$200 million to children’s hospital, sparked by Rob and Karen Hale and matched by their Celtics partners
Rob Hale has a habit of turning one generous act into many.
Usually he does it with cash envelopes at a college commencement.
This time, the ripple reached the Boston Celtics’ owners’ box and ended with the largest single gift Boston Children’s Hospital has ever received.
The Celtics ownership group, led by chairman and governor Bill Chisholm and joined by the team and the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation, has committed $200 million to Boston Children’s.
The hospital calls the gift unprecedented. The structure explains how it came together. Half of the total is the $100 million that Rob and Karen Hale pledged last December to help build a new pediatric psychiatric campus in Brighton.
That pledge, already a record for the hospital at the time, prompted Chisholm and the roughly two dozen other owners to match it.
The result is a single $200 million commitment, with the Hales’ gift as both the foundation and the spark.
The money will reach well beyond one building. It will help complete what the hospital describes as the nation’s premier pediatric mental health facility, part of a $640 million behavioral health campus on the grounds of Franciscan Children’s, which joined the Boston Children’s system in 2023.
The gift will also fund research into emerging treatments for childhood diseases and into the childhood origins of adult illness.
It will pay for advanced training for pediatric nurses, create an innovation fund for new ideas in children’s health, and expand family-centered programs that encourage healthier lives in local communities.
“I’ve had the privilege of seeing firsthand the extraordinary work being done at Boston Children’s Hospital and the difference it makes for patients and families,” Hale said. “Through this gift, the Celtics and Boston Children’s Hospital can help advance groundbreaking research, expand access to exceptional care, and create opportunities to improve the lives of children for years to come.”
Chisholm, who led the group that bought the franchise last year at a record valuation, framed the gift around the team’s identity. “The Celtics have historically been defined by the concept that true legacy is more than what happens on the court,” he said. “This gift is our commitment to the next generation in Boston and far beyond. We all win when we invest in our children’s futures.”
The Brighton campus is where the need is sharpest. Demand for children’s mental health care has surged since the pandemic, and families across the region know the long waits for a bed.
The new 116-bed building will nearly double the hospital’s mental health bed capacity. It will bring inpatient care, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient programs, and rehabilitation together on one ten-acre campus, so a child can move between levels of care without starting over somewhere new. It will also have outdoor play spaces, a reminder that the patients are children first.
Stacy Drury, the hospital’s psychiatrist-in-chief, said the Hales’ support will help heal kids in ways once thought impossible.
For Hale, the cofounder and chief executive of Quincy-based Granite Telecommunications, the gift continues a long relationship.
He and Karen gave Boston Children’s $50 million in 2018, and their name is now on the Hale Family Building in Longwood, the 11-story clinical tower that houses the hospital’s heart center, newborn intensive care, and surgical services.
With the Brighton pledge, the couple’s giving to Boston Children’s alone has reached at least $150 million. Hale bought into the Celtics in 2012 and was the only existing co-owner to remain prominent under Chisholm, becoming one of the team’s largest individual shareholders.
Few people were better placed to show his new partners what the hospital could do.
The Hales live in Quincy, and much of their giving begins close to home. It also began with family. Rob’s father, Robert Hale Sr., was treated for pancreatic cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and in 2007 he and Rob’s mother, Judy, started a fund there for pancreatic cancer research.
That fund grew into the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. In 2021, Judy, Rob, and Karen pledged another $50 million, one of the largest gifts in Dana-Farber’s history, bringing the family’s support for the institute past $80 million.
Work at the center has helped make genetic testing standard for newly diagnosed pancreatic cancer patients.
Dana-Farber is also home to the Hales’ most cheerful tradition.
More than a decade ago, Rob could no longer stand the sight of one Granite employee’s enormous beard, so he offered $10,000 to Dana-Farber if the man shaved it off.
Another employee said he would shave his head for $1,000. Soon hundreds wanted the same deal.
“Saving by Shaving” became an annual event, and by 2022 more than 10,000 people had taken a turn in the barber’s chair, Tom Brady and Governor Charlie Baker among them, raising $46 million for cancer research.
The record goes on.
The couple gave $50 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which named the Hale Building for Transformative Medicine.
They have given more than $50 million to Connecticut College, Rob’s alma mater, including a $30 million gift, the largest in the school’s history.
In 2022, they tried something different and set out to give about $1 million a week to small, often overlooked nonprofits, ending the year with $52 million spread across 75 organizations.
After Rob finished the Boston Marathon in 2024, the couple marked the 26.2 miles with $26.2 million for 72 local charities.
Karen has also given $10 million to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Then there are the envelopes.
Since 2021, Hale has surprised graduates at Quincy College, Roxbury Community College, UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and Bridgewater State University with $1,000 in cash each, split into two envelopes.
One is marked “Gift.”
The other is marked “Give,” and its $500 is meant for someone who needs it more.
He started the tradition during the pandemic, when students had little to celebrate. He has described the feeling of giving as intoxicating and hopes it becomes a lifelong habit for the graduates.
By the couple’s own description, it is the greatest joy of their lives.
Before the Brighton pledge, the Hales had given away about half a billion dollars in all, by the Boston Globe’s count.
Rob often borrows a line from Maya Angelou to explain why: “To those who are given much, much is expected.”
What is new this time is the scale of the response.
One family’s commitment to children’s mental health became a cause shared by the owners of the city’s most storied team, and the amount doubled because someone went first.
“It’s very cool,” Rob Hale once said of the couple’s giving, “when you think, ‘Hey, we’re helping people who are going to help other people, now and forever.'”
In Brighton, that idea is about to take physical form, as a building full of people whose work is helping children get well.