Making a difference in healthcare: Douglas Hunter and family

These days, philanthropists aren’t just handing out dollars; instead, they want to “make a difference” by investing significant personal time and, increasingly, gifts labelled as “transformational,” like the Peter Gilgan Foundation’s recent $105 million gift to Trillium Health Partners Foundation in Mississauga, Ont.

Gifts like these aren’t undertaken lightly. Here’s the story of one donor family and how they arrived at a strategy to achieve their philanthropic goals in the healthcare sector.

The catalysts: Douglas Hunter and family

Some donors are led to their causes by chance; others, like Calgary’s Hunter family, choose by design.

After success in Alberta’s oil and gas sector, Douglas Hunter founded Bluesky Equities Ltd., where his son Derrick Hunter is president and CEO. Douglas Hunter created the Hunter Family Foundation in 1984 as a gift to his wife, former Calgary alderman Diane Hunter. Douglas, Diane and Derrick Hunter are trustees, with grandson Adam Hunter.

The foundation has three pillars: entrepreneurism, health and wellness, and free market thinking. In 2017, it gave $40 million to the University of Calgary to establish the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking.

Subsequently, working with Patrick O’Connor of Winnipeg’s Blackwood Family Enterprise Services and Gena Rotstein of Calgary’s Karma & Cents Inc., the family undertook a formal process for “narrowing down what they really wanted to invest in and what their values are,” says Mona Hunter, wife of Derrick Hunter and chair of the mental-health pillar.

They came up with an “ultimate outcome” that marries the three pillars: “a healthy society where innovation and entrepreneurial mindset drive solutions for complex social issues.” It’s an approach that’s typical for this strategy-minded family, which holds annual retreats for all members as young as 14.

 

“We’re trying to come up with innovative ways to make sure our communities are healthy,” Hunter says. “One of our mandates as a foundation is to be a catalyst for other foundations and individuals in Alberta.”

In 2018, the foundation charged Karma & Cents with identifying key Alberta organizations addressing the mental-health needs of emerging adults (age 15-25), then convened to discuss the issues, identify service gaps and pinpoint key areas for foundation support. This in turn spurred the commissioning of a research report with recommendations for further addressing these needs.

“As a foundation, we discovered a sweet spot in being able to catalyze different organizations to discuss these issues in a different way,” Hunter says.

“We started an organization called CONVERGE, comprised of more than 80 organizations in Alberta and across Canada, to look at the mental-health system and find opportunities to make things more efficient.”

With two projects already under way, CONVERGE aims to ensure people are able to navigate the mental-health system in order to get to the right services at the right time. The hope is to divert people from the health and justice systems by connecting them with services that will give them the help they need early on, explains Gena Rotstein. “We equate it to a highway with numerous on- and off-ramps that patients and families can access – hopefully before they head down the highway to hospital or justice services.”

“We see duplication of services and siloing; there’s incredible research that’s not getting out fast enough,” says Hunter. “We’re trying to escalate and reinforce systems and organizations that are already doing amazing work in mental-health services.”

This article is one of three spotlighting major philanthropic givers in the health care area. The others are Maxine Granovsky and Ira Gluskin and Donald K. Johnson.

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