I spoke with former Fiserv CEO Jeff Yabuki in May as part of a story I did on Project Healthy Minds, a dynamic, youth-focused mental health nonprofit that has also raked in support from the likes of the Irsay family, who own the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, and Sheri Sobrato.
When Yabuki spoke to me about his passion for mental health, it didn’t take long before the conversation turned personal. After his brother Craig died by suicide in 2017, he said he was inspired to ramp up his philanthropy, putting a strong focus on mental health.
Since the tragedy, Jeff and his wife Gail have become significant donors in that space, with Jeff joining the board of Project Healthy Minds and the couple committing $1 million to the organization at the start of this year. “We should put our money where our mouth is,” Jeff told me at the time.
In 2021, the Yabukis also made a $20 million gift to Children’s Wisconsin, where they built a program that pairs mental health professionals with pediatricians to screen children and deliver therapy before mental and behavioral health problems become catastrophic. The transformational gift even inspired Emmy Award-winning short documentary, “A Brother’s Journey,” chronicling the story of Craig’s lifelong battle with depression.
But the couple’s journey in philanthropy extends beyond support for Project Healthy Minds and mental health. Jeff started the Yabuki Family Foundation back in 1999. In the 2023 fiscal year, it held more than $41 million in assets and gave away nearly $5 million. Today, the grantmaker, which he and Gail run, focuses on social justice, the arts, education, as well as mental health.
I recently connected with Gail Yabuki to find out more about lessons in philanthropy she learned growing up, the pivotal moment when she and Jeff decided to ramp up their giving, and why the foundation has evolved to emphasize trust-based philanthropy.
A Midwestern start and turning tragedy into purpose
Born Gail Groenwoldt in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Gail Yabuki recalls growing up in a tight-knit family and community. It was there that she got her first lessons in philanthropy, which, given her family’s modest background, wasn’t just tied to money. “My parents are fabulous. They weren’t highly educated. They graduated high school and hit the ground running with work and family, and they have always exuded this really beautiful spirit of ‘be a good neighbor, be a good person, take good care of people in your community,’” Gail said.
Some of the community work her parents did involved volunteering at their local food pantry and church. Gail herself walked a nonconformist path, living on a Wyoming ranch, not going to a traditional college, and then running a small medical equipment company in Wisconsin. Back in her home state, she started volunteering, as well, including at the local symphony and art museum.
When Gail and Jeff became a couple last decade, the two started engaging in philanthropy together. At the time, the Yabuki Family Foundation was giving very modestly. Gail says they did a lot of “raising paddles at events.” They were contributing to the community, she says, but weren’t really moving in an intentional way. At the time, Jeff was still fully enmeshed in work at Fiserv and Gail was managing her own business and raising her young son.
Then Craig Yabuki passed away, prompting the couple to change up their philanthropy. “We [realized we] actually have the ability to maybe do something smart and different and try to make a difference,” she said.
The Yabuki Family Foundation soon ramped up its giving; in 2017, it was giving away a little under $400,000. By 2018, that number was nearly $540,000, and in 2020, it gave away an amount in the seven figures, which has continued through today.
A Milwaukee focus: the Yabukis’ trust-based and place-based philanthropy
Milwaukee is Gail Yabuki’s lifelong home, and her philanthropy these days is focused on getting hands-on with local Milwaukee organizations and their leaders. One such grantee is the Sojourner Family Peace Center, a domestic violence shelter headed up by Carmen Pitre whom Gail calls a “visionary… a master chess player” who always looks ahead. The Yabuki Foundation’s support funds a Sojourner summer camp modeled off Camp HOPE, serving kids who grow up in domestic violence situations.
Gail also spoke about connecting with Peter Feigin, president of the Milwaukee Bucks of the NBA, to help form the D.E.E.R. Accelerator (Driving Equity Empowerment and Resources), a partnership that includes the Bucks, Froedtert Hospital, the Yabukis and Medical College of Wisconsin, that addresses health disparities among Milwaukeeans.
