in front of Arturo Herrera’s collage cut-out Untitled, 2003, at the Sidney Garber New York store
A conversation with Brooke Garber Neidich can take any number of intriguing routes. As head of the fine jewelry line Sidney Garber, which was founded by her father in Chicago in 1946, she can talk shop about baubles and bijoux, sapphires and kunzite. Interested in the arts? The New York-based Neidich is well-versed in that, too. Go ahead — pick her brain about the Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney or the latest performance at the Lincoln Center Theater; she’s a Vice-Chair at the latter and a Trustee of the former. Is science more your thing? She also happens to be behind the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to children’s mental health care, which she launched with Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz. Politics? Just ask her friend Hillary Clinton. A cultural and social powerhouse, Neidich has a myriad divergent interests — and they all unite in her singular passion for philanthropy. Get to know her here as she talks about her multifaceted life and how, and why, she does it all. Plus, if you’re a parent, this is one interview not to be missed…
Of Ice & Gems: The Family Business
Early childhood memories at Sidney Garber…
I remember, when I was five or six, sitting in front of a huge safe on a linoleum floor, playing with a tray of charms. I loved to play with those charms. It was a really big deal for me. As I got older, I worked on Saturdays when I came home from college for Thanksgiving… My dad was a very tough taskmaster.
I officially became involved in the family business when…
Well, I didn’t exactly decide; I sort of fell into it. I went back home for Christmas in 2001 and realized there wasn’t anything I wanted. My birthday is on Christmas Eve, so I’m always thinking, what do I want for my birthday? But everything in the store had changed. So I said to him, “Let’s go to Europe [on a buying trip].” We did, and that was it. We changed the look of the store. But I was never really officially working with him. It’s not like I was going to get paid. I mean, even when we started to travel together, I booked my own tickets. It was totally free labor.
I took over in 2008 because…
My father died that year. It was the middle of a recession. I couldn’t bring myself to sell the company, plus I was worried about our employees. All those people who worked for us had been with us forever — 20 years, 30 years. No one was going to hire them. I couldn’t abandon the business. There was just no way. And, also, I love the business, I love jewelry, I love being around jewelry, wearing jewelry. So I kept on. There was a steep learning curve.
Examples of that learning curve…
I remember doing the website for the first time and the women who were doing it for me pointed out that I didn’t have an inventory system. That was a revelation. Last year, I hired Susan Nicholas of H. Stern as president and that moved the needle all the way across. She’s made a huge difference.
My advice to would-be entrepreneurs…
Focus. It’s really 24/7. There’s no vacation; there’s no disconnect. You have to be on it, all the time. The attention to detail, the amount of focus you need, is absolutely extraordinary.
Favorite piece of jewelry…
My snake bracelets, but almost any bracelets. I’m a serious bracelet girl; I wear them all the time. I can’t leave the house without bracelets.
And the one piece of jewelry that means the most to me…
My daughter gave me this little charm for my 60th birthday. It said, “To our mother who taught us how to love.” It has a little sapphire, which is my favorite stone. That’s probably my most treasured piece of jewelry.
The philanthropic element to Sidney Garber…
I’ll never take a profit out of the business. I don’t need to take money out of the business and I’m very grateful for that. It’s a pleasure to be able to give it away. I remember the first time I said I was giving all the profits away — I said it in an interview — my accountant called and said, “A heads up would have been good because, actually, you don’t have any profits.” Last year was the first year I could really give away a substantial amount of money, so now I can say it.
And the causes it supports…
The Whitney Museum, Child Mind Institute, Lincoln Center Theater and 52 other charities, many based in Chicago.
A New Frame of Mind: The CMI Chapter
The Child Mind Institute is…
The only independent nonprofit exclusively dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders. Over the past five years, we’ve seen over 5,600 families from 39 states and 29 nations. We don’t turn a child away because of their parents’ inability to pay. We see children from all economic backgrounds. They all have one thing in common: mothers who care deeply about them. Dr. [Harold] Koplewicz has repeatedly said a parent is as happy as their least happy child.
My personal connection to the CMI…
My oldest son — we probably could have figured out he had attention deficit disorder when he was two, but we didn’t. When he was 10, I ran into Dr. Koplewicz, whom I knew a bit, on the street and asked him what was wrong with John. He asked if I had had my son tested and to send him the tests. I did and he asked if anybody had talked to me about attention deficit disorder. I said, “Well, I don’t believe in it. Forget it. We’re not having it.” A year later, I called him and said, “We want to come see you now….” I became so devoted to Dr. Koplewicz, I asked how I could help. It shouldn’t be this complicated for a family. If it’s complicated for us — and we have amazing access — I can’t even imagine what it’s like for other people. So we started the NYU Child Study Center in 1997 and then left in 2009 and founded the Child Mind Institute.
