Frank Shankwitz, the inspirational founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, gave an emotionally charged talk to a roomful of guests at the Grand Harbor Golf Club last Thursday evening. He was the featured speaker at this year’s Finding Peace Amid the Chaos fundraiser to benefit Suncoast Mental Health Center, which serves the behavioral and mental-health needs of Indian River, Martin, St. Lucie and Okeechobee County residents.
“My sincere hope is that when you leave here tonight your thoughts about mental health are changed,” said Suncoast CEO Art Ciasca, noting that one of the most critical ways to generate change and decrease the stigma attached to mental health is to bring it out into the open and get people talking about it.
Gabrielle Radcliff, Suncoast board president and a criminal defense attorney, said that she sees people every day who could have led productive lives instead of ending up in their current predicaments if they’d had access to the early diagnosis and treatment of their mental health issues.
Indian River Sheriff’s Office Lt. Eric Flowers shared that 55 percent of the people they take in self-report some sort of mental health issue. He spoke briefly about the Mental Health Collaborative, an affiliation of funders and providers working to increase access to mental-health services, and one of its most successful undertakings, the Mental Health Court.
“These are people who would be in our jails otherwise,” said Flowers of the 100 clients in the program now. “It’s amazing to see the transformation in these folks’ lives.”
Shankwitz spoke about the chance meeting he had with a little 7-year-old boy dying of leukemia, that has since transformed the lives of more than 350,000 children around the world through the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Shankwitz told of his troubled childhood, abandoned by his mother as a toddler and raised by his loving father and grandparents until he was kidnapped at age 5 by his mother. She spirited him away for an impoverished life on the run before once again abandoning him when he reached seventh grade.
He was helped along the way by caring people, coaches and teachers, including a wonderful mentor in a little town in Arizona who advised him to give back, even if just in small ways, and told him, “You’ve got to learn to turn those negatives into positives.”
After a stint in the Air Force, Shankwitz eventually joined the Arizona Highway Patrol, retiring two years ago after 42 years of service. A member of the Fatal Accident team, he regularly saw the effects of horrific crashes, and in 1978 was nearly a statistic himself, pronounced dead at the scene before being brought back to life. Because of the stigma attached to mental health, he checked himself in to a psych ward under an assumed name for a couple of weeks, but said he continued to search for his purpose in life.
As a motorcycle officer, he was asked to visit with a 7-year-old boy who had just weeks to live and whose favorite TV show was “CHiPs.” The little boy told him, “I wish I could be a motorcycle cop.”
They had a special tiny uniform made which was later hanging in the boy’s hospital room as he came out of a coma just long enough for them to pin on a specially-made motorcycle cop wing pin, before he passed away that day.
“His wish had become true,” said Shankwitz, who said he then thought, “This little boy had his wish. Why can’t we do the same for other children?”
The organization received world-wide recognition once Disney got involved, and today wishes are granted roughly every 38 minutes through 64 chapters in the United States and 36 overseas.
