” in making it.
“We’re going to name the pavilion after them, but they weren’t really concerned with the size of lettering or where it goes,” Mr. Digan said. “They really were concerned about the mission more than the marketing.”