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Donor Stories
Menninger receives donations from around the world for its work. But what motivates giving? Why is Menninger’s work considered such a compelling mission? Here you will find an assortment of stories that explain the generous relationship between Menninger and the friends who provide support.
Stedman West gift supports nurse training
 At Menninger, nursing staff stability is crucial to the consistently high performance of treatment teams. The nurse’s responsibility in patient care is enormous and complex. To meet the expectations placed on the nurse in the Menninger setting, extensive training is needed beyond what a nurse receives in even the very best baccalaureate program.
In order to address the short supply of psychiatric nurses, Menninger initiated a program in 2005 made possible by a leadership grant of $120,000 and continued funding of $140,000 from the Houston-based Stedman West Foundation. “The Betty Ann Stedman Psychiatric Nursing Intern Program” provides on-the-job training in psychiatric care to graduate nurses.
“We wanted to participate in supporting the Menninger mission, but we also were eager to see our resources used now for an immediate need,” said Betty Ann Stedman, a Foundation Trustee and in whose name the program was established.
“The nursing program is a very positive effort. We all know how vital nurses are to healthcare. We are pleased we can help Menninger create an opportunity for nursing professionals to realize their potential while providing compassion and hope for those in recovery from mental illness.”
The grant provides paid positions for newly graduated, college-educated nurses. They are taught the skills to practice the multi-faceted and highly effective treatment methods for which Menninger is world renowned.
Menninger provided early inspiration for later work
 Among the guidelines broadly used today by mental health treaters around the world, borderline personality is considered a formal diagnosis of a severe condition. The guidelines also suggest effective modes of treatment, a result that can be attributed in part to the work of Otto Kernberg, MD, his Menninger colleagues and the generous donors who supported their work.
Dr. Kernberg is an alumnus of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and a former director of the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital. Included among his many awards is the prestigious I. Arthur Marshall Distinguished Alumnus Award from Menninger in 1993. He was elected a Menninger Trustee the previous year and has supported Menninger programs for 40 years.
Today, he is director of the Personality Disorder Institute at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University. He is training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and has been president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Dr. Kernberg is the epitome of the American story. He left Austria when he was 10 years old as his parents escaped the Nazis. They immigrated to Chile and he trained there in psychiatry at the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. He traveled to the United States for the first time in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study research in psychotherapy at Johns Hopkins. Eventually he made his way to Menninger.
Dr. Kernberg was among dozens of Menninger clinicians and researchers to work on and eventually direct the massive Psychotherapy Research Project. The landmark study remains the most extensive and detailed examination of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis that has ever been done. The research group documented, as much as humanly possible, how serious mental illness is best treated.
Support is rooted in legacy of excellence
 Jack and Candy Clevenger, Kansas City, Missouri, embrace their interests with verve and energy. They have included mental health and Menninger among their interests as well, supporting Menninger's work since 1984. Mr. Clevenger, director of investments and a senior institutional consultant for Smith Barney, has also successfully encouraged corporate gifts to Menninger while generously providing his professional business expertise to Menninger in a variety of ways.
A history of cheering on and supporting excellence runs in the Clevenger family.
"Our involvement in Menninger and mental health started in Topeka with the interest my Mom and Dad had in the organization," Mr. Clevenger said. "They always spoke highly of the work Menninger did. We've also had close acquaintances benefit from Menninger care so we know that just as physical illness can be successfully treated, so can mental illness. Our family believes in that."
Mr. Clevenger's family has long been associated with Menninger in a number of roles. His brother Thomas R. Clevenger, Wichita, Kansas, was elected a Menninger Trustee in 1976, was past vice chairman of Trustees and chaired the board of The Menninger Foundation from 1989 to 1994. Their father, the late R. Charles Clevenger, was interim president of The Menninger Foundation after the death of co-founder William C. Menninger, MD, in 1966.
Global executive understands human limitations
 Peter Benoliel, who spent 40 years with the Pennsylvania-based Quaker Chemical Company before retiring as chairman of the Board in 1997, has supported Menninger for more than four decades, just as his mother did before him.
