Use your workplace to change the world: Andy French and Tim Needham with the Access Foundation
“I want to heal the scene because the scene has healed me. It's provided a community for me. It's provided an outlet for me. It's provided a place to put my creativity and it's given me a purpose.”
— Andy French, HeartSupport donor and volunteer
“We care to heal the scene because we want to make a real difference to individual people.”
— Tim Needham, grant coordinator between HeartSupport and the Access Foundation
Most of us spend a minimum of 40 hours a week at work, which can add up to 90,000 hours over our lifetimes. What if all that time could be part of forging connections that propel forward the causes you care about?
Andy French has achieved that momentum.
Andy lives in New York and works at The Access Group, a software company that works with users in a wide array of sectors — including music. The Access Group is global, enjoying so much success that they established a charitable giving foundation to give back to meaningful causes.
That’s where Tim Needham comes in. Tim works with The Access Foundation to help facilitate charitable giving. Recently, Andy and Tim worked together to secure a significant grant for HeartSupport.
The successful grant process is the direct result of Andy’s personal passion and a culture within Access that similarly values mental health.
“I've been with heart support on and off for like 10 years,” Andy says, introducing his history with the nonprofit. “I first volunteered with HeartSupport at the 2014 Warped Tour in Bonner Springs, where the first person that I met was Nate Hilpert. It changed my life.”
Andy was a college student at the time, but he still felt compelled to become a donor. He signed up to donate monthly for a time.
“After a couple of months, because of some stuff I had going on in my life, I stopped. Honestly, since then, the desire to give back to my community has always been there,” Andy shares.
That desire to give back was also born of his own story and struggles. Andy has experienced mental health from all angles at this point in his life.
He says, “I have a background in mental health, both from the intellectual side and a personal side. I have a degree in psychology, and part of that is to understand the underlying causes behind mental health. On the other hand, I've definitely had my fair share of bouts of depression, anxiety, thoughts of self-harm, and stuff like that.”
In light of that experience, HeartSupport has been like a helping hand for Any personally from that first day he volunteered at their tent.
“Where HeartSupport has come in for me is that it's been the catalyst for me to find the resources, for me to understand what I'm going through from other people's stories,” he explains. “Hearing people's stories makes me feel like I'm not alone and that it's OK to open up about my own struggles, which in turn both helps me out and helps others out in the process. It’s one of those positive feedback loops.”
HeartSupport catalyzed that process in a moment when Andy was really searching for purpose and meaning following seeing one of his first dreams fall through. With a background in audio engineering, he had moved to Los Angeles to be part of a band. But when the band fell through, he ended up having to move back to live with his parents. He felt adrift and confused.
“I thought I was living that dream. And then all of a sudden, I wasn't. I was back at square one, the very place that I first left from,” he remembers.
When the chance to get into Warped Tour as a nonprofit volunteer arose, Andy was excited about the music. But he was also secretly hoping that some spark of passion might be reignited. He arrived at the venue early, where Nate Hilpert greeted him. He spent the whole day interacting with courageous, vulnerable people just like him at the HeartSupport booth. And he was hooked.
“It inspired me to take a trajectory that was different than what I was previously on,” Andy shares emotionally. “It inspired me to get my undergraduate degree in psychology to understand what is it about music, specifically metal music for me, that brings people together. There's this catharsis, there's this sense of love and community. I started to wonder, how can I bring that to people? That led me on a beautiful path, and HeartSupport has been with me that entire time.”
Over the years since college, Andy’s involvement has grown into a significant volunteer role leading Team Beacon. He uses his own social media to advocate extensively for HeartSupport under the name I Am Reclaimer, a name that holds deep significance for him.
“I decided to choose that name and theme because I had been through a lot of stuff myself, and it's kind of my own mantra,” he reveals. “‘I am’ are the most important words in any language. The phrase shapes destiny. ‘Reclaimer’ is derived from ‘to reclaim,’ and that is to bring something and update it, renew it, and restore its most perfect self.”
Andy is so passionate about mental health that when he started working with Access, he was immediately impressed by the mental health training that was a universal part of their onboarding. This made it clear to him from the very beginning that Access valued mental health. Then he found out about Access Foundation’s charitable giving, and he felt like it could be a natural fit.
Tim, who works with the Access Foundation, heard Andy’s story and immediately could tell how passionate he was.
Tim says, “One of our key funding streams is for people who work within the Access Group. We give them the ability to give something extra back to organizations that have either been there to support those employees or where those employees give back personally. And in Andy's case, it's both of those things! It’s something we can do in a small way so that Andy can do something a little bit extra for an organization that quite clearly he's hugely passionate about.”
“I'm tremendously lucky to be on a team of people at work that also is very open and very vulnerable and allow me to have a safe space within work,” Andy says.
There are over 7,000 employees at The Access Group, which means that the Foundation gets a lot of requests for causes to be supported. But Tim could immediately tell that HeartSupport was something special.
“It seems to be very community-led,” he observes. These innovative approaches that organizations such as HeartSupport are doing are really so important. I think they're more successful, rather than just approaching it in a generic way.”
Tim Needham
Grants are typically approved to cover very specific parts of a nonprofit’s work. In this case, the Access Foundation granted funds to cover a full year of mentorship for five different individuals through HeartSupport’s support calls.
“I think it's freaking amazing that five people are going to get mentoring for a year. That's going to change people's lives,” Andy enthuses. “Again, I know the impact that HeartSupport has had on me. Knowing that five people are going to get really high-quality mentoring and guidance through the next year is incredible.”
“Actually seeing that an actual person has gone from X to Y, that's the difference that this has made? That's why we do all this stuff,” Tim agrees. “It's not about giving out the money. It's the difference it makes.”
That difference is creating a ripple effect. Andy has proven to be such a passionate advocate for purpose that Tim has enlisted him to advocate among Access employees in the United States, encouraging them to consider what causes they might be able to champion too.
But through all of the growth, ultimately, Andy remains at his core a metal fan who has been moved by the mental health support he’s received. He knows he’s not the only one.
He sees it this way: “We're a bunch of people that are from the scene that have been through the darkness, the pain, the trauma — but we made it out on the other side. We want to share that experience and that way out for others who may not have had the opportunities that we have had. And that's what HeartSupport is.”
If you want to join Andy in shedding light for those who need it most, make a tax-deductible donation today. Consider contacting your employer to see if they will match donations on your behalf!
