The Care & Cure Institute honored Ben Affleck at its 20th anniversary gala at the Beverly Wilshire on Wednesday night, and the room answered with nearly $2 million, the most the organization has ever raised at a single event.
The money funds endowed fellowships in pediatric epilepsy. The institute pays children’s hospitals to train pediatric epileptologists, the specialists who diagnose and treat epilepsy in children, and it endows the positions so the training continues permanently. Twenty years in, that model has funded 57 fellows. The goal announced Wednesday is a national network of 100 specialists within five years, backed by a $30 million campaign to fund 50 more fellows.
Affleck, a two-time Academy Award winner and the chief executive of Artists Equity, has friends whose lives have been touched by epilepsy. “Epilepsy isn’t abstract to me,” he said. “I’ve watched people I care about deal with it, and I’ve seen how much it matters when a family can get in front of the right doctor quickly.” Ahead of the gala, he visited UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital and met with pediatric epileptologists the institute trained. The institute honored him for that personal connection and for a long record of philanthropic work.
The honor also ran through his own company. Andrew Gumpert, who co-founded the institute, is president of business affairs and strategy at Artists Equity. “Ben’s willingness to step into this work, to listen to our doctors and help tell this story, means so much as we mark 20 years,” Gumpert said. Gumpert co-chaired the gala with co-founder Mark Borman, Nicole Gumpert, and Karen Hermelin.
Gumpert and Borman started the institute after their own children were diagnosed with epilepsy at birth. Both families had access to leading medical care. What they could not find, quickly, was a specialist with the expertise their children needed. Their first gala was held in 2006.
The shortage those two families ran into is still the institute’s subject. Children with complex seizure disorders can wait months for an appointment, and the wait can cost seizure control and development. In Los Angeles, where the institute’s work runs deepest, wait times for pediatric epilepsy care have fallen from six months to a matter of days. Its programs have trained roughly 62 percent of California’s pediatric epileptologists and helped provide specialized care to more than 250,000 children.
The fellowships sit at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, and Los Angeles General Medical Center. A new partnership with UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals makes six, each funded to sustain its fellowship in perpetuity.
“Twenty years ago, we set out to make sure no family had to fight as hard as ours did to get care for their child,” Borman said. “Honoring Ben and expanding our national network in the same year shows how far that vision has come, and how much further we can take it.”
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