More Big Donors Are Supporting — and Talking About — Mental Health

One evening in 2017, Craig Yabuki drove to Zuma Beach in Malibu, Calif., turned off his phone, walked into the ocean, and shot himself. A successful businessman who founded his own accounting firm, Craig was 52 and a much-beloved son, brother, husband, and father. His suicide shocked many in his orbit who knew him as fun loving, joyful, and family focused, says his older brother Jeff Yabuki.

“He loved to read, he loved to ski, and before he started to suffer, he was the center of lots of interesting discussions and fun. He just had this incredible life and joy in his eyes,” Jeff Yabuki says. “It was one of the things that was so enlightening to me because I saw that change and go away.”

Craig’s death was the heartbreaking result of a yearslong struggle with mental illness that went undiagnosed until it was too late. His recurring bouts of anxiety and depression began in childhood. They mostly subsided in his youth but reappeared in adulthood. Jeff Yabuki says his brother was not one to ignore a problem. When Craig realized that his depression and anxiety were becoming debilitating, he took action to address his condition, which was as bewildering to him as it was to his loved ones.

By the time Craig took his own life, Jeff says he thinks his brother had concluded that his mental health wasn’t going to improve no matter what course of treatment he pursued.

“He tried everything,” Jeff Yabuki says. “He was in therapy, he tried pharmaceutical treatments, he tried magnetic treatments, but the only things that seemed to level him out also took the joy out of his life. I just don’t think he could imagine another 25 or 30 years feeling the way he did.”
The horrific experience of seeing his brother struggle with and then succumb to his mental illness led Jeff Yabuki and his wife, Gail, to give $20 million to the Children’s Wisconsin health system last year to back its $150 million effort to increase families’ access to therapeutic mental-health services. The health system plans to double the number of behavioral-health professionals who work with children and youths and help families get immediate care when their children first develop mental- and behavioral-health problems.

Courtesy of Jeff Yabuki

The gift is one of many multimillion-dollar donations that wealthy donors have made to advance mental-health programs in recent years — and an example of how many are becoming more comfortable talking about their personal experiences with mental-health challenges.

Children’s Wisconsin did not pursue the Yabukis. The couple started searching for the right program to support several years after Craig’s death. They wanted to honor him and help others like him by giving to a mental-health effort that had the potential to help as many people as possible and included a childhood-diagnosis component. They researched a number of organizations, but it wasn’t until 2019, when Gail Yabuki attended a dinner party and heard Meg Brzyski Nelson, president of Children’s Wisconsin Foundation, and Smriti Khare, the health system’s chief mental-health officer, speak about the organization’s ambitious plans, that they found the right one.

Gail approached Brzyski Nelson, who also serves as the health system’s chief development officer, later that evening to ask a few questions about the effort. She went home that night and told her husband about the program. He says the organization’s plans immediately resonated with him, and the couple soon signaled their interest to Children’s Wisconsin officials.

“That’s really when our journey with them began,” says Brzyski Nelson, whose team stayed in close touch with the couple as the Yabukis spent roughly a year learning more about the program. Jeff Yabuki says he and his wife decided to give $20 million not only to help the program flourish but also to capture the attention of other potential donors.

Some of the couple’s gift will pay the salaries of therapists trained in child psychology who will work in pediatricians’ offices to help doctors better recognize the onset of mental- and behavioral-health problems in young children so that they can be addressed early. Most mental-health problems start in childhood and often go undetected, experts say, so having trained therapists working hand-in-hand with pediatricians to catch conditions like depression early can make a big difference in a person’s long-term mental health and well-being.

Pediatricians are often not equipped to address children’s mental health, says Lisa Hunter Romanelli, a practicing clinical psychologist who works regularly with children and CEO of the Reach Institute, a nonprofit that trains primary-care providers, therapists, and other professionals to diagnose and treat mental-health issues in children and teens.

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Courtesy of Bryzski Nelson

How to Talk to Big Donors About Mental-Health Programs

“Kids come to the attention of mental-health providers when there’s a problem,” Hunter Romanelli says. “But if you did more on the preventative end for kids and families, just to support them and teach them strategies for managing the stress that we all face, that could go a long way in terms of minimizing some of the mental-health issues we’re seeing today.”

The gift will also support Children’s Wisconsin’s long-term evaluation of the program. The goal is to assess outcomes and share findings and successful practices with health systems throughout the country. In addition, $5 million of the donation has matched contributions from other donors. So far, the organization has raised an additional $5.7 million from at least 675 other donors, about 200 of whom were new donors to the health system, Brzyski Nelson says.

The Yabukis told Craig’s story in a poignant and sobering video that Brzyski Nelson’s team created to publicize the gift and put a human face on the program as a way to reach other donors.

