JED Co-Founders Honored With Kennedy Forum Award | JED

JED Co-founders Phil and Donna Satow Honored With the Kennedy Forum’s Ask Not Award

The Satows pose with the Kennedys at the Kennedy Forum’s 2024 Alignment for Progress conference at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The Jed Foundation’s co-founders, Donna and Phil Satow, were recognized last week for their longstanding commitment to mental health advocacy, receiving the Ask Not Award from The Kennedy Forum. The award ceremony took place during the Forum’s 2024 Alignment for Progress conference at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. 

In remarks upon accepting the award, the Satows shared how President John F. Kennedy’s famous words, for which the award was named, resonated with them as college students and continued to inspire their work with JED: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

“It was our call to action and defined a service ethic that guided our entire generation,” Donna Satow, a JED board member, said in her remarks.

The Ask Not Awards honor individuals and entities who have acted to advance and improve mental health and substance-use treatment systems, and support and serve those who make use of those systems.

The Kennedy Forum, co-founded by former Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy and his wife, Amy L. Kennedy, is a nonprofit dedicated to transforming mental health and substance use prevention, treatment, and care in the United States. The Forum brings together key leaders and partners to address critical issues such as insurance coverage inequities and the youth mental health crisis. Patrick Kennedy “has consistently answered his uncle’s challenge, making mental health care and substance use disorder prevention and care a national priority long before the rest of the country caught on,” JED board chair emeritus Phil Satow said.

In 2023, the organization launched the Alignment for Progress initiative, aiming to achieve three nationwide goals by 2033:

  • 90% of individuals being screened for mental health conditions or substance use disorders
  • 90% receiving the evidence-based services and support they need
  • 90% of those treated being able to manage their symptoms and achieve recovery

In his remarks, Phil Satow praised The Kennedy Forum’s Alignment for Progress goals, describing the initiative as a “blueprint for the work we must do over the next decade to realize a healthier and happier future for all of us.” The Satows expressed their gratitude to Patrick and Amy Kennedy for their leadership in mental health advocacy. “How lucky are we to have leaders like Patrick and Amy, who have the empathy and compassion to recognize the struggle of our common humanity, the vision to imagine global solutions to what were once dismissed as personal problems, and the strategy to leverage powerful partnerships to bring them to life?” Phil Satow said.

In a separate event during the Alignment for Progress conference, Dr. Zainab Okolo, JED’s Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations, spoke on the panel Youth and Addiction: Exploring Its Intersection With Policy and Pathways to Change. Also on the panel were moderator Joan Steinberg, President of the Morgan Stanley Foundation; Steve Adelsheim, Director of the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing; David Anderson, Vice President of Public Engagement and Education at the Child Mind Institute; and Duncan Young, the CEO of Effective School Solutions.

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