This month’s Donor Spotlight is Liz Loveless, founder of Accelerate the Future Foundation.
Liz, a psychotherapist based in Roslindale, MA, strives to create a safe and welcoming space where young people can work through their concerns. Her style is warm and supportive, and she believes therapeutic change can occur through collaboration, trust and creative solutions. In her profession, she has seen firsthand the incredible number of youth who struggle with depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking.
Liz received her Masters in Mental Health Counseling from Boston College in 2012. She’s worked as a clinician at Medfield Youth Outreach and more recently as a therapist at Needham Youth Services. Liz likes to incorporate play therapy, mindfulness, solution focused techniques, and narrative therapy into her practice, and her areas of expertise include trauma, depression, anxiety, and loss.
She’s also the founder of Accelerate the Future, a foundation she created to support organizations that are both innovative and tireless in their pursuit of solving mental health issues and offering support to those in need. Recently, Accelerate the Future became a donor to Samaritans.
Her partnership with Samaritans began when she decided to run the Boston Marathon in 2015. She joined the team as a child and adolescent therapist because she found herself referring more and more young people to Samaritans on almost a weekly basis, causing her to further look into the organization beyond the helpline. She realized that Samaritans had a much broader reach and wanted to support an organization that was addressing the stigma around mental health and suicidality.
Accelerate the Future looks for organizations that provide direct support and can make the biggest impact for the populations they serve. Samaritans was chosen because of the immense increase in mental health crises during the pandemic. Knowing how hard it was to find mental health resources during this time, she noticed that Samaritans was able to pivot and provide services virtually. By doing this, Samaritans continued to provide support and education to so many people in the community. This, coupled with her belief that mental health care is a true crisis in our country, she felt that effort needed to be supported.
We are grateful to Liz and Accelerate the Future for their donation and support. It is because of donations like these that we can continue our work to reduce the incidence of suicide, educate the public about suicide prevention, lend care to those who have lost a loved one to suicide, and reduce the stigma.
