As research on child development has progressed, funders supporting education and the wellbeing of children have shifted their work further upstream, into the earliest months and years of life. Sometimes, that means tackling health inequities beginning even before birth, as in the case of a recent $25 million gift from one donor couple.
The donation from Kathleen and John Schreiber is focused on children from birth to age five — “the most important years of development,” according to the announcement. The gift to the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago will establish the Schreiber Family Center for Early Childhood Health and Wellness. But the new center will also look at determinants of health from before birth, an acknowledgement of the many factors that contribute to a child’s development. The center will promote home visiting, doula, and care coordination strategies; it will also coordinate a broad range of existing community programs that provide social services and connect parents to healthcare, child development initiatives, and other resources.
“Over the decades, our understanding of how to approach our work has evolved,” said Thomas Shanley, Lurie Children’s president and CEO, when the gift was announced. “Providing high-quality medical care and cutting-edge research is essential, but it is not enough to meet the critical needs of our youth. We need to focus on the upstream factors that lead to health and racial inequities our children and communities experience. The Schreiber family’s visionary gift will support us in this work.”
The center’s focus on the earliest years may be unique, but its emphasis on addressing social and health inequities in the city of Chicago aligns with Kathleen and John Schreiber’s giving priorities to date. Real estate investor John Schreiber was a cofounder and partner of Blackstone Real Estate Advisors. The John and Kathleen Schreiber Foundation, created in 2005, has a spare, one-page website that sums up the organization’s goal: “to work primarily within the Chicagoland region to create vibrant and welcoming communities where underserved and vulnerable populations have access to high-quality education and supportive services that help people reach their full potential.”
In an interview with Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, a foundation grantee, John Schreiber linked his philanthropy to his Catholic faith. “I spent my life in the real estate investment business and did well, which got me and my wife thinking about philanthropy twenty-some years ago,” he said. “I was raised a Catholic. If you know anything about Catholicism and the gospel you hear regularly in church on Sunday, God’s message is to help the least of our brethren.” (The Schreibers declined our request for an interview.)
According to Candid, the foundation gave close to $17 million from 2015 to 2019. Most of that funding went to education, social services, religion and health causes. The Schreibers also make personal gifts separate from the foundation, as is the case with the new center. And in June, the couple gave $100 million to Loyola University Chicago, the largest individual gift in the university’s history. The gift will fund full scholarships, room and board, and support services for Black, Latino, first-generation, and other traditionally underrepresented students. (John Schreiber attended Loyola as an undergraduate and is on the board of trustees).
Early childhood has been an area of growing interest for the Schreibers in recent years, and while they’ve provided support to Lurie Children’s Hospital before, their investment in the new center represents an expanded commitment to the youngest children. As IP reported in its recent research paper, “Giving for Early Childhood Education,” early childhood has been consistently underfunded by philanthropy as a whole, but support has ticked up in recent years, along with awareness that early childhood experiences — both positive and negative — have lifelong impacts. As John Schreiber told the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, “We’re putting a lot of effort into that now on the theory that so many problems that come up later in life for kids in school could be solved early on.”
Fostering early connections
Pediatrician Mariana Glusman was a medical student and a new mother when she first began thinking about the impact of early relationships on child development. “I was learning to be a mom and I was learning to be a pediatrician at the same time,” she told me. “One of the things that I loved to do with my daughter was read to her. It was something that I enjoyed doing and she loved it, too. It was also something I could do lying down — I was so tired!”
Over time, Glusman noticed that her daughter was developing more quickly than many of the children she was treating as patients. “I thought, this makes no sense, these kids are loved just as much as my daughter, their parents really care about them. And it occurred to me that reading was making the difference.”
That revelation turned Glusman into an avid champion of reading to kids. She’s now associate medical director for the new Schreiber Center, in addition to being active in the organization Reach Out and Read, which helps pediatricians incorporate books and reading into well-child visits. Glusman is the medical director and board chair of Reach Out and Read in Illinois.
Glusman points out that reading to young children is about more than literacy. “Over the years, as we’ve learned more about adverse childhood experiences and about the importance of positive childhood experiences, we’ve come to realize that Reach Out and Read is not an early literacy program. It’s an early relational health program.”
Promoting early relational health will be a primary goal of the Schreiber Center, seeking to mitigate adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that impact long-term health and wellness into adulthood. “They’ve found that the more adverse childhood experiences people have, the higher the risk of cardiovascular disease, of immune problems, of drug abuse and mental health issues,” said Glusman. “Stroke. Cancer. Because those experiences create toxic stress.”
In recent years, developmental scientists have also found that safe, stable and nurturing relationships “buffer adversity and build resilience,” and prevent childhood toxic stress, according to a 2021 policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“It’s about strengthening the relationships between children and their caregivers,” Glusman said. “Our goal is to support families starting at birth or even prenatally, and to try to take away some of the stressors. If you’re working three jobs, are in an abusive relationship, or are really depressed, it’s hard to develop the kind of sustained, nurturing relationships that promote health development. So we’re encouraging families to talk, read and sing to their babies; we’re also trying to help eliminate some of the stressors that get in their way.”
Connecting prospective and new parents to home visiting services and doulas will be an important part of the center’s mission. “Those early connections are important for helping parents create safe, stable nurturing relationships right from the start,” Glusman said. “The home visiting programs and the doulas provide support for parents. Kids don’t come with a user’s manual.” Home visiting representatives and doulas will also connect parents to services to help with food insecurity, unstable housing, mental health issues and other needs.
Other center programs will promote children’s resiliency and social-emotional wellbeing, provide training for the early childhood workforce, and conduct collaborative research. The new center will build on work already underway at Lurie Children’s Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities, according to Glusman. “What the Schreibers’ generous gift is allowing us to do is to articulate and amplify the work we’ve already been doing with this age group, to continue work with our community partners, and to increase those partnerships,” she said.
Glusman believes the new center’s comprehensive approach is unique. “We’re usually so siloed in the work that we do,” she said. “There’s the group that promotes safe sleep, and then there’s another group that does early relational health, and another group that does obesity and breastfeeding, and nobody’s talking to each other.”
That won’t be the case at the Schreiber center, she said, where the nutrition program will share materials on the benefits of breastfeeding with the maternal programs, for example, and resources from the safe sleep center will make its way to doulas and parent educators.
“All of us working together from many different angles — I’m not aware of any other programs like it.”
Just getting started
A portion of the Schreibers’ recent $25 million gift will go to an endowment that will ensure the new center’s future. “It’s amazing, we don’t often receive money that is going into a fund for longevity,” Glusman said. “Typically someone gives you money and you have to spend it within three years, and then what happens? This is a much more visionary approach.”
But creating an endowment also cuts into the amount of money available for center programs, as Glusman acknowledged. “This is a fabulous foundation, but it is important that we continue to have support to be able to build into the future.”
John Schreiber himself hopes his gift will encourage other funders to step up, too. “Kathy and I wanted to do what we could to help address some of the barriers to health and wellness for Chicago’s children,” he said when the funding was unveiled. “While our investment has established this focused effort on birth to age five, we hope others who share our belief in the importance of the early childhood years will join us in supporting this effort.”