The best fundraising campaigns are like a living thing. The key priorities are planted as seeds that gradually grow and evolve. Early gifts from donors form the roots that, over time, produce stalks and leaves that catch the attention of others.
Fed by the gifts of generous donors and with ongoing cultivation, a successful campaign ultimately yields a mature “plant” that provides sustenance to the organization’s most important needs.
From its “leadership phase” inception in 2019 to its recently launched “public phase” this past fall, the aptly named The Way Forward: Campaign for McLean has evolved in just this way.
Grounded in the hospital’s most vital priorities, the campaign is helping McLean achieve crucial goals in patient care, research, and training across our seven divisions, while supporting new technologies and expanding unrestricted support for the full scope of our mission.
The Way Forward fundraising objectives include an approximately 90,000-square-foot child and adolescent campus ($125 million) (see story Building Dreams, Burnishing Hopes); a broad range of focused care and research ($80 million) initiatives throughout all of McLean’s subspecialty divisions; the President’s Campaign Fund ($15 million) for unrestricted support, which provides the flexibility to address emerging needs; and technological innovation ($5 million), which seeks resources to leverage technology in enhancing access to care, innovating new treatments, and expanding research discoveries.
2019 McLean Award Recipient Selena Gomez shared a special video message at the campaign launch event
“The underlying motivation of The Way Forward is rooted in the mission of the hospital,” said Chief Operating Officer Michael Macht-Greenberg, PhD, MPH.
“It provides an opportunity to support the breadth of that mission so we can continue to deliver excellent patient care across the lifespan, advance our understanding of how mental illness manifests in individual populations, and transfer our knowledge to the caregivers of tomorrow.”
Answering the Call
According to Macht-Greenberg, who formerly served as senior director within McLean’s Nancy and Richard Simches Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and now leads the team involved with designing and building the new youth campus, this is much more than a construction project.
“Yes, there’s a building,” he said. “But it’s really the people who will be cared for at McLean who matter. Families come here at a time of great vulnerability; they want to feel good about where their kids spend the day or where they are living. This is where the bricks and the building become human, and the generosity of our donors shows that they understand this goes far beyond a roof and a heating system.”
With a total goal of $225 million, The Way Forward is the largest campaign in McLean’s history. Yet, just months after McLean launched the early phase of the initiative, the world was upended by COVID-19.
The pandemic, it soon became clear, was disproportionately impacting children and adolescents—amplifying the need for new clinical environments and services for these vulnerable populations. And McLean’s donors are answering the call.
