The total donation amount was $23.8 million led by Hoffman, who had previously backed the non-profit. Gates, Omidyar Network, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and his wife and One Kings Lane founder Ali Pincus, along with Steve Ballmer’s foundation, The Ballmer Group, are among the other backers in this round. The organization has a total of $35 million in grants.
Crisis Text Line was founded by Nancy Lublin, who was formerly the CEO of DoSomething.org and the creator of non-profit Dress for Success, as a way for teens to talk with counselors about problems through their primary form of communication— mobile phones. For many teens today, making a phone call is a foreign concept. Messaging through apps like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger and texting is their primary way of communicating with friends and family.
Teens who contact the organization talk by text with counselors about issues like suicide, bullying, depression, and anorexia. To use Crisis Text Line, teens send the organization a text with the word “START” to connect with the non-profit’s 1,500 volunteer crisis counselors. Since introducing its service in 2013, the organization has processed more than 18.5 million messages from teens about suicide, depression, and LGBT issues. The service continues to grow with the number of text messages sent from April to May increasing 35% month over month.