2010 Annual Letter

Thank you very much for your continued interest in the Garrett B. Smith foundation, now in its fifteenth year since the passing of our son in January 1995. Our annual golf outing, held in May at the Stanwich Club in Greenwich, was another success. Although the economy is still soft, I am extremely pleased to report that we added 2 teams to our sponsorship roster this year, bringing our total up to 22. Heidi and I are greatly appreciative of all our friends who have kept the Garrett among their top philanthropic priorities. This year’s golf outing enabled the foundation to approach $3.5 million in cumulative fund-raising. The Garrett foundation prides itself on spending money, not just raising it. By the end of 2010, the foundation will have spent almost $2 million on original programs that we have created to help seriously ill children.

The foundation supports research fellowships at leading hospitals around the country as well as the child life department at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital where Garrett was treated. All told, we have funded 11 fellowships at 6 different hospitals. The fellowships cover the cost of a young scientist working in an established cancer research setting for 2 years. By renewing our fellowships at these institutions over the years, we hope that each Garrett fellow can leverage the work of their predecessors. Our long-term goal is to cultivate a network of top physicians that will remain committed to fighting cancer for their entire careers.

We are excited about the significant accomplishments of our 2 current Garrett research fellows, Dr. Sandra Ryeom at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Charles Roberts at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, in the past year. Dr. Ryeom published the results of her research on Down Syndrome patients, who appear to have an immunity to almost all cancers, in the prestigious magazine, Nature, and moved her team from Harvard to the University of Pennsylvania. Heidi and I visited her there several times, meeting with senior management as well, and have decided that the foundation will continue to fund her work. Dr. Roberts published his work on the SNF5 gene in Cancer Research magazine and was recently highlighted as one of the 13 most promising young cancer researchers nationwide by the American Association for Cancer Research’s “Stand Up to Cancer” initiative. The foundation had supported 3 fellows but Dr. Marianna Papaspyridonos, who worked under the direction of Dr. David Lyden at the Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York, elected to leave the research world for a post in the pharmaceutical industry back in London. We will consider replacing the fellowship in Dr. Lyden’s lab as our fund-raising permits.

On the lighter side, the foundation attracted the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit to Yale-New Haven and provides the complete funding for it. While 17 other prominent children’s hospitals nationwide also have the clowns, the Yale unit is the only one that is completely funded by a single private organization. In fact, several hospitals had to close their clown unit during the current recession, but our commitment to Yale, the foundation’s single largest annual expenditure, has remained intact. We are pleased to note that Dr. Sneakers (Elizabeth Bolick) and Dr. Chester Drawers (Leo Desilets) have led the Yale clowns since the inception of the unit 13 years ago. They have become such an integral component of life at the hospital that they were featured in an article published this past spring (which we have included with this letter). Heidi and I are extremely proud of the work of the Garrett B. Smith Foundation. We hope that you can see that all funds are going directly to help children, not to finance a bureaucracy or build an endowment. In fact, we again expect to spend more on our programs than we generate from the golf outing, but feel that the young patients need our help. Fortunately, the foundation has the necessary financial cushion.

Heidi and I continue to give our firm commitment to oversee projects personally and to pay all foundation overhead ourselves. Our work here is a labor of love for our son and his memory. We thank you again.

As Garrett would say virtually every morning: “Sun’s up – time to play!”