$100 million latest gift from philanthropists Stewart and Lynda Resnick to mental and behavioral health care raises their giving to well over $2.5 billion

Stewart and Lynda Resnick have given UCLA Health $100 million to build the largest expansion of mental and behavioral health care in the system’s history, the latest gift that pushes the couple’s lifetime giving to UCLA to nearly $200 million and reaffirms them as one of the most consequential philanthropic forces in American medicine and higher education.

UCLA Health calls it the single largest gift in its history dedicated to mental health care, and it lands at a genuinely pivotal moment: the new psychiatric hospital the money helps complete is finishing construction in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles right now, with an opening expected this fall.

The gift, funneled through the Resnicks’ foundation, is doing something concrete and overdue. The Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA currently sits inside Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on the Westwood campus with 74 beds.

It’s moving about six miles east to a newly built, five-story facility at 5900 West Olympic Boulevard, on the site of the old Olympia Medical Center, and it’s not a lateral move—capacity jumps 61 percent to 119 beds, including 36 set aside for children and adolescents.

Alongside those beds, the hospital is adding something UCLA has never had at Westwood: a dedicated 20-bed unit built specifically to diagnose and stabilize patients in the middle of an acute behavioral health crisis.

Outpatient programs for adults and kids are being folded into an adjoining medical office building, and the whole campus is designed around gardens and outdoor space meant to feel therapeutic rather than clinical.

It’s a big, expensive undertaking—the full project runs about $452 million, with the UC Board of Regents contributing $352 million through bond financing to match the Resnicks’ contribution.

Substantial construction wrapped up late this summer, and the building now moves into licensing review with the California Department of Public Health before it opens its doors this fall; the full 119-bed capacity and the crisis unit are expected to be fully up and running in 2027.

“This extraordinary investment transforms our ability to serve the Los Angeles-area community,” said Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of the UCLA Hospital System. “By expanding inpatient services and integrating outpatient and community-based programs, we will be able to serve more people in need. The impact of this campus will be felt across our region for generations.”

UCLA leadership has been direct about why this matters right now, pointing to a mental health crisis in Los Angeles that has been outpacing the region’s psychiatric bed capacity for years.

The Resnicks’ gift isn’t happening in isolation, either — it dovetails with a separate $20 million commitment from philanthropists Laurie and Steven C. Gordon that will convert the space the current Resnick hospital is vacating into 103 additional acute-care beds back at Ronald Reagan Medical Center, meaning this is really the anchor of a broader, multi-donor overhaul of UCLA’s psychiatric and acute-care footprint.

None of this comes out of nowhere.

The Resnick name has been on this hospital since 2005, when a $15 million gift helped build the original facility.

That relationship with UCLA stretches back more than five decades and reaches well past medicine — an endowed chair in art ($2 million), the Resnick Scholars Program that has supported nearly 150 art students, the Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy at the law school, and a $30 million lead gift toward the Hammer Museum’s expansion.

Add it all up, and UCLA says this new gift brings the couple’s combined lifetime giving to the university—through them personally, their companies, and their foundation—to nearly $200 million.

Zoom out further, and the number gets bigger still.

Stewart and Lynda Resnick co-founded and still co-own The Wonderful Company, the massive, privately held agricultural empire behind Wonderful Pistachios, FIJI Water, POM Wonderful, Halo mandarins, and Teleflora—their combined real-time net worth is estimated at roughly $10.8 billion as of this week.

UCLA’s own release on the gift cites a striking lifetime figure for the couple’s broader philanthropy: $2.5 billion given by the Resnicks, The Wonderful Company, and their foundations to community and health initiatives across California’s Central Valley, Fiji, Mexico, and Los Angeles.

They’ve also been reported to have pledged more than $2 billion to charitable causes overall, with a heavy emphasis on climate and sustainability research.

Their single largest gift remains the $750 million they pledged to Caltech in September 2019 for sustainability and climate research — at the time, the largest gift ever made for sustainability research and the second-largest gift in American higher education history.

That relationship with Caltech goes back to 2005, when Stewart joined the board and gave $38 million for sustainability work.

They’ve extended that same climate and agricultural thread with $50 million to UC Davis for the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Center for Agricultural Innovation, which opened this past May, and a matching $50 million to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa for a sustainability and catalysis center bearing their name.

All told, the couple has described pledging around $850 million to universities for sustainability research and climate-protection technology.

They’ve been just as visible in the arts—a $45 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008 for a new exhibition pavilion, plus $10 million in donated artworks, and a $30 million gift in 2018 toward the Hammer Museum’s renovation and expansion.

They’ve landed on the list of the nation’s biggest individual donors four separate times since 2008.

What makes the timing feel especially pointed is that this isn’t an abstract pledge for some distant future building—the hospital is right there, nearly finished, about to open.

After roughly three years of construction, the new Resnick hospital on Olympic Boulevard is heading into final fit-out and state licensing, with an opening on track for this fall.

That turns a name that’s already been attached to UCLA psychiatric care for two decades into the identity of what will effectively be a brand-new, freestanding mental health campus for one of the country’s largest university health systems—arriving exactly as Los Angeles is straining under demand for psychiatric beds and crisis care that the region simply hasn’t had enough of.

For a couple whose giving in recent years has leaned heavily toward climate and sustainability science, this gift reads as a very deliberate, very public recommitment to mental health—one that, layered on top of everything else they’ve built at UCLA and Caltech and UC Davis, keeps the Resnicks among the small handful of donors who can single-handedly reshape the physical infrastructure of American health care and higher education.