Telling Craig’s story publicly did not come easily for Jeff, a former finance executive. No one outside of his immediate family and a few close friends knew about Craig’s struggles or how he died. For many people, suicide and mental illness are too hard or painful to discuss openly. Jeff wasn’t sure he could do it, and he worried about how his family would be perceived. But after talking it over with relatives and confidants, Yabuki decided it was time to tell Craig’s story — especially if it encouraged others to talk about their or their loved ones’ mental-health struggles.

“Until more of us share our stories and make it OK for others to share their stories, we’re going to continue to fight this problem,” he says. “It was very difficult to do this, but the good that came out of it, the literally hundreds if not thousands of people who have said thank you and we’re sorry for your loss — every time someone says that — it’s healing.”

Less Taboo

It hasn’t always been easy for fundraisers to bring up topics like depression or thoughts of suicide with rich donors — but that might be changing, say major-gift fundraisers. Today, more sports figures and other celebrities are speaking up about their own mental-health struggles. The taboo against talking about mental health is losing its power, and that’s leading to more big gifts.

Wealthy donors publicly gave more to mental health last year than in any other year over the past decade: According to a Chronicle tally of publicized donations of $1 million or more, 15 donors gave 16 such gifts totaling nearly $767 million in 2021.

There have also been several notable nine-figure donations in recent years:

• Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, gave $425 million in March to the University of Oregon to create the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health, an effort to improve access to mental-health care for children and youths in Oregon.
• In 2019, Karen Huntsman, the matriarch of Utah’s wealthy Huntsman family, gave $150 million to the University of Utah to establish the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, which is focused on improving mental-health services for college students and expanding access to mental-health services in Utah’s rural areas.
• The financier Steven Cohen gave $275 million in 2016 to launch Cohen Veterans Network, a Connecticut charity that offers free care to military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental-health issues.

“One thing about mental and behavioral health is it has no bias,” Brzyski Nelson says. “It crosses all boundaries of income, industry, neighborhoods, city and rural, and so the commonality for all of us is profound.”

Raising money for mental-health programs has become more important in recent years as more Americans are experiencing increased anxiety, depression, and other mental-health disorders. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults, 50 million people, experienced some form of mental illness in 2019, according to a recent report by Mental Health America, and suicidal ideation (thinking seriously about ending one’s own life) is on the rise.

Severe depression among U.S. youths is also growing, with 15 percent experiencing major depression in the last year.

The pandemic and other recent crises have certainly had a hand in these increases. But the mental-health crisis in the United States, especially among young people, is longstanding and well documented, going back to the U.S. surgeon general’s landmark report on mental health in 1999, says Peter Jensen, a former associate director of child and adolescent research at the National Institute of Mental Health and the founder of the Reach Institute.

Police violence and pandemic-related illness, death, isolation, and economic fallout have been especially tough on people of color and other marginalized groups. Andrea Brown, the executive director of the nonprofit Black Mental Health Alliance, says these crises have heightened the anxiety among Black people, especially Black youths. It’s a silver lining, Brown says, that today’s Black youths are much more comfortable acknowledging their mental-health struggles than their elders, many of whom see discussions about mental illness or seeking psychological counseling as taboo subjects that should not be discussed outside of the home, Brown says.

“Young people are more apt to want to have a conversation around how they feel,” Brown says. “Then they become these ambassadors for having conversations around mental health and wellness, but we need to do much, much more.”

‘You Have to Say It Out Loud’

TACKMA sportswear founder Jeffrey Schottenstein and his parents gave $10 million to Ohio State University for a new mental-health program to build students’ emotional resiliency and better equip them to cope with mental-health challenges. Schottenstein’s parents, Jay and Jeanie, are longtime donors to the university, but this gift grew out of conversations Jeffrey Schottenstein had with university officials about his own emotional-health challenges. He told university officials about his struggle with depression and anxiety during his freshman year there and how keeping it to himself made it worse.

Courtesy of Jefferey Schottenstein

“No one can see what you’re going through inside; you have to say it out loud,” Schottenstein says. “For a long time I was ashamed of what my mind did to me. Shame and fear are among the top reasons why more than half of people facing mental-health challenges don’t seek the help they need. For me, the biggest motivator in speaking openly is remembering how alone and isolated I felt. I never want anyone to feel that way.”

Emily Christian, the university’s senior director of development, says once she learned about Schottenstein’s experiences, she connected him with Luan Phan, chairman of the university’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and the driving force behind the university’s efforts to create the new program. Part of Phan’s plan is to build a marketing campaign to eliminate the stigma associated with mental-health challenges and help students reduce their feelings of shame about their struggles.