Did you know…
Childhood mental health and learning disorders affect over 17 million children in America — more than diabetes, cancer and AIDS combined!
CMI highlights…
We’ve accomplished so much. Our privately funded Healthy Brain Network, for example, provides free psychiatric and psychological testing, fitness and nutrition evaluation as well as functional MRIs and EEGs to 10,000 kids to create a baseline. It will be the largest and most comprehensive repository of data on the developing brain of children with mental health and learning disorders ever established, and will provide an atlas of the developing brain for scientists worldwide and ultimately lead to the discovery of an objective test for childhood mental health disorders. We are sharing the data before it is published with over 2,500 scientists globally. This concept of open science is extraordinary…
And the challenges…
Our biggest issue is that psychiatric and learning disorders have to be destigmatized. The brain is no different than the kidneys. If your child is diabetic, you would give him or her insulin. Nobody would ask if you were over-insulinizing your child. And everything is kept secret — the medication, the reports… and that’s not the way to make this better, that’s not the way to make the child better.
The CMI team includes…
Michael Milham, MD, PhD, who joined us from NYU and is one of the youngest and most cited in the neuroscience world today (by other researchers in their articles), and Tomas Paus, MD, PhD, a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He joined us this year as the Phelan Scholar and Director of Population Neuroscience. During the last five years, CMI scientists have shared their data openly and have published 49 articles; simultaneously, scientists from other institutions using our data have published over 630 other articles. Our big data open science is accelerating the pace of discovery for child mental health.
How a parent can recognize if his or her child needs help…
You see it. Your child can never sit still in a chair, is bouncing off the walls, is afraid of sitting in a dark movie… my other son was sleeping with a cricket bat at age 12. There’s a whole symptom checker on the Child Mind Institute site you can reference; it’s been used by over a million parents. We have a mental health guide to help parents understand specific disorders and a parents guide to getting mental health treatment for their child that describes the different types of clinicians and what type of questions a parent should ask. We link to specific organizations like the AACAP (for child psychiatrists) and others to help parents find a clinician in their state.
To get involved…
Join us for our Speak Up for Kids campaign that we do each May. Volunteer for research at healthybrainnetwork.org. Support us at childmind.org/donate — even five dollars makes a huge difference. It’s horrendously hard to raise money for psychiatry, let alone child psychiatry, and we don’t take any money from pharmaceutical companies — none. And spread the word. Ask your schools to put a link to the Child Mind Institute on their websites — the site itself and its free resources can make a difference for so many kids. Conversations among mothers, and fathers, are important, too.
Philanthropy, Art & Actress Ambitions
For me, the philanthropic spark began…
30 years ago. We went to a church dinner dance at Brick Church School, where my son was in preschool. Afterwards, my husband Daniel said to me, “You better figure out another way to give money to this school because I can’t do another church dinner dance…” So we did an auction — I had never done one, I had never been to one — but that year we raised $50,000. No one believed it. First of all, it was fun and, second, it made a huge difference in the school. We started having continuing education for the teachers, we started having scholarships… It was a sea change. We were able to do it over and over, every two years.
Fundraising tips…
Remember why you’re doing it. I can’t do it if I don’t believe in it. And being good at it has a lot to do with just making a phone call. Ask.
Growing up I wanted to be…
An actress. I was always in theater, I was always in plays. Then, in college, I dated an actor and he was obviously so much better than me. I remember he asked me, “What do you think? Should I be a lawyer or an actor?” He was super-smart, a National Merit finalist. And I said, “Oh, an actor! Why would anyone want to be a lawyer?” Can you imagine? I would have killed me if I was his mother. And, yes, he became an actor. He’s been on Broadway.
My different passions now…
Art and theater, the Whitney Museum and the Lincoln Center Theater — that’s what I love. The Child Mind Institute — I owe. Sidney Garber — this is a business. I love it all. There are people who know very young what they want to do and then there are people, like me, where your life moves you. I was a late bloomer. If I was sitting here at age 20, I would have said, “All I want to do is have a family.”
First work of art owned…
I think I was in college. There was an illustrator named Jean-Michel Folon — I don’t think the work was a real Folon, but what I had looked like a Folon. There was a vague line of a person and a rainbow coming out of his mouth.
Favorite piece in the Whitney…
Head, 1947, by Elizabeth Catlett. We bought it in honor of one of our guards who died. You know, the guards at the Whitney are like a family. Some of them have been there two or three generations. They’re remarkable people. Whenever I go to the Whitney, by the time I say hello to everybody I don’t have any time to look at the art!
My time management tips…
My iPhone — I couldn’t do any of this without my iPhone.