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Business Supporter of the Year: Indianapolis Colts
The Irsay family has donated generously to Indianapolis organizations and charities since moving the Colts to town in 1984, but they wanted a signature issue to support. They brainstormed the idea, thinking about what issues had touched their family.
Their conversation kept coming back to mental health awareness, said Kalen Jackson, Jim and Meg Irsay’s youngest daughter, the team’s co-owner, chief brand officer and face of the team’s philanthropic initiatives. Jim had suffered public battles with addiction, and mental health challenges were something that family and others close to them experienced. They also looked at the statistics in Indiana and found that the state ranked poorly “in all the things you don’t want to … depression, suicide, mental health problems,” Jackson said.
From those discussions came Kicking the Stigma, an initiative that began in 2020 to raise awareness about the prevalence of mental health disorders and to raise and distribute funding to nonprofits and other organizations for direct treatment services.
Five years later, the Kicking the Stigma initiative has raised more than $31 million for mental-health awareness programs and to expand treatment and research. It also has led to $6.4 million in grants being awarded to more than 60 organizations in Indiana and beyond that work on mental health problems, with another $1.2 million in grants to be announced later this summer.
The Irsays also have made personal donations to advance the effort, including $3 million in 2021 to establish the Irsay Institute at Indiana University to research and address the stigma surrounding mental health. The institute opened in March 2023.
The family’s contributions have also included $2 million to Community Fairbanks Recovery Center’s Family Connections Program and $1 million to help expand the Indiana University Health West Addiction Treatment Recovery Center, which was able to double its patient load, hire additional staff and increase its virtual counseling capabilities.
In addition, the Colts produced a series of nationally broadcast public service announcements about Kicking the Stigma in collaboration with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee R.E.M. that included appearances by Snoop Dogg, Peyton Manning, Shaquille Leonard, Tony Dungy and others.
Theresa Brun, executive director of Brooke’s Place, which received a Kicking the Stigma grant to support its program that provides peer support groups and individual therapy, said that “by using the full platform of their NFL franchise, [the Irsays] are breaking ground in illustrating that the players and staff of a sport known for its machismo and ‘hurt’ can also heal and, in their vulnerability, become role models for us all.”
Jackson said that beginning with the first public-service announcement recorded in 2020, Jim Irsay and the Colts wanted to send a message to everyone in the public struggling with mental health. The message: “Us, too. We’ll be the first to tell you: ‘We’re struggling. We’ve been struggling. We know how it feels. We know how scary and judged you must feel—and you don’t have to feel like that anymore.’”
“By an NFL team speaking up about their own issues, it has enabled so many people to realize that they’re not alone,” she said. “And what a gift that is.”•
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Excellent work!