Our 2022 Excellence Award winner and Beck Institute board member Estelle Richman has over 50 years of experience in both the public and nonprofit sectors, with a particular focus on children and families, health equity, and systems change. She has worked at the city, state, and federal level to understand the causes of poor health outcomes among minority populations, and to create and advance programs and systems that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of our society.

Her efforts have resulted in measurable outcomes, including a statewide increase in the percentage of foster children finding permanent homes, a drop in wait time for receipt of intellectual disability services, and improvements to child support collection services. In collaboration with parents and the community, she created the state’s first Bureau of Autism, ensuring children given an autism diagnosis and their families receive much-needed support throughout their childhood and into adulthood.

Ms. Richman is known for her intelligence, leadership, and integrity. Her extensive experience and expertise in policy, public health, family and child welfare, health equity, education, and social services make her an asset to Beck Institute as we continue our work to make evidence-based mental health treatment accessible to all.

In 2021, Beck Institute honored Katherine K. Kinsey, PhD, RN, FAAN with the Beck Institute Excellence Award. Dr. Kinsey has secured more than $50 million in federal, state, city and foundation grants supporting public health initiatives to improve the well-being of vulnerable populations and has been nationally recognized as a public health nursing leader and a pioneer in establishing urban nurse-led health centers. 

To date, the programs initiated by Dr. Kinsey have served over 4,820 families and have led to measurable improvements in outcomes for both parents and children, including increased breastfeeding initiation for first-time mothers, reduced rates of smoking during pregnancy, and increased immunization rates for infants and children. 

We are thrilled to honor Dr. Kinsey for her important work improving the lives of the most vulnerable members of our community. Her tireless work delivering evidence-based services to impoverished families in their neighborhoods and in their homes is an inspiration to the CBT community and an important lesson in meeting people where they are.

In 2020, Beck Institute honored former US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy with the Beck Institute Excellence Award.

During his time in Congress, Kennedy was the lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires insurers to cover treatment for mental health and substance use disorders no more restrictively than treatment for illnesses of the body, such as diabetes and cancer. In 2013, he founded The Kennedy Forum, a nonprofit that unites mental health advocates, business leaders, and government agencies to advance evidence-based practices, policies, and programming in mental health and addiction. In 2017, he was appointed to the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.

Kennedy is also the co-founder of One Mind, an organization that pushes for greater global investment in brain research; co-chair of Mental Health for US, a nonpartisan initiative designed to elevate mental health and addiction in policy conversations during the 2020 election cycle; and co-chair of the Action Alliance’s Mental Health & Suicide Prevention National Response to COVID-19.

In 2019, Beck Institute honored David M. Clark, DPhil, with the Beck Institute Excellence Award.

Dr. Clark is one of the most well-known and well-respected academics and researchers and innovators in the field of CBT. He has spent much of his career studying, developing and testing new and effective CBT treatments for anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, hypochondriasis, social phobia and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Not satisfied with simply developing effective treatments, he subsequently partnered with economist Lord Richard Layard to urge the National Health Service to radically expand access to evidence-based psychological therapies throughout England.

Through this program, Dr. Clark and his colleagues have trained over 10,500 clinicians in CBT and other evidence-based therapies. In 2018 alone, over 1 million people passed through the program, with over half a million receiving a course of treatment. The impact that Dr. Clark’s work has had on these individuals, their families, friends, and communities, is nothing short of astounding. With the presentation of this award, we acknowledge his tremendous positive impact on mental health in England and beyond.

In 2018, Beck Institute honored Arthur C. Evans, PhD, with the Beck Institute Excellence Award. For twelve years, Dr. Evans served as the commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Service, a $1.2 billion public health care agency that provides behavioral health services to the most vulnerable members of our community. Guided by his vision of a better way to help individuals in need of mental health services, he transformed the entire system by investing heavily in evidence-based treatment. Forming a key partnership with a team of educators and researchers led by our founder, Dr. Aaron Beck, he sought to address systemic health care disparities by executing one of the largest and most successful implementations of CBT within a population health environment, improving outcomes for tens of thousands of individuals and families with complex needs.

He expanded consumer access to CBT, with a particular focus on Medicaid recipients, immigrant communities, and the severely mentally ill. In effect, he brought CBT, once available primarily in private outpatient settings, to the front lines of behavioral health care for populations in need. Dr. Evans built a sustainable system-wide treatment delivery model based on the evidence-based principles of CBT and the spirit of the recovery movement and on individual and community empowerment that other cities around the world can replicate, to the great benefit of so many more.