Hearts and Hands at Work!

December 2006 Special Sections

Helping Kids Live Strong
For more than 100 years, Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare has been serving children and teenagers with long-term and permanent disabilities, such as traumatic injuries to the brain, spinal cord, and bones, cerebral palsy, seizure disorders, and scoliosis. In 2005, Gillette’s clinics treated 19,574 children referred by more than 1,710 physicians from all over Minnesota and around the world. Gillette is an independent, not-for-profit hospital that strives to meet the special health needs of children and teens while helping them enjoy life and develop a strong sense of well being. Charitable planned gifts to the Gillette Children’s Foundation are crucial to the hospital’s ability to provide services and care personnel such as the Mobile Outreach Clinic, the rehabilitation engineers who help patients who can’t speak find alternative modes of communication, and clinical research that seeks new treatments for children with disabilities and complex medical conditions.

Restoring Hope
According to Anne Hovland, the executive vice president for development at Hazelden, the organization’s mission has been consistent since its founding in 1949: to help people sustain lifelong recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs. “We help people restore hope in their lives,” Hovland says. To do this as effectively as possible, Hazelden, a private and nonprofit organization based in Center City, Minnesota, relies on donors to help expand treatment options, education programs, and facilities. This year, the first phase of a women’s recovery center opened on the main campus. The project includes a renovation of the Lilly Unit, forty-four additional beds, and increased extended care for younger women. Too frequently, financial constraints prevent people who need it from seeking treatment. Hovland estimates nearly 26 million Americans need treatment for addiction, and of those, only 10 percent receive it. This disparity inspired Hazelden’s General Patient Aid Endowment, a fund that allows donors to help patients afford the care they need.

Bringing Our Past to Life
Committed to telling Minnesota’s varied and rich histories since 1849, the Minnesota Historical Society is the force that was behind the restoration of the Mill City Museum, the Minnesota History Center, and the Split Rock Lighthouse in Two Harbors. Currently, the society is hard at work converting and expanding Fort Snelling into a year-round exhibition that will chronicle the fort’s many uses of since it was first built as a military outpost in the 1820s. For the project, director Nina Archabal envisions not only a static museum where visitors simply glimpse into the past, but a “place of civic engagement,” that is both hands-on and interactive. Archabal also deeply values planned gifts as a way to ensure that Minnesota stories continue to get told in creative ways. “Our most important treasures are the people’s stories,” she says.

Artful Engagement
Planned gifts are an essential part of carrying out the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ goal to engage the public with art. The Institute has been recently reinvigorated by the new president and director, Bill Griswold, and an additional wing that opened in June 2006. Planned gifts go into the Institute’s endowment, which is used to sustain museum programming and purchase artwork. Kimberly Bowman, director of endowments and planned giving, says, “As endowment funds endure for generations, they offer donors a meaningful opportunity to leave a lasting legacy that lives on through the educational and cultural work of the museum. Planned gifts to the Institute are truly a gift to the next generation.”