Inviting others into life-saving purpose: Jeremy Boyum
“I want to heal the scene because it's time. It's absolutely necessary. Things are tumultuous, and there are a lot of things that are working against some of our concertgoers and our music lovers. It’s just really hard to be a kid, and it's really hard to be a human a lot of days. We need HeartSupport to help us heal the scene because it's the scene. That's what we do for each other.”
— Jeremy Boyum, HeartSupport donor and fundraiser
How do you get others to contribute to life-saving causes? For Jeremy Boyum, it’s a numbers game— and he has the determination to play it.
This HeartSupport donor set a personal fundraising goal in 2024. In just a few hours, he smashed it.
“I'm pretty competitive as a person. So if there's a goalpost, I like to hit it,” Jeremy confesses. “But to be able to get there as quickly as we did? Fantastic. You don't ever expect that when you're reaching out. You're putting the feelers out there, and whatever happens happens, you know? But we got there in a couple of hours..”
Jeremy works in tech, specifically in sales. He also has experience with a high-caliber MLM travel business. All of this has given him confidence in simply asking enough people so that he can reach his goals.
He shares, “It doesn't matter if this person says yes, I just need to get to that tenth person. The quickest way to do that is to talk to 10 people as quickly as possible. It can be a little bit grindy for some people, but I am just very familiar with that process.”
That familiarity has made him an especially effective fundraiser, but so has his innate love for HeartSupport’s mission as a whole. Jeremy has been deeply invested in HeartSupport’s work for over a decade now. That made it easy for him to explain the importance to those he was reaching out to.
“In that hour, I literally just sat here and texted pretty much copy-paste messages to a bunch of individuals in my phone, and then also to some people at work,” Jeremy explains. “I'm very fortunate to work with a lot of people who feel the same way about the mission that I do. I happened to be at that moment in time connected with people who all felt as strongly about this mission as I do, and they were willing to help.”
Jeremy might downplay his own role with humility, but the truth is that success like that can only come from a history as long as his. Ten years ago, Jeremy was in a band called Shadow of Whales — a group infused with the influences of a youth spent deep in punk music like The Offspring, Blink 182, and Sum 41. While in that scene, Jeremy was introduced by HeartSupport’s Nate Hilpert.
“I was instantly passionate about what HeartSupport is doing, mainly in trying to reach at-risk teens,” Jeremy remembers. “Shadow of Whales was all about that kind of mission. We really wanted to reach people and to lift people up and have close connections with our fans. It was a really great experience, being around people in that way and connecting with them at our shows. Really, our whole show, that was everything that it was about. So we were very aligned with what HeartSupport was already doing in terms of trying to help people.”
Jeremy’s focus on caring for others in that way stemmed naturally from his own struggles with mental health. His involvement in the HeartSupport community became a give and take, an ebb and flow of connection and compassion.
He says, “It was great to be able to jump in there and be able to help anonymously, and to be able to offload anonymously too when things were hard for me. So it's personally affected me in a very positive way.”
That impact extends beyond the positivity of the support wall. Jeremy has found it at live events too, continuing to engage in the music community long after the conclusion of his own band. He’s found the scene to be an ongoing source of solace and solidarity, noticing that others are having that same experience.
“I have been to a lot of really great HeartSupport events where Jake has spoken, and some of the bigger name bands have shared their stories,” Jeremy explains. “It’s about being able to realize that you're not alone. I think that because we're around that message so much, it might start to feel really repetitive. To some people, maybe the ‘you're not alone part’ feels like baseline. But I think to someone who did not previously know that? It's really everything.”
The power of that presence, the reminder that no one has to go through things alone, gets taken to the next level through HeartSupport’s commitment to connecting metal fans with real therapy. For Jeremy, this is vital for destigmatizing what can be life-saving care.
Thinking about the mission, he offers, “It helps at-risk youth connect to resources such as therapy and community to help pull them out of whatever potentially dangerous situation that they are in. I think the stigma of therapy and therapists has definitely gone down a lot, in a good way. People are recognizing that they need help a little bit more. And I think that as a society, a lot of that has to do with organizations like HeartSupport that have really made it their mission to get people help.”
That mission and its practical outworking continues to make Jeremy excited for what’s still to come for HeartSupport.
“Those walls continue to come down. People continue to get the help that they need. I think that HeartSupport has done a fantastic job of being very creative with how they get those resources to people,” he reflects.
Seeing that real impact makes it easy for this sales-savvy supporter to fundraise. For him, it’s not a burdensome ask to reach out to friends and see if they want in: it’s a way of inviting them to be part of something truly world-changing.
Jeremy lays it out this way: “With HeartSupport, you're like, ‘Hey, can you help me save some people?’ Then they're like, ‘Yeah, what can I do to help?’”
If you’d like to join Jeremy in healing the scene, you can make a tax-deductible gift today. You can also consider sending the HeartSupport website to a friend who cares about mental health, extending that same invitation to them.
