Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing in “Friends,” was a centerpiece of the legendary 10-season sitcom that graced the small screen for what seemed like decades, thanks in part to reruns. Perry went on to star in other roles — I’m partial to his fun performance in “The Whole Nine Yards” opposite Bruce Willis — but he’ll forever be known as Chandler. When news broke that he passed away in the fall of 2023 at 54 years old, fans all over the world mourned.
Perry impacted the lives of many people he never met. But he also impacted people he worked with and was close to, including Hollywood veterans Doug Chapin, a longtime producer, and Lisa Kasteler-Calio, who had a five-decade career in entertainment public relations. Doug and Lisa serve as board president and executive director of the newly minted Matthew Perry Foundation. “Addiction is too powerful for anyone to defeat alone,” says a quote from Perry himself on the website. “But together, one day at a time, we can beat it down.”
I recently connected with Doug and Lisa, who spoke about what inspired them to honor Perry’s legacy, what the young foundation focuses on, and how they hope to transcend typical Hollywood philanthropy and make an impact by working with a range of stakeholders.
“He was doing it quietly, forever”
Both Chapin and Kasteler-Calio said Perry has been a significant part of their lives for three decades and continues to be a driving force in their lives. “It’s like having a son that we shared,” Doug began, emphasizing that the relationship cut far deeper than just the professional level.
Perry first had a drink of alcohol when was only 11 years old, setting off a lifelong battle with addiction to which he ultimately succumbed. But both of Perry’s friends describe a talented man who battled the disease until the end, sometimes backsliding, but delivering plenty of blows to the disease, too.
He also helped many people who were also struggling with addiction, offering words of advice and pointing them in the direction of help. “Matthew was always helping people who have the disease. He was doing it quietly, forever,” Kasteler-Calio said.
One of his biggest victories came when Perry put pen to paper and wrote a 272-page memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir,” released in 2022.
Perry then went on the road for a book tour, doing a Q&A at the 92Y in New York City, as well as traveling to Princeton, Washington, D.C, and Toronto, where hundreds gathered.
Kasteler-Calio said the book tour helped Perry realize that he could have an even greater impact with his story than he imagined. “He could tangibly feel the reaction people were having to him and his journey because he so bravely wrote everything in there in that book,” she said. “You felt like you were in the room with him.”
Perry was also starting to notice that his many fans were getting to see him not as the fictional character Chandler Bing, but as the real-life Matthew Perry. The three started to have more formal conversations about taking their work to the next level and establishing a foundation. Perry also started talking about launching a rehab facility and went on a college tour to talk about addiction and drugs.
Kasteler-Calio said Perry was talking about his plans a few days before his death on October 28, 2023.
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Picking up the pieces and going on a learning tour
Weeks and months of mourning followed. But at the start of 2024, Kasteler-Calio and Chapin grew intent on continuing what Perry had started.
For instance, they were able to set up a fund at the National Philanthropic Trust, allowing fans to make donations. The Matthew Perry estate also left a sizable donation to seed the new Matthew Perry Foundation.
The next step was going on a learning tour, connecting with nonprofit veterans like Stand Up to Cancer cofounder Ellen Ziffren, as well as Karen Gaines, who now serves as chief of mission at the Matthew Perry Foundation. Kasteler-Calio also met with Laura Silber, vice president of external affairs at Open Society Foundations. “We brought people into the tent that could educate us. It was really important we got people we could really trust,” she said.
Things started ramping up about nine months ago. The foundation uses the Perry name to open doors, but Kasteler-Calio and Chapin are clear that they don’t want to take the stereotypical Hollywood philanthropy route of bringing in a lot of famous people for a glitzy event.
The foundation currently has a three-pronged focus: spreading the message that addiction is a disease, promoting collaboration and growing communities, and advocating for better and more equitable treatment.
One of its earliest efforts is its Grassroots Recovery Grants program across the state of California, which makes unrestricted grants to provide recovery to individuals affected by substance use disorders. The Matthew Perry Foundation sees itself as a convener and connector, trusting that organizations on the ground know how best to work with the communities that they serve.
