BeCause Foundation was founded in early 2007 when BeCause Founder Richard Kincaid and Executive Director Debbie Ferruzzi met director/producer Kim Snyder in Aspen, Colorado, where she was producing “Wall of Life,” a short documentary about young people surviving cancer. This film was part of a series of social-issue documentaries Ms. Snyder conceived of to inspire philanthropy, an idea that would ultimately form the foundation of BeCause.
At the time, Mr. Kincaid, then CEO of Equity Office Properties (EOP) in Chicago, and Ms. Ferruzzi, EOP’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy, wanted to find more creative and effective ways to support the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, led by Executive Director Erin Sorenson.
The fusion of these creative and entrepreneurial forces sparked the making of Alone No Love, a film that not only brought new funds to the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, but also attracted widespread media coverage and spawned a strategic plan to establish a secure, confidential website and 24-hour helpline for children in crisis.
In 2007, following the success of the Alone No Love project, BeCause Foundation was officially formed by this new team with the mission to make films about innovators across the globe who take on complex social problems and come up with innovative, powerful, and effective solutions. Each short film is created as the cornerstone of a larger campaign to promote activism around the profiled cause and produce tangible results.