$50 million gift from Larry and Heidi Canarelli advances Nevada’s first stand-alone children’s hospital
Larry Canarelli has spent most of his adult life deciding where Nevada families would live.
Over four decades, he put together land across the Las Vegas Valley, laid out cul-de-sacs and model homes, and by his own count built some 20,000 houses for people who were moving to the desert to start over.
Now he and his wife, Heidi, are helping build something the state has never had: a place where its sickest children can stay close to home.
The Canarellis have committed $50 million to Intermountain Health’s Nevada Campaign for Kids, the fundraising drive behind Nevada’s first comprehensive, stand-alone children’s hospital.
Intermountain Healthcare Foundation announced the gift on October 6. In recognition, the hospital’s inpatient tower will be named the Larry & Heidi Canarelli Inpatient Tower.
When it opens in 2030, the tower will hold 180 inpatient beds, with room to grow to 228, and it will serve as the clinical heart of the campus.
Planned services include a trauma center, an emergency department, the state’s highest-level neonatal intensive care unit, pediatric intensive care, a cancer center, behavioral health services, a child abuse treatment center, and advanced medical and surgical specialties.
“We’ve been fortunate to build in Nevada for a long time and watch generations of families put down roots here,” the couple said. “Every child deserves access to great care close to home. We hope this helps keep more Nevada families together during some of life’s most difficult moments.”
The need behind those words is real. Intermountain has said Las Vegas is the largest metropolitan area in the United States without a stand-alone children’s hospital, that Nevada ranks 48th in the nation in pediatricians per capita, and that nearly 30,000 Nevada families leave the state each year to get care for their children.
For a family with a premature newborn or a child in critical condition, that can mean a flight to Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, or Phoenix, with one parent at the bedside and the other at home holding everything else together.
“Soon, a child in Las Vegas who needs the highest level of intensive care will be able to get it here,” said Mitch Cloward, Intermountain Health region president.
“This kind of access changes what is possible for families when every hour, every step and every mile matters.”
The gift goes beyond the building. Intermountain says the money will also help Intermountain Children’s Health widen access to specialized care, recruit leading pediatric experts, and strengthen services for children across Nevada, including pediatric behavioral health.
The family’s children, Stacia Lemke, Jeffrey Canarelli, and Alyssa Canarelli, strongly encouraged and supported the commitment, according to the foundation. All three serve with their parents on the board of the Canarelli Family Foundation.
“The Canarelli family’s extraordinary commitment is helping create something Nevada has never had before: a comprehensive health system for children, built around the complex needs of kids and families,” said David Flood, chief development officer of Intermountain Health and president of Intermountain Foundation. “The Larry & Heidi Canarelli Inpatient Tower is turning generosity into lasting capacity for children’s health in Nevada.”
The timing matters. Intermountain expects to break ground later this month at UNLV’s Harry Reid Research and Technology Park in southwest Las Vegas, where the hospital will sit on about 34 acres. The Salt Lake City-based nonprofit has put the project’s cost at more than $1 billion. It has committed to paying two-thirds of that itself and has asked its foundation to raise the rest from donors.
“We are essentially committing two dollars for every dollar of philanthropic support invested by our community,” Flood said earlier this year. Measured that way, the Canarellis’ commitment carries even more weight.
It is also the largest gift so far in a campaign that has been gaining speed. MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle and his wife, Wendy, launched the Nevada Campaign for Kids at MGM Grand in October 2025.
In May, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust committed $20 million to expand pediatric behavioral health services. In August, the Las Vegas Raiders announced a $25 million gift, the largest philanthropic commitment in team history, with owners Mark Davis, Egon Durban, and Michael Meldman each giving $5 million and the organization adding $10 million.
Clark County commissioners unanimously approved the hospital’s development and use permits, along with a heliport, in May. Intermountain estimates the hospital will create about 1,300 jobs and generate about $800 million a year in economic impact for the county.
“When we launched this campaign, we asked our community to imagine what would be possible if every Nevada child could receive comprehensive, top-quality care at home,” the Hornbuckles said. “Larry and Heidi just answered that question by adding tremendous fuel to what will be one of the most inclusive and galvanizing campaigns Nevada has seen.
Now we’re asking others in this state to answer it, too.”
For Larry Canarelli, home has always carried a particular meaning. He was born in 1946 in Roseburg, Oregon, and spent his earliest years in a tent on the Umpqua River while his father worked in logging camps.
The family later lived beside the Merced River in California, then in a two-room shack on a San Joaquin Valley dairy, where he slept in a fold-out chair. When he was about 5, his father left.
His mother, then 21 with four children, placed him for a time in a Pentecostal orphanage, the first place he lived with indoor plumbing. “But never in my life did I feel that I was less than or different from anyone else,” he has said.
The turn came through small acts of attention. A town librarian let him take home two books a day, and teachers who spotted his gift for numbers kept him after school. At 9 he started delivering the Fresno Bee, and while reading the classifieds he found a house for sale.
