Left to right: Steve Magirius, Jennifer Murray, Lucio Di Clemente and Felix Decata at Luce on the Links, an annual golf fundraising event, at the Lambton Golf and Country Club in June, 2024.Supplied
The organizer: Lucio Di Clemente
The pitch: Founding the Luce Initiative
The cause: Funding mental health services
Lucio Di Clemente had spent years raising money for various causes when he had to stop because a family member experienced mental-health issues.
The experience, and his daughter, led him to change where he put his philanthropic efforts. “My daughter said to me, ‘Dad, you know, you’ve raised money for all kinds of causes, but you’ve never raised money for mental health.’ And it kind of hit me right between the eyes. Of course, I should do that,” Mr. Di Clemente, 67, recalled from his home in Toronto.
He started looking for a charity to support and realized that he wanted to have a real impact with a smaller organization. That led him to the Family Navigation Project, which operates out of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. The FNP helps young adults and families find the services they need, and stays with them through the process.
Mr. Di Clemente, who has held executive roles at several companies, said he’d learned from his family’s experience how difficult it can be to even find a psychiatrist, which is why he believes the FNP is so valuable. “It’s not so much that the services don’t exist. They’re out there, but they’re hard to find your way to.”
In 2022, he founded the Luce Initiative, a non-profit group that raises money for the FNP through a number of events including an annual golf tournament in June. So far, he has raised $1-million in total which has helped fund programs for underserved communities in downtown Toronto and Northern Ontario. “We have no administrative overhead. It’s all volunteer work.”
He pointed out that Luce means “light” in Italian. “The image we’re trying to evoke here is, we’re bringing youth mental-health issues out of the dark and into the light.”