Ted and Vada Stanley
An enduring commitment to ease the burdens of mental illness
Before they passed away, Ted and Vada Stanley had a long history of deploying their philanthropy to reduce the burden of serious mental illness. The couple was deeply committed to helping scientists better understand psychiatric conditions and ultimately design new treatments. Their legacy continues through the Stanley Foundation, which recently donated $280 million to the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Transcript
Ted and Veda Stanley are Giving Pledge members.
They’re now passed, sadly, but very happily, their legacy that they set in place continues strongly.
They focus their legacy through a foundation on basic neuroscientific research for the major disease and disorders of the mind, including schizophrenia, bipolar, and biologically related illness.
Todd goes as far as to say that the biggest unmet need in medicine these days is mental illness, and for which there’s no good treatment. And yet there’s very little funding for research into this area.
There are a whole bunch of people that have these illnesses that really wish they could be living happy, healthy lives.
What we learn about schizophrenia and bipolar will be informative for other disorders because they share a certain number of mechanisms.
Our model is to listen to the scientists and listen to our trusted experts, and to trust the plans that they have.
We think they’re best placed to identify what’s happening in the world of research and to adapt quickly toward the new opportunities.
We have an international collaborative community of investigators across the world sharing data, tools, technologies, approaches, ideas, hypotheses.
Everything that makes science science is done no longer in a single lab, but really in an international collaboration.
It’s what the Stanley Center really represents, a new way of doing science, one that brings people together rather than isolates them.
Philanthropy is essential for progress in science.
It enables you to take risks. I’d also say that philanthropy changes the way you think about the problem.
I hope that we can fulfill the vision of Ted Stanley, which is to do high-quality research that will ultimately benefit people in the real world.
