Gelt Charitable Foundation -Suicide prevention and mental health

How the Gelt Charitable Foundation has been addressing and dealing with suicide prevention workshops and other mental heal issues.

“Jack: Hello, this is Jack and Marcy again.
Marcy: Hi, how are you?
Jack: Usually, we try to keep this light. I don’t say funny, but you know, we try to keep them light. But we wanted to talk to you a little bit about today, about a project that we’ve been involved with for, I think, this is our third year now. And we run it through the Gelt Charitable Foundation, and you can Google it. We do a bunch of the stuff through the Gelt Charitable Foundation, but the main thing is we’ve sort of stumbled on is suicide prevention and mental health issues. And Marcy was right, literally. She said to me two minutes ago, “Let’s make a video on this because a lot of people don’t know.”
Marcy: And I also just feel like it’s really important right now because honestly, the past year has been very devastating mentally with what has been going on in the world. And you know, Gelt Financial gives back through Gelt Charitable Foundation, and we are suicide prevention lectures. I mean, we open up our doors to whoever wants the guidance.
Jack: So what we offer, and I’ll kind of walk you through the evolution. We sort of stumbled upon this. It was the craziest way. I know nothing about mental health. People who know me, including Marcy, said that I probably need mental health. No, but it’s a very serious issue. And we started to fund in-person suicide prevention workshops. I guess this is our third year already. And with the pandemic, we converted it to an online workshop. And we started to offer, and we were doing, I would say, an average of about two to three a week. About 50 people were attending each one. And we were offering for free throughout the country, in fact, throughout the world. We’ve done them in South Africa, we’ve done them in Israel, and a couple of Latin American countries, in Canada as well. So I think we’ve done them in five countries. And what happened is just the demand kept building and building. Then we started, I don’t want to say the hotline, but if someone is in crisis, they can call one of our counselors, and we help them through it. And the people who are attending these are a lot of faith based. We’re actually doing work, believe it or not, in the criminal justice system, now the prison system, the college fraternity, sororities. We’ve been doing a huge sorority, like, once a week, 100 people attend them. And we then realized there was a huge demand in Spanish. I happen not to speak Spanish, but there was almost no one who was doing suicide prevention work for the Spanish-speaking community. So we hired someone, happened to be in California, and they’re now doing them in Spanish. We’re booked up, booked up, booked up. A couple of things happened. We’ve expanded. Now we’re on an expansion program. We’re looking for yet another suicide prevention counselor, and we’re going to be doing up to five of these a week, English, Spanish. And we’re not only addressing the suicide people who’ve been affected by it, or it’s really about prevention, but other mental health issues. We’re dealing with course material, which we’re writing now. We’ll hope to have it done by April, and maybe by May or June, we’ll start doing it. And by the way, on the suicide prevention, we have three different types of workshops, depending on the interest and the level and things like that. But we’re going to be dealing with eating disorders, anorexia, bulimic, bulimia, anxiety or issues, and all kinds of other mental issues to try to address these issues before it gets to the next step. And this is rampant in every community. You know, I speak to people over the—it’s really all over the world.
Marcy: All over the world. And because of Zoom, it can reach everyone.
Jack: Every community, the Spanish people community, it’s rampant in the law enforcement, and on our where they call them the frontline people, absolutely unbelievably rampant. You know, there was a lot to do. And I don’t want to talk politics, but there’s a lot to do. Two very unfortunately lost their life to suicide after the Capitol Hill riots. But what they don’t talk about is every day we’re losing our best people to it. It’s just unbelievable within the veterans’ community. Twenty on average of 22 people a day are losing their lives to suicide, and nobody’s doing anything.
Marcy: And there’s no control over it. I mean, that is the truth. But we have tried, and we’ve—Jack has set up this foundation to try to help people, to reach out to the communities, to try to talk about suicide that people don’t want to talk about it, but it has to be talked about.
Jack: It has to be talked about. What we’re trying to do is interesting. I got involved with—it’s too long, the story to go into now because no one was really doing it within my community, and I was really upset. And I literally approached about 50 or 75 leaders in my community, and no one wanted to talk about it. So we took it upon ourselves to do it. Now we’re expanding it to other mental health issues. But the good news is, and it’s rampant in every community. Every community. Every community. Race, color, religion. When I speak to people, they say, “Oh, it’s terrible in my community.” The reality is, it’s terrible in every community all over the world. I need you. If you believe in mental health issues or want to help, get involved. Tweet about it. Post about it. Contact the government. Contact insurance companies because this is a problem that needs to be solved on a bigger portion than we can do. But the reality is, we’re taking—we’ve funded this so far, pretty much exclusively.
Marcy: I mean, that’s what I’m saying, which is a really nice point that Gelt Financial, we’re giving back to the world. We give back to the community. You know, again, you know everything in life comes down to money. I mean, that’s the truth. And it’s like we’re giving the money to help with these lectures and these seminars and reaching out to the different communities to talk about suicide. And I think it’s amazing, and I really admire Jack for doing this, and I just
really wanted to talk about it. And anyone that sees this video, please, you know, if your child is in an attorney or sorority or anywhere that thinks that they would, you know, benefit from this program, please reach out because we can get it. It could get set up if there’s someone out there that needs it so.
