The world's leading charity event aimed to find ways to treat, and, ultimately, cure mental illness

"The Music Festival is becoming a national leader in the search for new approaches to mental illness."
Sam Barondes, M.D., Director, Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF

About Venture Philanthropy

"We support the Music Festival because it is not only one of the great events of the year, but the research funded by our donations is producing some of the most profound developments in medical science today. As a banker, I always look for a high return, and our donations get the highest return in terms of scientific advancement of anything we do!"

-Vince Rinaldi

Your donation to the Music Festival for Mental Health will have a ripple effect:

Over $44 million of the $83 million total raised by the Music Festival for brain research programs over thirteen years has been raised as "leveraged" funds given by organizations such as the NIMH. Since 1995, the Festival's scientific advisory board has chosen to give to promising programs so cutting-edge that they could only be funded by the private sector. These investments have paid off in spades:

  • Donated Vs. Leveraged Funds July 2008$3.7 million which the Festival provided the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) through UCLA research facilities overseen by Dr. Tyrone Cannon has enabled the NAPLS to develop predictive tests for psychosis conversion. These tests are so powerful that in August 2008, the NIMH has given the NAPLS an additional $20 million to expand their studies of psychosis prediction.
  • $400,000 provided to the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at UCLA, also overseen by Dr. Tyrone Cannon, enabled the center to validate DISC1 as a schizophrenia risk gene and garner an additional $7.9 million from the NIMH in 2007.
  • $250,000 provided to Dr. Akira Sawa allowed him to make discoveries about the DISC1 and neuregulin-1 genes so important that the NIMH awarded him an additional $6 million in 2008 to expand his research at Johns Hopkins University.
  • $250,000 given to Dr. Linda Brzustowicz at Rutgers enabled her to develop such a powerful technique for locating schizophrenia risk genes that she earned a $3.4 million grant from the NIMH in 2007.
  • $250,000 provided to Dr. Eva Anton at University of North Carolina gave him the ability to trace disease mechanisms of the neuregulin-1 gene and earn a $1 million grant from the NIMH in 2008.

The list goes on and on.

Just these five examples together have multiplied their initial donation investment 9 times over.

Would you like to see this happen with your donation? Your donation to the Music Festival for Mental Health will go to a research program whose rewards for the mental health community will likely be worth much more than what you put in, both in scientific discovery and financial support.

Learn more about how to support the Music Festival for Mental Health

a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, tax ID number 68-0359707 under the name Staglin Music Festival for Mental Health
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