“When I was growing up, mental illness was not recognized. It existed, but those sorts of problems went unspoken. This didn’t happen in my home, but in society generally. So I’ve always had an interest. My mother was an enthusiastic supporter of Menninger for many years before me.
“People will go and have a broken finger fixed, but because of stigma some people still won’t get their mental problems treated. I’ve encountered severe mental illness, I’ve seen it, so I greatly appreciate what Menninger does, and I have always admired what the Menninger's have done for mental health.”
While he was a top executive with Quaker, Mr. Benoliel drew strength and inspiration from Menninger co-founder Dr. Will Menninger’s “Criteria of Emotional Maturity,” which Mr. Benoliel has kept within easy reach for many years.
The criteria involve:
- The ability to deal constructively with reality
- The capacity to adapt to change
- A relative freedom from symptoms that are produced by tensions and anxieties
- The capacity to find more satisfaction in giving than receiving
- The capacity to relate to other people in a consistent manner with mutual satisfaction and helpfulness
- The capacity to sublimate, to direct one’s instinctive hostile energy into creative and constructive outlets
- The capacity to love
Musical soul
 It was in 1963 that jazz pianist Marian McPartland, host of public radio’s Piano Jazz, planned to invite Dr. Karl Menninger to a concert in Kansas City where she was to play with the Benny Goodman band. The concert never happened.
President John F. Kennedy was killed that November and Mrs. McPartland took a long needed break from the road. She visited the Menninger campus, played piano for patients, met and talked with staff members and attended various lectures and classes. She stayed for two weeks.
Mrs. McPartland had read Dr. Karl's enormously successful layman's book on psychiatry, The Human Mind, the first of its kind to explore the psychology of human behavior for non-clinicians.
“I'm so glad I got to know him,” Mrs. McPartland said. “I'm not a religious person, but I went to his Bible class because it was him. He was a fantastic guy. He was a fabulous individual. Actually, I enjoyed being at The Clinic so much I really didn't want to leave. They had a very nice piano there. They even had hip things to read like Down Beat magazine. I was astonished.
“At that time, in my own life, I think I was doing things that were getting in my own way. What I learned there at Menninger I think made me do a lot of things in my life I wouldn't otherwise have had the courage to do.”
Since 1971, Mrs. McPartland has supported Menninger programs. Her giving is sustained by the notion that though the world is not in better shape than she might have expected by now, she remains hopeful.
A man who remembered mentors
 Rutherford B. Stevens, MD, was the first black psychiatric trainee to be accepted into the Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka. Though his participation in the program was novel in 1946, once the color barrier was breached, other black physicians followed.
Dr. Stevens died November 27, 2003, in New York City. He was 92. Virtually from the day he graduated until his death, Dr. Stevens consistently supported Menninger.
“He certainly attributed his successful professional life to the training he had at Menninger and held in the highest regard Drs. Will and Karl,” said his wife, Mildred.
Major Stevens was accepted into the first wave of trainees that flocked to Menninger in 1946.
The question of allowing a black physician into the program had already been discussed and answered at the Menninger School of Psychiatry.
“We may consider a Negro on the same terms as any other applicant,” said the official Menninger statement, an extension of Menninger's long-standing view that color and religion were irrelevant considerations in judging an individual's ability or character.
Dr. Stevens, who was married with two children, attended school on a stipend and had to pay for his own psychoanalytic training. Unlike his white classmates who had access to loans or family resources, Dr. Stevens was fairly isolated. While serving as Dr. Stevens' teacher and mentor, Dr. Karl financially staked Dr. Stevens, who promptly repaid the debt.
After training, he was in private practice in New York for 50 successful years.
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treating individuals with mood, personality, anxiety and
addictive disorders, teaching mental health professionals
and advancing mental healthcare through research.
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Affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine and
The Methodist Hospital in the Texas Medical Center
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