Donor Thanks Email

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We continue to be beyond thankful for your generosity towards SoS and wanted to reiterate our appreciation and keep you informed about the exciting things that have been happening lately for our organization thanks to your early support. What we are achieving and the reach and impact of our work is succeeding beyond what we could have dreamed of a few short years ago. Our successes are directly in line with our mission of addressing the mental health crisis in the US, combatting the epidemic of loneliness and preventing suicide. Thank you for personally helping to move the needle in all these areas. Here are a few specific developments we wanted to let you know about:

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• SoS continues to do vital work with the 988 Crisis and Suicide Lifeline - formerly known as the National Sucide Prevention Lifeline. We have been a key partner for the rollout and adoption of the new national 3-digit number, which is greatly expanding access to utilization of the federally funded hotline. The videos we create with musicians in which they share stories of making it through crisis is based on the empirically proven Papageno Effect - the contagious, life saving effect of hearing stories of hope from others. We have not only continued our “Song That Found Me at the Right TIme” series with 988 but have been partnering on a “Trusted Messenger” PSA (Public Service Announcement) campaign with them in which well-known musicians are making videos with us that spread awareness of 988. While congressional gridlock stalled funding for the first few months of this year, the 2024 spending bill was just signed into law, authorizing over $500 million for 988 which shows bipartisan support for mental health. We are excited to be a part of this generational culture shift in mental health response, as 988 is not only a suicide hotline but will eventually become an alternative to 911 for those in mental health crisis.

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• SoS received a generous contribution from Sirius XM Radio as well an offer to explore potential ways of partnering with their audience of 100 million listeners. Sirius played a PSA about SoS & 988 at the end of 2023 to bring awareness to suicide prevention and our work with 988.

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• Last summer we were invited to Washington DC to meet with some key members of the US Department of Education to discuss our work in schools that we began last spring. We are thrilled to let you know that last month we were invited by the Department to run an SoS program during the US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s visit to George Washington Elementary School in Lancaster, PA. We were honored to not only meet the Secretary but to have him introduce us at the beginning of our program which included amazing music and discussion with students about emotion and mental health. Secretary Cardona even shared with the students which ‘song found him at the right time,’  a Spanish song about flowers that he said spoke to his passion for education, which he compared to a garden where you can nurture flowers and watch them grow. We are hopeful this partnership with the Department will continue, and we could not be more excited about the credibility it offers us as we build and expand our school-based programming. Please see a few images from this day at the bottom of this letter!

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• Additionally we are meeting this month with some of the folks who run partnerships for the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Dr. Murthy is an active advocate for mental health and for the role music can have in fighting social isolation and in getting people off of their phones and into environments where they connect in real life. We are hopeful we can find some wonderful ways to partner with the Office of the Surgeon General and will report back soon!

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• Along these lines, we were a partner on a large-scale traveling music festival in 2023 that featured some of the biggest names in contemporary music (boygenius, Steve Lacy, LCD Soundsystem, Idles etc.). This brought us to locations throughout the US including Dallas, Chicago, Columbus, Austin, LA, NYC, San Diego & Denver where we distributed mental health resources and information to tens of thousands of fans. We landed this opportunity through AEG, the world’s largest sports and live entertainment company and we’re hopeful to build on this partnership. In this and similar activations, SoS is able to fundraise through a company called Propeller which incentivizes fans to donate small amounts to nonprofits in hopes of winning prizes such as ticket upgrades, signed set lists and meet & greets with artists. 

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• SoS has been fortunate to be supported by many generous donations over the past year. One philanthropist gave us a “Firestarter Grant” of $25k, and a few donors supported us at the $10k-$13k level. One donor even offered us $50k if we were to match this number and we succeeded in that handlily! This allowed us to hire our first Executive Director (Anjali Ramasunder) and Director of Development (Dorothy Fuqua). We are now a small, scrappy and growing team of 5 at SoS and are hoping to expand further as we are able to, including fractional hiring of experts to help build our school programs and curricula.  

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Again, we can not thank you enough for being an early supporter of SoS and believing in our mission. There is no way we would be where we are today and made these strides without your generosity and confidence in us.

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Most appreciatively yours!

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Charlie & Nick

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