Jack: Check out the Gelt Charitable Foundation on social. We have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. We’re lucky, you know. I don’t want to take all the credit. The truth is we provide the funding and we write all the money, but we have a fantastic—the truth is we have a fantastic group of people that happen to be women. I don’t want to call them girls, but they’re happy to be women who really run the Gelt Charitable Foundation, who are so devoted. It’s unbelievable and so compassionate. And we give our money, which is very hard to give, but they give their time and their love, and the stories that I hear are unbelievable. And we want to give a message of hope and inspiration and, you know.
Marcy: And even if one person that sees this video today hears us and reaches out for help, that’s really why we’re doing it today.
Jack: A lot of people go through unbelievably tough times, and I’ll speak for myself, but we’re lucky that, you know, I’ve gone through tough times but not like some people. And, you know, but there is tomorrow is a new day, and tomorrow you live on, and you know, yesterday’s in the past, and you have to look forward to the future. And we consider ourselves lucky because very few things in life you do actually can change the course of events or can save lives. And through the Gelt Charitable Foundation, we are saving lives. It’s unbelievable the stories that I hear. I’m a little removed. I don’t speak to the people directly. I speak to our staff who speak to them. But the stories are unbelievable. And the truth is, you know, the Gelt Financial, I really don’t give Gelt credit enough. But Gelt Financial, if we weren’t doing business and we weren’t making money, we wouldn’t be able to fund this. So the truth is—
Marcy: But I just want everyone to know where some of the money goes. And it goes, and we’re paying it forward. We’re helping people. I feel very blessed and grateful that this foundation was formed because I know it’s helping people. And honestly, you know, sometimes like you get caught up in things, especially, you know, when we’re dealing with, you know, money loans, hard money, whatever you want to call it. I know in the back of my mind that okay, there’s a part of the day that goes by that’s helping people in a different way. In a different way, we help people, you know, with their loans, and we help people make their dreams come true by bridging them into another permanent financing. But I just want everyone to know that we are also trying to help people.
Jack: And don’t think it doesn’t affect your community. There’s sadly a mill— just to put it in some numbers, there’s sadly about—and no one really knows. No one knows, and I get my information from Google, so take it what it is. But there’s sadly about a million people who lose their life to suicide a year. And if you think about that, you know there’s probably, you know, I’m going to say 10, 20, 30 million attempts and figure for every person, you know, has a mother, father, sister, brother, child. So I use, you know, if it literally affects, you know, 50-100 million people a year on a global basis. And it shouldn’t because these people just because they’re in a rut or a lot of it’s, you know, biological or whatever the issue is, just because they’re in a rut, they still have greatness in them. Every person was born for a purpose in life, and I believe that they have to live out their purpose, whatever that purpose is. All of our purpose is different for their best ability. So really, we have to help every single person in the world be the best they can.
Marcy: So just make it your best day. I really feel like this past year has mental health is so many people are struggling. So, I mean, and again, all we can say is just try to be, we have to be aware.
Jack: Take out the stigma of it, tweet about it, post about it, go on your Facebook. I don’t know if I told you this kind of, I’m going to say a funny story. When we first started to get involved with it, and I’m not really a Facebook guy, I tried to talk to people and no one was interested. So I set myself up for an experiment one night, and I told my wife I was doing this. I posted something about suicide prevention, and I wanted to see how many likes I get in comments, almost none. Two to three nights later, I happen to like peanut butter and jelly crackers, whatever, so I took a picture of the Ritz cracker, and I posted it on Facebook, and I think I put the best dinner in the world, and the comments were unbelievable, and the likes. People don’t want to talk about; it’s uncomfortable to talk about mental illness. The reality is it affects every family, every person. And what we’re asking you is destigmatize it, talk about it, post about it, engage people about it, make people pay attention to it because that’ll help solve a difference. Your little poster, if you have a conversation with someone, that could lead to something else. So help us destigmatize it, and that would be fantastic. That would be fantastic. And you know, you never know what effect you can have on life. You see, the littlest thing can have an unbelievable effect. It’s funny. We had somebody on Instagram on the Gelt Financial account. I don’t know this person. We spoke to them, posted, I think it was over the weekend, something like, “Oh, I want to thank you. You inspired me at my lowest moment, and your few minutes made an unbelievable difference in my life.”
Marcy: I mean, believe it or not, though, Jack, I mean, like when I speak to a lot of brokers, I basically speak to mostly brokers, but they watch our videos, and honestly, we help people. I mean, they feel, you know, they take our advice. We’ve given people direction, you know, with their careers. You know, I hope today we’re helping people to recognize someone that is not feeling great mentally, and you know, that’s what the suicide prevention workshops are for, so that you learn to recognize if someone’s in distress.
Jack: Okay, check us out again. You can check out Gelt Financial online, self-understood Gelt Charitable Foundation, and like us on all the media stuff. Thank you. Have a great day, and God bless you.”