A Year After Matthew Perry’s Death, a Foundation Is Keeping His Legacy Alive
Matthew Perry wearing button up shirt" width="970" height="867" data-caption='The organization’s initiatives include unrestricted grants, a new fellowship and a program aiding incarcerated individuals struggling with addiction. <span class="media-credit">Courtesy Matthew Perry Foundation</span>'>
A year ago, Lisa Kasteler was preparing to retire from a lengthy career in publicity that included a longstanding working relationship with the actor Matthew Perry, her client of more than 30 years. But after Perry’s untimely death on Oct. 28, 2023, the publicist quickly shifted gears into an entirely new path.
Kasteler serves as the executive director of the Matthew Perry Foundation, a nonprofit created last November to carry on the Friends actor’s mission to help those struggling with addiction. Perry, who had long been candid about his own struggles with sobriety, was planning on launching such an organization before his passing, said Kasteler. “We were able to have these really important conversations about how to go about it,” she told Observer. “The hope was we would be doing it with him, obviously.”
With an overarching goal to dismantle the stigma surrounding addiction and “help as many people as possible on their journey to recover,” the foundation is in many ways a progression of Perry’s own efforts during his lifetime. The actor, who previously spent two years running a sober living facility known as the Perry House, once stated: “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want [helping people] to be the first thing that’s mentioned.”
The Matthew Perry Foundation is led by a team that surrounded Perry for decades. Doug Chapin, the actor’s longtime manager, serves as the foundation’s board president while Perry’s business manager Lisa Ferguson acts as its secretary treasurer. The foundation, which is structured as a donor-advised fund maintained by the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, declined to provide financial details.
More than just “another celebrity foundation”
Much of the organization’s mission comes from Perry himself, who detailed his journey with addiction and recovery in the 2023 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. “Once we didn’t have him, we still had multiple decades of time and experience with him—and we had his book,” Chapin told Observer. “His book was for us the blueprint, because it spoke so clearly about what his journey was but also where he thinks things were helpful and not helpful on that journey.”
Despite the star power associated with Perry, Kasteler and Chapin said they took pains to ensure the organization wouldn’t just become another celebrity foundation. “The natural thing to do is use his name, have big benefits, have stars come,” said Chapin.
While the foundation had no shortage of partnership requests from the get-go, the organization’s leaders said they wanted to take their time and first understand the world of philanthropy, something they worked on by speaking with leaders at Open Society and the Michael J. Fox Foundation. “We wanted to be perceived from the very beginning as serious and doing the work on a street level, which I think is indicative by the things we’ve accomplished,” said Kasteler.
What is the foundation’s impact a year later?
One of the Matthew Perry Foundation’s first initiatives was its Grassroots Recovery Grants, which has already provided unrestricted grants to more than a dozen local California groups including the American Indian Child Resource Center, Voices of San Recovery San Mateo County and Palmdale Community Foundation. Some of the recipients were so surprised to receive funds from the foundation that “they thought it was a scam,” said Kasteler, who noted that this program will expand across other states in the future.
The organization has also taken on projects that include funding a year-long fellowship in addiction medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital—an initiative the foundation said it plans to extend in the future—and launching a telehealth program to support inmates struggling with addiction in jails across California. “We’re finding where the holes are and filling them,” said Kasteler.
Despite their backgrounds in entertainment, both Kasteler and Chapin said the transition to overseeing the Matthew Perry Foundation was a natural one. “I was always fiercely protective of him, and I think that carries over now,” said Kasteler, who previously led the public relations agency Wolf Kasteler. Chapin, meanwhile, said he spent decades in his former career helping his clients accomplish their goals and dreams. “In a way, it doesn’t feel any different to me,” he said. “It saves me missing him every day.”
As the foundation marks the one-year anniversary of Perry’s death, Kasteler and Chapin said they are working towards turning the foundation into an ongoing legacy organization and one centered upon treating addiction as a disease—something only 53 percent of Americans believe to be the case.
Perry “kept telling us, over and over and over again, ‘Addiction wants you alone, it wants you in your room,'” said Chapin, noting that overcoming stigma is one of the key barriers to pursuing recovery. “Without solving that, there’s a whole lot of people locked up in a room suffering in a way they don’t need to be.”