Zack Arostegui

With this year’s Regifting, we were challenged to find a cause that was personal to us and connected to our past. As I considered the many worthy organizations that I could partner with, the topic of mental health immediately jumped to mind. In college, a close friend of mine lost his father to suicide, and I had seen firsthand the impact this event had beyond his family. Beyond that, the statistics on suicide are staggering: in the US, there is a suicide committed every 13.7 minutes and suicide is the leading cause of death for Americans age 15–24

For that reason, for my 2018 Regifting I chose to support the organization Find Your Anchor, a grassroots, pay-it-forward movement aimed at suicide prevention and awareness. My friend Ali Borowski started the organization in 2012 after she found the available resources on mental health and suicide to be frequently sterile and impersonal.

The premise of Find Your Anchor is simple:

The organization produces small blue boxes filled with a wide range of items, including a deck of cards with 52+ reasons to live, inspirational posters and a list of online and phone hotlines for suicide prevention. There are two ways to engage with the organization: you can request a box for yourself or you can become a messenger—taking the box you receive and putting it out into the world for someone in need to find.

Find Your Anchor invites those who receive a box to add something to their box to personalize and humanize it—a note of encouragement, a drawing or anything else that might brighten the day of someone in need. For my regifting, I asked Ali to come to the 88 offices to introduce the agency to the organization, and asked my coworkers to all become messengers for Find Your Anchor themselves.

With boxes in tow, the team went home for the holidays—extending the impact of Find Your Anchor while adding their own personal touches to the movement.

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