A Call to Action for Philanthropy in the Face of a Mental Health Crisis

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Most families are touched in some way by mental illness. Whether it’s the depression of a family member or a friend, a colleague’s substance use disorder or personal struggles of one's own, few people escape mental illness or its fallout. COVID-19 acted as an accelerant to an already widespread mental health crisis, with the National Institute of Mental Health reporting in the pandemic’s aftermath that more than 1 in 5 U.S. adults live with a mental illness, and young adults are especially impacted.

Mindful Philanthropy, a nonprofit that aims to increase funding for mental health, has been tracking the crisis, and this week issued a call to philanthropy to do much more. The organization released “Mental Health at the Center: The Case for Philanthropic Investment,” which it calls a “snapshot of the current state of mental health in America.” 

The report points to analysis from the Chronicle of Philanthropy showing that just 15 funders made contributions of over $1 million to mental health issues in 2022, most of which went to major research institutions and hospitals. It also concludes that in 2018, funding for mental health made up just 1.3% of all foundation giving, and 5% of all giving for health, adding, “If all giving follows a similar rate as the foundation giving tracked by Candid, we can estimate that all mental health giving grew from approximately $5.5 billion in 2018 to $6.5 billion in 2022.”

Along with the guidance, the organization issued a concrete call to action: “Mindful Philanthropy is calling for all of philanthropy to invest 5x more in mental health by 2035 — to $35 billion annually — through greater collaboration and bigger, bolder bets.” 

Such calls for greater support have been reverberating for a while now throughout the sector, including in coverage on Inside Philanthropy. But Mindful Philanthropy’s new release represents a specific and unequivocal challenge to foundations — that it’s time to take this crisis head-on. “We have a moment to get this right and to invest in mental health,” said Mindful Philanthropy Executive Director Alyson Niemann. “We want to make sure we don’t let the moment pass by.”

A North Star for the sector

As IP reported last year, Mindful Philanthropy was created in 2020 by a group of mental health funders, including Peg’s Foundation, Well Being Trust, Scattergood Foundation and The John Heller Fund. The goal: to “catalyze impactful funding in mental health, addiction and wellbeing,” according to its website. “At a time when mental health was left out of conversations around how philanthropy could improve the nation’s wellbeing, our founders recognized an opportunity to create a North Star for the sector.” 

Since its founding, the organization has worked to inform funders how they can include mental health in their portfolios or increase the investments they are already making in the area. Mindful Philanthropy released the guidance this week during its second annual summit, Activate 2023, held in Healdsburg, California. Eighty funders and mental health experts attended the conference, including representatives from family foundations, institutional grantmakers, and a number of billionaires. The goal of the summit was to provide information on the scope of the issue, including information on gaps in funding, and to create opportunities for collaboration.

Mindful Philanthropy has also produced a number of resources for funders to inform their giving, including guidance on girls’ mental health, as IP reported last spring, and on the 988 Mental Health Emergency Hotline, which IP’s Paul Karon wrote about in 2021. By the end of 2022, Mindful Philanthropy had guided over $45 million to mental health. 

“I think what we see from funders is there's a lot of fear and a little bit of paralysis that comes from that fear of really wanting to get it right, but not understanding how,” Alyson Niemann said when asked about the dearth of funding for mental health. She described a recent conversation she had with one West Coast funder. After working on the issue of youth mental health for several years, the funder was overwhelmed by the complexity of the issue and turned to Mindful Philanthropy for advice. 

“She told me, ‘As we started diving in, we realized that this was like a ball of yarn that's all tangled. We wanted to address youth mental health, but now, we’re looking at the juvenile system, incarceration and education…’ Funders tend to get overwhelmed about the intersectionality of mental health, and where's the most strategic place to start, and how to have the most impact with their dollars.” 

Roadmap to the future

Mindful Philanthropy sees its role as supporting and guiding funders through this complex and thorny mental health terrain. “We see ourselves as the connective tissue between funders and those on the ground doing the work and experts in the field. We’re hoping to be the field builder by helping all funders find the place where they can make their best contribution by providing a set of guides, tools and metrics that will enable the funding going into the field to be effective and efficient.”

Niemann is encouraged by growing interest in the issue, and said not a week goes by without a funder contacting Mindful Philanthropy. “In the background, there's a lot happening around strategy and how people are coming into the mental health and wellbeing space, and I include addiction in that, too,” she said. (See IP’s recent article on funding for opioid use disorder.) “I think we'll see over the next year an emergence and a reemergence of funders, whether it's a new funder, or a funder that walked away 10 years ago, or five years ago, and they're trying to figure out how to come back to the mental health and wellbeing space, and how they can collaborate and work together on the mental health continuum.”

“Mental Health at the Center” includes an overview of the scale and cost of the mental health crisis, challenges to accessing treatment, social issues that intersect with mental health, the unequal toll of mental health across diverse communities, and specific funding gaps that offer opportunities for philanthropic impact.

Next month, Mindful Philanthropy will release a roadmap with specific advice for how funders can make a difference in the area of mental health. Mental health experts will be discussing the roadmap in a webinar on November 14, and the organization is planning to hold workshops around the country next spring.

While the recent guidance represents a call to action, the roadmap will outline priority areas for giving and a path forward. 

“We're seeing a lot of interest, and people starting to come up to the edge of the water and trying to decide where they can step in,” Niemann said. “We’re hoping the call to action will push them to say, ‘Yes, I’m in.’ The next step is to figure out how to work together, and that’s where the roadmap comes in.”