2023 endowment prospectus
This kind of impact doesn’t happen alone. Your legacy gift helps us lead groundbreaking research and provide world-class care for children in our community. Endowed funds ensure that reliable resources are available each year — creating a healthier future for every child we serve. Thank you for your incredible support!
This kind of impact doesn’t happen alone. Your legacy gift helps us lead groundbreaking research and provide world-class care for children in our community. Endowed funds ensure that reliable resources are available each year — creating a healthier future for every child we serve. Thank you for your incredible support!
continuing to make life better for children
Living in North Texas, you’ve surely seen and felt the explosive population growth happening across our region. At Children’s HealthSM, we’re feeling this growth as well, and planning for the future to accommodate the evolving needs of our community. We will continue to make life better for children now and for decades to come.
Endowments play an important role in this work, providing a lasting legacy for donors and helping to secure each fund’s designated purpose across countless years ahead. Donors just like you ensure that a reliable source of income will be available through the establishment of endowment funds at Children’s Health. Simply put your gifts today help us plan for tomorrow.
Through the stories highlighted here, you’ll learn some of the ways endowments meet a range of clinical, supportive, research and educational needs at Children’s Health. You’ll read about Debbie and Ric Scripps, who generously provided a legacy gift to establish an endowment fund benefiting Child Life. Their gift will provide a lasting impact through the power of play therapy and patient and family support programs.
Another wonderful story of support is about Micaela’s Army, a family foundation created in memory of their daughter, Micaela, who passed away from acute myeloid leukemia. Micaela’s Army established endowment funds last year for Leukemia research and Child Life in her honor.
It’s also a pleasure to introduce you to our new Director of Legacy and Gift Planning, Kelsey Picken, PhD, CFRE, CSPG. In addition to a lot of credentials, she’s got an energetic spirit and a passion for helping kids. Kelsey brings an abundance of professional expertise and has worked in philanthropy across the higher education, museum and health care sectors in Los Angeles for more than a decade. We’re thrilled to have her on our team, and she will be a wonderful resource to advise and assist you in all your gift planning needs. Kelsey can help you creatively use the full range of tools at your disposal — some of which you may not even realize you have to make a big difference in the lives of kids and families.
Thank you for your continued support. Together, we’re planning for the long future of Children’s Health.
Brent E. Christopher President Children’s Medical Center Foundation
miracles are happening every day at children’s health
COUPLE ESTABLISHES ENDOWMENTS TO SUPPORT RESEARCH, CHILD LIFE, SAYING AN INVESTMENT IN KIDS ‘COMES BACK TO YOU TENFOLD’
For Debbie and Ric Scripps, investing in the future is a “no-brainer.”
Both retired teachers, the couple has spent years shaping the lives of children. Advocating for future generations is one of the top ways they like to give back.
“Anything dealing with investing in kids, that investment comes back to you tenfold,” Ric said. “Any time we have an opportunity to invest in the future of kids, that’s where our passion lies.”
For more than 40 years, the couple has been profoundly connected to Children’s Health. Before they moved to Dallas in 1980, they lived in Minneapolis, Minn., where their youngest son, Andy, was born prematurely. He was admitted to a children’s hospital there and the family’s experience inspired Debbie to sign up as a volunteer. Once in Texas, her dedication to helping children continued when Debbie joined the Women’s Auxiliary to Children’s Medical Center Dallas.
But she didn’t stop there. Both she and Ric have served in numerous leadership roles over the years. Debbie has chaired the Children’s Medical Center Foundation Board; served on the hospital board; held roles as president of the Women’s Auxiliary Dallas chapter and as Family Night chair. Ric has served on the Foundation Board and on various task force initiatives, including hosting physicians and their families during their visits to North Texas. The two have also dedicated their time and efforts to several other civic and professional organizations in the community.
Debbie and Ric’s active involvement has only helped fuel their strong passion for pediatric health care.
“Seeing all the little miracles that happen every day at Children’s Health makes me want to be a part of it and a part of the growth,” Debbie said.
In 2012, Children’s Health established the Scripps Society to honor Debbie and Ric for their work as volunteers, leaders and philanthropists. The Society recognizes friends of Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) who have contributed $1 million or more and embody the mission of Children’s Health to make life better for children.
That same year, the couple created an endowment to support the general operations of CRI, a leader in groundbreaking discoveries with the goal to cure people who otherwise would not be cured.