When the partnership launched in 2023, Froedtert President Eric Conley highlighted the 12-year life expectancy gap between the 52317 zip code, home to the wealthy Whitefish Bay area, and the 53206 zip code in inner city Milwaukee.
“We’re doing that in a really grassroots way. We’ve targeted three neighborhoods which have really active community centers — that’s sort of the heart of it — and asked them ‘what are your things? What do you need help with?’” Gail said.
Going in, she admits she made certain assumptions about the top issues in those communities (for instance, food insecurity or education), but has learned a lot by simply going there and listening.
In one neighborhood, she heard that a top issue was safety, which could be improved by installing new street lights so that kids and their families could stay outside later. D.E.E.R. was able to pressure the Department of Public Works to change the street lights and have since been working with DPW leadership and the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center (SSNC) to create community-centric solutions to keep the neighborhood lit at night.
As a philanthropist, Gail Yabuki has made peace with the fact that she doesn’t always see immediate results from her giving and that some projects might not bear fruit at all. This doesn’t mean eschewing measuring results — they’ve hired an outside group to do so — but giving latitude and making sure leaders on the ground are allowed to lead.
She’s still struck by something someone told her at a conference in London: “If you get to check out at 5 p.m. from the problem you’re trying to solve, you should not be in charge of the solution.”
She said, “I’ve really become more trust based, and you might get burned a little bit here or there by bad decisions, but that’s kind of what I’ve been learning along the way.”
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The Yabukis’ interests in the arts, college readiness and California
When I started trying to parse out the foundation’s work into different buckets, Gail quickly stopped me. While she said Jeff tends to see the foundation’s work in structured lanes, she favors a looser approach. According to Gail, her more trusting approach is balanced by Jeff’s scrutiny of organizations.
Gail recently joined the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of several arts institutions with which she is involved. For instance, the Yabukis are involved with the Gordon Parks Foundation and its annual gala. In fact, Gail recently engaged in a bidding war with Usher at an auction of photographs by the famed Black photographer. All told, the fundraiser earned about $3 million. “Sometimes, it feels frivolous, almost, you know, saying like we’re trying to do all this really heady, like change the world and then it’s like the art museum. But I love [the arts] and I think they have such a valuable place in communities,” she added.
Beyond Milwaukee, some of the Yabuki Family Foundation’s work touches California, too, where Jeff grew up. Jeff sits on the board of LACMA and the foundation also supports Thorn, which advocates for child victims of sexual abuse. Once Gail’s child goes off to college, she thinks she and Jeff will spend more time in California, a site of potentially bigger grantmaking by the couple.
The Yabukis are also keen on college readiness, including through All In Milwaukee, which puts first-gen students through college debt free. She praised director Allison Wagner for learning everything she could about the kids she was helping. “She knew all of them. She would be like ‘his eyes are blue and his mom is this’ and some of them came to her house for the holidays,” Gail said.
“I would love to be able to not be necessary”
Looking ahead, the Yabukis hope to expand their mental health work at Children’s Wisconsin elsewhere, including to California, where they would aim to find a similar partner that has relationships all around the state. “Almost like a business franchise, how do we footprint that somewhere else?” Gail said.
The Yabukis also hope to build on initiatives like the Bridge Project in New York, which gives pregnant women direct cash assistance over several years, as my colleague Connie Matthiessen covered earlier this year. The Zilber Family Foundation eventually brought that model to Milwaukee. These two organizations are not Yabuki Family Foundation grantees, but Gail said she has learned a great deal from them. “I just think the life-changing $1,100 a month on a debit card with no questions asked, where it’s spent, is life changing,” Gail said, adding that she wants to build on this work.
Ultimately, Gail sees her future work as architecting a reality where people and organizations no longer need philanthropy at all — echoing the words of leaders like Marguerite Casey Foundation President Carmen Rojas. “I would love to not be able to not be necessary. I don’t fully know what that means, but I see that with this Bridge [Project]… I think that’s the model that I somehow want to transfer to other areas of philanthropy.”
