The FMK Foundation was co-founded in 2014 by Jenn Kikel-Lynn and her brother Jon, in memory of their parents. It is the most personal work either of them does, because they know exactly what it means to lose a loved one to suicide and severe mental illness.
Jenn was eleven years old when she lost her dad to suicide. He was forty-two. Her mom fought cancer twice, in her thirties and again in her forties, and passed away at fifty-two, when Jenn had just turned thirty. Through every one of those chapters, Jenn and Jon had each other, and years later they turned the hardest parts of their story into a promise: that other Utah families would not have to walk the same road alone.
That promise became the FMK Foundation. For more than a decade it has carried their experience into work that helps: suicide prevention, mental health awareness, and support for families facing what their family faced. This is not charity from a distance. It is delivered by people who have stood on the hardest side of the story themselves.
The preparation behind the mission runs deep. Jenn earned her Nonprofit Fund Development Certification from the University of Utah's Nonprofit Academy of Excellence in 2013, the year before the foundation launched. She became a QPR certified trainer in suicide awareness through the Utah Department of Human Services, and in 2025 she completed an intensive grant writing cohort to strengthen the funding side of the work. The heart came from the family's story. The competence was built on purpose.
And the mission does not stand alone. It is one branch of a family of giving that includes the Yellow For Life Organization, The Give Back Brokerage Charitable Foundation, and The Give Back Brokerage itself, where every real estate closing contributes to community causes. In Jenn's world, the business funds the mission, and the mission is the point.