More than a decade later, they remain heavily involved in CRI and the work of Dr. Sean Morrison, the Institute’s director. They’re proud of the overall growth of the Institute since its founding, the unexpected discoveries by CRI investigators and the groundbreaking research Morrison and his team pursue.
“He is so brilliant,” Ric said. “We know that in 10 or 15 years we’re going to have solutions to diseases we currently don’t have solutions to.”
Their three sons, Ryan, Scott and Andy, and two daughters-in-law have gotten involved too, through Scripps Society dinners, CRI receptions and donor appreciation events.
Because the institution means a great deal to them, Debbie and Ric have generously named Children’s Health in their estate plans. One planned gift will support the Scripps Family Charitable Fund of Communities Foundation of Texas for Children’s Research Institute to further the inspiring research conducted at CRI.
Another estate gift will add to the Debbie and Ric Scripps Endowment for Child Life, a fund they established in 1999, in recognition of the incredible impact child life has on a patient’s experience. Programs like child life are offered throughout the hospital at no cost to patient families. With their history of supporting Children’s Health within and outside the walls of the hospital, Debbie and Ric know how important resources like child life are to holistically care for a child. This endowed fund has already helped the child life specialists meet the individual and wide-ranging needs of the children and families they serve. And, the anticipated growth of this fund will extend this impact even further as team members care for the growing number of children who rely on Children’s Health year after year.
“Children are our future. Why wouldn’t we want to support something that does such a good job with the health of children,” Debbie said.
‘I know the heart of children’s health’
AFTER MICAELA’S ARMY DISSOLVES, NONPROFIT UNANIMOUSLY VOTES TO ESTABLISH TWO ENDOWMENTS
Recently, Sharon White uncovered a list of 25 life goals her teenage daughter wrote more than a decade ago.
No. 1: Move to New York. No. 2: Travel to Africa and help orphaned children. No. 3: Pass my French class.
The list goes on ...
No. 23: Get a tattoo. No. 24: Go to Heaven. No. 25: Be happy.
“She was smart. She was funny. She was just enough sweetness and sass. This is what cancer took from the world,” Sharon said of her daughter, Micaela, who passed away in 2011 from leukemia when she was 18 years old.
For many months, team members in the Pauline Allen Gill Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Children’s Health cared for Micaela — a dancer with national awards who wanted to be a journalist when she grew up.
And for most of that time, the teenager and her mother lived at the hospital, as Micaela underwent numerous rounds of chemotherapy treatments and a bone marrow transplant. While there, they also talked about what they’d do one day when they left the hospital.
But Sharon felt depleted as she drove home alone from the hospital in August 2011, after Micaela had a seizure and passed away in the Intensive Care Unit while Sharon held her close.
“I took Micaela’s strength and vision and opened a foundation to support pediatric cancer research,” said Sharon of the nonprofit named Micaela’s Army. “And over the many years, I hope I made a small difference. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I’m so proud of what we did.”
Last year, Sharon and the foundation’s board members dissolved the nonprofit and used the remaining funds to establish two endowments at Children’s Health to support cancer research and child life services — which provide coping strategies and help make life easier for those experiencing the unthinkable. Programs like child life are one of the resources that makes the holistic care we provide patients and families at Children’s Health unique.
“I know the heart of Children’s Health. When you spend eight months there caring for your child, I don’t know how you walk out of there, knowing what you know, and not want to make a difference,” Sharon said. “These kids need a fighting chance, and research is the solution.”
your support of research provides hope
Research helps scientists better understand diseases, chronic conditions and injuries, and can lead to the development of new medicines, treatments or approaches to caring for patients.
Philanthropy fuels new areas of research not presently funded by external entities; supports important, life-saving studies that are nationally and locally underfunded; and provides
pilot funding that helps researchers successfully apply for larger, future grants such as from the National Institutes of Health.
Each year, there are more than 1,200 active research studies at Children’s Health, with nearly 13,000 patients enrolled. For many of these children, research is their last hope for treatment for their illnesses.
Your support remains the essential
catalyst for facilitating new and innovative ideas for research at Children’s Health to help us accomplish the incredible together.
LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO HELP FUND THESE JOURNEYS THAT LEAD TO LIFE-SAVING DISCOVERIES. READ THE FULL STORY ONLINE.