His family took over the seller’s VA loan and moved into a three-bedroom, 950-square-foot home, the 12th place he had lived. That was also the year he took his stepfather’s surname, Canarelli.
At UCLA, he worked Saturday mornings for George Page, the Mission Pak founder whose name is on the Page Museum in Los Angeles.
Page and his wife were so taken with the young man that they paid his tuition for his final three years and later for graduate school, a debt of kindness that runs quietly beneath much of the couple’s later giving.
It was also at UCLA, in 1969, that he met Heidi at a cocktail party at his Sigma Nu fraternity house, the day before the third quarter of their senior year. Both have called it love at first sight.
They married 10 months later.
After earning an MBA from USC and rising quickly through Southern California homebuilding, Larry began buying land in Las Vegas for Metropolitan Development in the mid-1970s, and he was later sent to run the company’s Las Vegas division.
“You could put your arms around it,” he said of the city. In 1984 he founded American West Homes, and within two years it was the largest builder in Las Vegas. For decades it was the rare locally owned builder competing near the top of a market dominated by national public companies.
The Canarellis raised their four children in Las Vegas and sent them all to public schools, while Larry coached baseball and soccer and got to know the families on the other side of the fences he built.
In 2014, he was named one of the “10 Legends of National Housing.” In 2019, he sold American West’s homebuilding operations to PulteGroup; the initial lots alone went for more than $150 million.
Today he chairs the investment firm BRUIN Capital Partners, and the couple has 11 grandchildren.
Their philanthropy grew out of that same neighborhood-level engagement. Long before the family foundation became a formal grantmaker, the Canarellis paid for computer labs, band uniforms, athletic fields, and scholarships at schools across the valley.
In 2003, the Clark County School District opened Lawrence and Heidi Canarelli Middle School in the southwest valley, named in recognition of their dedication to public education.
They have supported The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, where the family foundation has given $1 million in unrestricted support, as well as Opportunity Village, the Boys & Girls Clubs, the UNLV Foundation, and the Boy Scouts of America.
The Canarelli Family Foundation, with Heidi as president and Larry as chair, now formalizes that commitment. Its mission is to support youth and families through education, health, housing stability, and the arts, mainly in the Las Vegas Valley and with a focus on at-risk, disabled, and underserved residents.
It funds by invitation and leans heavily on unrestricted grants, the kind of flexible money nonprofits value most. In 2025 it made 81 grants totaling about $3.3 million, more than 90 percent of it in Nevada, and it paid out several times the minimum required of a private foundation.
Recent recipients read like a map of the valley’s safety net: Hopelink of Southern Nevada, Communities in Schools of Nevada, HELP of Southern Nevada and its Shannon West Homeless Youth Center, Baby’s Bounty, The Shade Tree, St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, Olive Crest, the Salvation Army, Nathan Adelson Hospice, Opportunity Village, and the Ability Center of Southern Nevada, a gym for people with disabilities. Nevada Ballet Theatre has received support for its annual production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.
In recent years the couple’s giving has also been shaped by something deeply personal. When their daughter Stacia was diagnosed with oligodendroglioma, a rare brain cancer, doctors in Nevada considered the tumor too dangerous to remove. The family went to UCLA for a second opinion.
There, neurosurgeon Linda Liau took the case and removed most of the tumor despite its position near the brain’s language and motor centers. Stacia is now stable. “I call Dr. Liau and Dr. Chong ‘Stacia’s angels,'” Heidi has said. “They changed our lives, and with this gift, we are hoping more families will benefit from their extraordinary work.”
That gratitude became a $10 million gift to UCLA Health in 2025. Four million dollars established the Canarelli Family Oligodendroglioma Brain Tumor Research Fund, along with a fellowship dedicated to the disease, and the neurosurgery check-in area in the Edie and Lew Wasserman Building now carries the family name.
The other $6 million launched a third mobile stroke unit, a specially equipped ambulance that brings advanced stroke care to the patient. Alongside a gift from fellow Las Vegas developer Brett Torino, it helped triple the program’s capacity.
Heidi has spoken openly about her own fear of stroke as she gets older and about wanting to support work that rarely draws the attention given to cancer centers or children’s hospitals. Larry, who still calls his years at UCLA “a fairytale pathway,” was also the lead donor in 2018 to renovate the Sigma Nu house where the couple met.
“Helping others is a value that Heidi and I have carried throughout our lives, especially considering the opportunities we were given that enabled us to achieve success,” Larry said at the time. He has put it even more simply: giving back, he said, is a way “to do good for the world because the world has done good for us.”
The children’s hospital gift brings these threads together. It joins the couple’s lifelong focus on Nevada’s children and families with their recent, hard-won understanding of what it means to need world-class medical care and to wonder whether you will have to leave home to find it. It is, by a wide margin, the largest publicly announced gift of their giving lives.
And it comes from a man who once found his family’s first real house in the classifieds, now giving the next generation of Nevada families a place to heal close to home.