“If we can explain that these struggles are rooted in an organ like the brain, it helps people understand that this isn’t some weak psychological will,” Phan says. “It’s not their fault, but rather it’s something that can be related to a biological organ, not unlike diabetes or heart disease.”

Helping Others Speak Out

Ian Adair is a rarity among nonprofit executives: He writes and speaks extensively about his mental-health challenges as well as those of his family. Adair served as executive director of Gracepoint Foundation from 2017 until early September. When he was hired, the small foundation was bringing in very little money for the much larger mental-health service provider it supports. Adair says the foundation didn’t know how to connect with wealthy donors. Five years on, however, the foundation has raised a total of $2.3 million and has a much more active set of wealthy supporters.

Courtesy of Ian Adair.

Adair says that success stems partly from his slowly encouraging some senior staff and board members to speak openly about their mental-health struggles or how those experienced by family and friends affected them and eventually led them to the Gracepoint Foundation. Most had never been asked why they joined. When Adair inquired, he learned that several trustees had lost family members to suicide , while others had struggled with mental illness themselves or witnessed their employees’ mental-health struggles.

He used what he learned to create one of the organization’s most successful fundraising efforts to date. Adair and his team shot photos of trustees, senior staff, and others who were willing to share their experiences and worked with each to design personalized text for social-media posts they could send out to their followers. The team created graphics to go along with the posts.

Staff, trustees, and others sharing their stories helped the organization capture donors’ attention and build trust with them.

“When you have people willing to authentically and genuinely give something of themselves, it just resonates,” Adair says. “That’s what really started driving our traction in terms of annual higher-end gifts.”

Adair also revved up his speaking engagements to better connect the organization to outside supporters. He says whenever he speaks at a conference or talks to a group of potential donors, he always asks who in the room has been affected by mental illness, suicide, or addiction — either their own or a loved one’s. Whether he is talking to people at a small gathering or a crowd of 1,000 people, he says more than 95 percent of those in the room raise their hand or stand up.

Adair says he does that early on because he doesn’t want people to feel guarded and in a state of mind where they can’t receive the discussion and the information well enough to absorb it. “I want people to know they’re in a room with other people that have a shared experience.”

Small Nonprofits Struggle

The megagifts of the last several years as well as donations like the ones from the Yabukis and the Schottensteins all went to large institutions with well-equipped development departments. Major-gift officers and leaders of smaller mental-health organizations say raising money for their nonprofits is much harder.

Perception is part of the problem, says Jonathan Meagher-Zayas, who oversees development communications at Villa of Hope, a Rochester, N.Y., charity that primarily serves people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others from marginalized backgrounds who struggle with trauma, mental illness, and addiction.

He says some big donors don’t understand why his organization needs large gifts since it gets government funding. But that government support comes with strict stipulations about how the money can be used, and it usually cannot support operating costs, Meagher-Zayas says. It also doesn’t pay for new clinicians or the specially trained nurses and special-education teachers his group currently needs to hire to provide its services. Government funding also doesn’t cover the charity’s full programmatic costs, he says.

Heightened awareness about mental health is making it a little easier for small organizations to raise money from rich donors, but a big challenge remains, Meagher-Zayas says: Many wealthy donors and foundations only want to back something they can easily understand, like workforce development, or tangibles like equipment for telehealth programs or a building project.

“Mental health is one of the most intangible things to describe and understand, and that’s what makes it harder to fundraise from foundations,” Meagher-Zayas says. “Individuals are a bit more flexible, but they usually need a direct personal connection to the mission to make that big investment.”

He says educating current and potential supporters about the increased need to support staffing and expand services is a work in progress. He says nonprofit leaders at groups like his need to help donors understand what it’s like to need mental-health services so they’ll better grasp the organizations’ true needs.

Andrea Brown, of the Black Mental Health Alliance, agrees. The alliance is launching a major fundraising campaign later this year, in part to raise money for a massive public-education effort. It will lay out the state of mental health for Black Americans, explaining how poorly clinicians have historically treated people of color, the need for more Black therapists, and efforts to reduce stigma in Black communities about discussing mental illness and seeking out counseling.

While the alliance saw a slight uptick in small gifts during the racial-justice protests of 2020, Brown says her organization is scrambling to attract big donors. She and her team are working with a consultant to design the campaign, and she is trying to set up meetings with corporations and philanthropists to talk about the campaign and the types of support they could provide.

Brown says leaders of mental-health nonprofits need to do all they can to make sure today’s heightened interest in mental health and wellness doesn’t slip away as the public’s attention turns to other concerns.

“This really should be a national movement and not just a moment,” she says. “We’ve got to get beyond that.”