Fundraising & Campaigns
Celtics owners give Boston Children's Hospital $200 million, its largest gift ever
Rob and Karen Hale's $100 million pledge is half the total. About two dozen other owners matched it for mental health care, research and nurse training.
By The Editors · The Game of Giving
The owners of the Boston Celtics are giving Boston Children's Hospital more than $200 million, the largest gift in the hospital's history, the hospital announced on October 29.
The money comes from the Celtics ownership group and the team, in association with the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation, the team's charitable foundation. Boston Children's is a 491-bed hospital and the pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, according to the announcement.
Who is giving the money?
About two dozen members of the ownership group, led by chairman and governor Bill Chisholm, contributed, The Boston Globe reported. Half of the total is the $100 million that co-owner Rob Hale and his wife, Karen, disclosed in December 2025 for a new psychiatric campus in Brighton. The hospital called that pledge the largest in its history at the time.
According to the Globe, the Hales' gift prompted the rest of the ownership group to match it. Among the owners the paper named were the investment firm Sixth Street, Aditya Mittal, Andrew Bialecki and Bruce Beal Jr. Neither the team nor the hospital disclosed what each owner gave.
What will the $200 million pay for?
The gift is split across five priorities, according to the hospital:
- A pediatric mental health facility and earlier intervention for children in crisis. The Globe put the cost of the Brighton behavioral health campus at $640 million.
- Research into emerging therapies for childhood diseases and the childhood origins of adult disease.
- Advanced training for pediatric nurses.
- An innovation fund for new ideas in children's health.
- Family-centered programs that promote healthy lifestyles in local communities.
"Its significance will ultimately be measured not by the record it sets, but by the lives it will save," Dr. Kevin Churchwell, the hospital's chief executive, said in the announcement. "We all win when we invest in our children's futures," Chisholm said.
How does it compare with other recent children's hospital gifts?
It is the largest of several big children's hospital commitments this month. Felicia and Ben Horowitz gave $150 million to name Nevada's first stand-alone children's hospital, and the Duke Endowment gave $100 million to North Carolina's planned NC Children's. The table is our own comparison from the announcements.
| Donor | Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Celtics ownership group and team | Boston Children's Hospital | More than $200 million |
| Felicia and Ben Horowitz | Intermountain Health's planned Las Vegas children's hospital | $150 million |
| The Duke Endowment | NC Children's (planned) | $100 million |
| Rob and Karen Hale, December 2025 (counted within the Celtics total) | Boston Children's Hospital | $100 million |
By our arithmetic, the owners other than the Hales account for roughly $100 million of the total, about as much as the Hales gave on their own.
What can other nonprofits take from it?
In our view, the lesson is that one lead gift can set the size of a group gift. The Globe reported that some of the owners had never given to Boston Children's before, and that over the past year they met one by one with the hospital's development staff to choose where their money would go.
Hale pointed to the Red Sox's long partnership with the Jimmy Fund, which the Globe said has raised more than $198 million, as the model. "The Jimmy Fund and the Red Sox are a wonderful blueprint to absorb and learn from," he told the paper. The Shamrock Foundation, which gave about $7.5 million last year to roughly 500 New England nonprofits, will keep that grantmaking going, the Globe reported. The hospital gift does not replace it.
General information for donors and nonprofit leaders, not legal or tax advice. How we report is set out in our editorial guide.
