Blue Dove Foundation Announces National Partnership

The Blue Dove Foundation, which has provided mental health resources for the Atlanta Jewish community, is partnering with the Be Well Initiative of the Jewish Federations of North America to make those resources available nationally.

The partnership is the result of discussions that have been aided by the Upstart Accelerator in Berkeley, Calif., which provides consulting services for several innovative Jewish philanthropic initiatives.

The president of the Blue Dove Foundation, Justin Milrad, who was also one of the three co-founders of the organization eight years ago, announced the partnership.

“Blue Dove on a very tight budget has reached hundreds of thousands of people and we want to reach millions. What we know is the Jewish element of tying in mental health and substance addiction helps people work through their mental health challenges.”

For the past eight years, the foundation has developed an extensive catalogue of resources of mental health materials that emphasize the Jewish dimension in mental healing.

“Jewish people struggle with mental health and substance abuse at similar rates as all others,” Milrad said, “yet we carry a heavy burden of shame and stigma. Because so many of us are programmed to be high achievers we find that many people know resources exist, but they don’t know where to start. When the Blue Dove Foundation was started, we found that nothing else existed to address mental health and substance abuse through a Jewish lens.”

Milrad, who was one of the founders of The Berman Center, which provides outpatient programs for mental health and substance abuse in adolescents and adults, indicated that the Blue Dove was set to become a part the Be Well Initiative more than two years ago, but that the events related to the Oct. 7 attack in Israel put the plan on hold.

Jewish people struggle with mental health and substance abuse at similar rates as all others, yet we carry a heavy burden of shame and stigma.

“We were ready to partner with them then,” Milrad said, “but both organizations had to provide tools to support the community and help in the grieving both from the trauma of Oct. 7 and then rising antisemitism which was a real and tall and difficult order.”

Milrad points out that shortly after Oct. 7, the foundation created materials that were downloaded over 100,000 times. They were part of the extensive website the organization maintains for materials that provide mental health resources from a Jewish perspective.

There are printed materials and video programs that relate to Jewish holidays, Jewish prayers and spiritual teachings, and materials that address the needs and concerns of adolescents.

Those materials are now available to anyone who visits the Be Well website, which has been created in partnership with the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies in 20 communities with significant Jewish populations across the country.

“The ability to amplify our work has been tremendous,” Milrad pointed out, “and I think our relationship with the Be Well program was really a marriage made in heaven and, as they say in Yiddish, beshert. Be Well had a lot of amazing tools but they didn’t have a Jewish component; it was more psycho-education, and we brought the Jewish components, so it worked really well.”

The initiative has the support of several important funders of national Jewish communal program, the Crown Family Philanthropies, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. Milrad credits the support of the Marcus Foundation here as a crucial factor in getting his own organization off the ground in 2018.

The ability to amplify our work has been tremendous.

The recent tragedy in Los Angeles that resulted in the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, allegedly by their son, was a reminder, according to Milrad, that mental health and substance abuse doesn’t discriminate based on age, ethnicity, or socio-economic factors. And even with all the resources that were available to the Reiner family, he said there was no way of predicting what, unfortunately, occurred.

“In terms of family systems, it’s really tricky because it’s hard to make a family operate in harmony at all times,” Milrad observes. “But we provide a lot of tools to help an army of mental health first responders to make sure we are better equipped to help individuals, so that when something happens, they can jump in and react quickly.”

Milrad expects that in the new year his organization will develop new tools, expanded resources and powerful ways to connect Jewish communities around mental health and well-being. The work that Blue Dove has started, he believes, will continue with a greater reach and more impact than ever before.

“The work is evolving, the reach is expanding and the impact ahead is profound,” he stated in announcing the new partnership. “We cannot wait to share what’s next.”