CARPE DIEM

I once developed a script about hobos traveling the American West who stowed away on freight trains. Outside of Phoenix there were two rail lines that came from great distances and for several hundred yards ran exactly parallel, separated by only a six foot gap. If you were a hobo traveling from the southeast to the northwest, you could save a great deal of time if you seized the moment and with impeccable timing jumped the gap from one train speeding along, to the other. This very dangerous maneuver symbolized in the script the moment in our lives when we are faced with a great but dangerous opportunity. We either take it, or we do not.

So it was that last year I realized the two magnificent children’s charities I had founded, The Starlight Foundation and The Starbright Foundation, had the potential to merge and become greater than the sum of their parts. I had always felt, since 1990, that Starlight and Starbright were twins separated at birth….here finally was a chance to put things right, “highest and best”. The question was whether or not I would have the nerve to jump. And if I did, how could I possibly encourage forty other people to jump with me?

In 1982 my cousin introduced me to an eleven-year-old British boy, Sean Honnoraty, hospitalized in London with an inoperable brain tumor. Sean’s great wish was to see Disneyland. We decided he should fly to Los Angeles with his mother, Brenda, a considerable logistical challenge. Sean had a wonderful time as did Brenda, watching Sean enjoy himself. Mother, son and my cousin moved into my condominium….so over a two-week period I came to know Sean well. When he returned to London and then died a few weeks later, I was terribly upset of course, but felt we had contributed something important to his last days.

I had my epiphany ten days later at lunch with an executive from HBO. Half way through the meal, we ran out of business to discuss and he asked me, “So what else is new?” I told him the story of Sean’s visit and of his death. The man from HBO wept right at the lunch table. I was thunderstruck: though I was as deeply embarrassed as him, I realized there and then the enormous power of what we had accomplished for Sean.

I called a meeting of a dozen entertainment industry executives and others and simply told the story. I suggested we could replicate the wish and do some more good. When the lawyer in the room asked what we wanted to call the new charity, an attractive young lady suggested we remember the children’s rhyme “Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight…”. I had had one previous date with her. She was present, honestly, because I knew I would need an accountant! The fact that Saryl and I have now been married two decades underlines what wonderful personal serendipity for me rode on the back of founding Starlight.

By 1990, Starlight had grown into a prodigious international charity providing psychosocial services to seriously ill children in Australia, Canada, The United States and the United Kingdom through a network of Chapters and offices. One of the programs we had developed placed thousands of audio-visual Fun Centers into children’s hospitals. It occurred to me that perhaps we could manufacture software tailor-made to the needs of seriously ill children, rather than only showing them off-the-shelf entertainment. I managed to get a meeting with Steven Spielberg, which unexpectedly ran on for two exhilarating hours. By the end of the meeting, Steven had agreed to chair a new charitable activity: producing videos and interactive software for seriously ill children. He also made a substantial donation and became an important partner in creating the new entity.

I originally wanted Starbright to be a program of Starlight…it seemed self-evident then and ever since that software needed the distribution network of our Chapters while the distribution network needed an ever-fresh array of products and services. There was a concern, however, at Starlight that building a non-profit studio was risky and that within a charity it could make problems for the whole organization. So the prudent and expeditious thing to do was to form Starbright as a separate 501(c)3 non-profit with its own Board and budget. So we did just that.

We first built Starbright World, a cutting-edge interactive on-line network linking seriously ill children in hospitals throughout North America. Children play, learn and interact through picture and sound with kids separated by thousands of miles. We also produced an array of interactive software to teach children about disease management in highly attractive and compelling ways. And we had a lot of fun.

But I always thought these two magnificent organizations would do much better if put back together. Between them we raised ….and also spent ….over a hundred million dollars on seriously ill children, but I would see crazy missed opportunities as I traveled around the country: In the same corridor of the hospital for example there would be two doors: A Starlight Room would contain a superb, kid-friendly environment and hardware running…. plain old commercial software. Fifty feet further would be a Starbright Room where compelling software tailor-made for seriously ill children played…. on standard computers in a regular hospital room…. The people at the hospital couldn’t understand the logic and neither could I.

Most people believe that mergers and acquisitions are only a for-profit Wall Street activity. But eighteen months ago we embarked on a great adventure: merging these two well-established non-profits into one glorious Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. It took a great deal of professional effort involving law firms (Morrison & Foerster, Latham & Watkins, Kaye Scholer), accountancy (Deloitte & Touche), public relations (Sitric & Co., Addison) and the tireless efforts of a very high-powered joint committee known as Team Twinkle, which met regularly and in secret.

This process reached a happy conclusion last year when both boards voted through a full merger. We have already seen proof that our original hypothesis for merger holds water: More ill children are being served better over the long term and with diminished downside risk. The moral and pragmatic stockholders of our two organizations, seriously ill children, their families and the health care professionals looking after them have greatly benefited. Through Cause Related Marketing, the network of Starlight chapters dovetails seamlessly with the star power and products of Starbright. Starbright has brought serious scientific research to the array of psychosocial services proven by years of experience at Starlight. We’ve put Starbright software on Starlight hardware. We’ve merged two Boards so seamlessly that I have difficulty remembering who came from where. Most of all, by enhancing safety, longevity and permanency we have best served our special children. We’ve maybe created a perpetuity and through it an enduring legacy.

There is always fear of the unknown and it is always difficult to conquer the uncertainties which surround a new construction, a new relationship and a new definition of family. But sometimes when two trains run parallel one has to take the longest possible view, a deep breath and simply jump. Leadership is in the careful analysis of risk and reward and then in the presentation of a compelling proposition that will cause people to do the unprecedented and to do it brilliantly.

I am deeply grateful to all those individuals who worked so vigorously to make this rare non-profit merger come to pass. I thank you and, much more importantly, so do the two and a half million seriously ill children who are now helped by Starlight Starbright every year.

________________________________________________________
Peter Samuelson is founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (http://www.slsb.org/) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net.