The foundation wants to focus on filling gaps in the recovery journey, gaps that Perry himself was well aware of. The grassroots grants program will start in the Golden State and the goal is eventually to spread the model far beyond.
Breaking the stigma
“Stigma” is a word that comes up a lot in mental health and in mental health philanthropy. NBA veteran Kevin Love once told me about why he became more vocal about his own mental health challenges. “I felt like I have a story to tell and wanted to take ownership in it,” Love said.
A similar impulse inspired Perry to write his memoir and it became an animating force in the final years of his life. So one of the Matthew Perry Foundation’s early focuses is on education, not just for addiction sufferers and their families, but for medical practitioners, as well. “[There’s a surprising] lack of education among doctors on the realities of addiction and the treatment of addiction,” Chapin said.
There’s also a shortage of trained practitioners who know how best to treat the disease. To that end, the foundation established the Matthew Perry Foundation Fellowship in Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital — the first program to bear Perry’s name. Tapping addiction specialist Sarah Wakeman, the annual fellowship will soon award its inaugural cohort of four Perry fellows in November.
Lisa notes that a little over 50% of Americans think addiction is a disease, but for Perry, a watershed moment came when he was finally told plainly by a therapist that “you know this isn’t your fault… this is a disease,” Chapin recalled. If the foundation at least starts to ease this stigma, getting people together to tell their stories openly and fully, Kasteler-Calio said she will consider their work a success.
The Matthew Perry Foundation is also working with addiction medicine veteran Andrew Herring, Highland Hospital in Oakland, and the Public Health Institute to launch a telehealth program to support incarcerated individuals suffering from opioid use disorder. A pilot program showed that connecting incarcerated individuals to addiction specialists before release significantly improved follow-up care and reduced their risk of overdose. Next, the foundation is looking to take this program statewide.
In just under a year, the Matthew Perry Foundation has also given grants to other nonprofits, including American Indian Childhood Resource Center, The Source LGBT+ Center, Voices of Recovery San Mateo County and Michael Leonardi Foundation, which remembers a young San Diego college student who died from fentanyl poisoning.
Finally, Chapin mentioned that the foundation wants to engage in more early peer-to-peer work, knowing that Perry’s early experiences with alcohol made that much more difficult for him to get on the other side of his addiction. The foundation is still looking at the best place to intervene in this space, but might involve older teenagers speaking to younger ones.
“We know we have to broaden the reach beyond this town”
No longer working in Hollywood, Chapin and Kasteler-Calio can speak to the highs and the lows of the business and to the typical trappings of Hollywood philanthropy. Both said they don’t want to be predictable as they continue to develop the foundation’s work. There have been ideas fielded, for instance, about the cast of “Friends” coming together for some sort of fundraising benefit event.
“It’s hard. Because you get — I’m not making excuses for anyone — but there is so much coming at them [stars] in regard to this area that it’s hard for them to step up,” Kasteler-Calio said. “I don’t know.”
They know that some support will naturally come from the stars and emphasize that there truly are some fantastic and generous people in Tinseltown with whom they are glad to work. But rather than focus on the foundation’s public face, Kasteler-Calio and Chapin made it clear they want to center the grassroots leaders doing the work on the ground. “We know we have to broaden the reach beyond this town to get where we want to go. I know that we will,” Kasteler-Calio said.
In addition to Chapin and Kasteler-Calio, the foundation is currently run by a team of about eight people total and a board of about seven. Looking ahead, the foundation will continue to tap experts like Wakeman and Herring and also eventually add an advisory board and a peer-to-peer board.
The early days at the foundation were mostly just getting the lay of the land. But now that there’s some wind in its sails, the foundation is ready to ramp up its work — while bringing in people from many industries. “It’s been a careful curation of the people we want around us. And we’re lucky. Everyone shows up and it’s great working with them. I know that Matthew would be blown away,” Kasteler-Calio said.
