Grant Halliburton Foundation

Grant Halliburton Foundation was established in 2006 in memory of Grant Halliburton, a Dallas teen who battled depression and bipolar disorder for several years before his suicide death at the age of 19.

The Foundation that bears his name works to help families and young people recognize the signs of mental illness through a variety of avenues including mental health education, collaboration, encouragement, and information.

Grant Halliburton Foundation offers a variety of programs, presentations, and an annual conference on mental wellness, suicide prevention, bullying, resilience, and other issues impacting youth mental health.

The Foundation also developed Here For Texas, which includes HereForTexas.com, an online searchable database of mental health resources in Texas, and the Here For Texas Mental Health Navigation Line, a free helpline. These no-cost community tools aim to offer easy access for Texans seeking mental health and addiction resources and information.

Grant Halliburton Foundation provides mental health education, training, and support to more than 49,000 students, educators, parents, and professionals annually. Since 2006, the Foundation has reached nearly 300,000 people with its mental health and suicide prevention programming.

With a half million students in the Dallas-Fort Worth community, and with high suicide rates among our children and youth, the need for mental health literacy is of utmost importance. We take our educational curriculum directly into schools to teach students to recognize depression and the warning signs of suicide.

Our presentations are designed for classrooms, not auditoriums. The more intimate setting encourages youth to participate in the discussions and feel more comfortable when asking questions. We offer the following presentations.

• #Safe: Join the Conversation is designed to educate students about mental wellness and encourage them to speak up and become responsible for their mental health. Students learn the impact of stress on behaviors and brain health, positive coping skills, and the signs of depression and suicidal behavior. Students also learn how to talk with a friend in crisis and how to involve adults who can help.
• RISE: Change Your World is designed to help students understand the behaviors, consequences and outcomes of bullying and cyberbullying.
• BounceBack: Building Resiliency in Children and Teens helps children and teens develop strengths, acquire skills to cope, recover from hardships, and be prepared for future challenges.

Over the past decade, the Foundation has focused on improving the quality of life and, in some cases, even the life expectancy of adolescents with mental illness. We do this by teaching individuals to recognize and respond appropriately to signs of mental illness, psychological distress, and suicidal behavior in children, teens and young adults. In this way, we can prevent treatable mental illnesses from escalating to crisis situations, which often result in tragic consequences. To that end, we target our programs to three groups:
• Children, teens and young adults
• Adult stakeholders in youth mental health
• The mental health community

We are partnering with several organizations, including UT Dallas Center for Brain Health, The Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, Okay to Say, Hope Squad, Communities in Schools, and Children’s Medical Center, to name a few. Other partnerships will come into play based on the unique needs of each school community. Each of our partners will provide their experience and expertise in contributing to the key pillars of our programs: Awareness, student education, adult training, peer-to-peer, human services, access to mental health resources, and research/tracking

To offer these services, we rely on private funding to fund our operations. There is always the risk that we will not raise enough to support our operations budget. To help mitigate this risk, we are working very proactively to diversify our funding sources, including foundations, corporate donors, individual donors and fundraisers. We are actively pursuing long-term partnerships and are seeing strong interest across all potential partner groups. We are also seeing strong and steady growth in our annual fundraisers and expect this trend to continue. For us, diversity of funding is key to our long-term success. Expanding and diversifying our funding base is a top priority for the organization.

We host two fund-raisers annually including A Beacon of Hope Community Luncheon and The Hope Party. We are also supported by a dedicated group of supporters, the Connection HERE Auxiliary. Additionally, we participate in North Texas Giving Day.

Our board of directors and fund development personnel continually seek and qualify potential sources of funding in the private sector to provide the necessary resources for all our programs and services. The organization also receives ongoing pro bono services of considerable value from the following entities: BKM Sowan Horan; Briley Design Group; Haynes and Boone; Graham Consulting; Integer Dallas; and David Ziegler, CPA.

We are committed to the continued growth of our programs. We reached over 49,000 people in 2019 and expect to reach even more in 2021 as the pandemic begins to recede and in-person learning begins for students.
We are also committed to increasing the overall impact of our programs, and ultimately quantifying the positive results we hope to achieve for our constituents. In 2018, we partnered with Parish Episcopal School to develop a pilot program that would elevate the commitment to mental health awareness and education in an educational environment. Our desire is to infuse mental health education into the everyday learning environment of the school, literally changing the culture around how we address adolescent mental health.

Based on the learnings from our pilot program, we are introduced Thrive in 2018 and ow have more than 20 schools enrolled in our program. Thrive is a strategy that adopts best practices from a variety of mental health partners, ultimately creating layers of programs targeting three critical audiences: students, faculty/staff and parents. Programs could come in the form of classroom education, extracurricular activities, peer-based programs, awareness campaigns, teacher/adult training, and speaker series and seminars. We are developing partnership details with a variety of organizations, including Center for BrainHealth at UT Dallas, Children’s Health, Communities In Schools of the Dallas Region, Hope Squad, Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, and Okay to Say to name a few. As we are in the early stages of development, the program will be fluid and continue to evolve as we work to build and improve the program.

In January 2019, Grant Halliburton Foundation officially launched the HERE FOR TEXAS Mental Health Navigation Line to assist individuals with finding appropriate care for mental illnesses. We provide access via telephone and email. This no-cost service is a critical extension of the HereForTexas.com website.

For this new initiative, trained Mental Health Navigators anticipate, address, and overcome barriers to care. Individuals are guided through the complex treatment "maze” and helped to identify appropriate resources and options in care to meet their needs. True to the acronym in its name, HERE FOR TEXAS will offer Help, Education, Resources and Encouragement, empowering people to make informed decisions and find appropriate mental health care.

In late summer 2021, the Foundation will launch an all-new HereForTexas.com website.