A Philanthropy-Backed Competition Taps Winning Cohort to Promote Youth Mental Health
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The need for more philanthropic support for mental healthcare has been a running theme at Inside Philanthropy. While the National Institute for Mental Health reports that more than 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness, mental health has long been underresourced by philanthropy, as we discussed in depth in our 2023 brief on the topic, with annual grantmaking for the field lagging well behind other health causes.
Given this context, and against a backdrop of the growing number of young people struggling with mental health issues, it is encouraging to see funders stepping up to address the issue. We’ve tracked recent commitments to boost the mental health workforce and to promote mental healthcare for very young children and college students.
There are also new players on the scene. The organization Mindful Philanthropy, for example, has challenged funders to take a bigger role and is providing guidance for how to do so. And The Goodness Web, launched in 2022, makes youth mental health a priority (stay tuned for more information on the Goodness Web in a forthcoming article).
It’s also encouraging to see high-powered women philanthropists providing support in this area. Melinda French Gates and Susan Crown, through their respective philanthropies, Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange, teamed up last year to provide support for the Center for Digital Thriving, a research and innovation center based at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Both philanthropists have also provided seed funding for Young Futures, whose goal is to “make the digital world an easier place to grow up.” When IP reported on Young Futures in March, the organization had just opened its doors and announced an inaugural competition: The $1 million Lonely Hearts Club Funding Challenge. Young Futures also received funding from the Goodness Web, and the Foundation for Social Connection helped Young Futures evaluate applicants and create programming.
And the winners are…
Just this week, Young Futures announced the challenge winners, a set of diverse organizations all tackling the issue of how our increasingly digital lifestyles affect young people’s wellbeing. The 10 winners, a group Young Futures is calling the “YF Innovators Cohort,” will each receive $100,000 and participate in the Young Futures Academy, a six-month program to strengthen their organizations and increase their impact.
The YF Innovators and the communities they work with “span diverse genders, races, ages, regions, stages and strategies, with many of the programs focused on serving marginalized youth,” according to the announcement.
#HalfTheStory, one of the YF Innovators, is an education and advocacy organization; it created SocialMediaU, a digital wellbeing program for middle and high school students, and summer program Digital Civics Academy, which provides training and support for young people who want to influence digital policy. Another Innovator, Be Loud Studios, based in New Orleans, gives kids a voice and helps them “turn screens into tools for self expression and courageous collaboration” through radio production. Only7Seconds aims to tackle the loneliness epidemic by helping young people create connection, and Civics Unplugged trains and supports high school leaders to become what it calls “Civic Innovators,” through a range of programs, including Digital Citizen Fellowships and Civic Innovation Academies. (See the complete list of YF Innovators).
Other Innovators prioritize LGBTQ+ and BIPOC youth, and a number work to prevent cyberbullying and to build social emotional intelligence. They all focus, in different ways, on social connection, a common theme when it comes to promoting youth mental health.
As Kevin Connors, senior director for Susan Crown Exchange, said when the YF Innovators Cohort was announced, “To truly improve youth wellbeing, we have to go upstream and focus on social-emotional supports, including solutions that foster meaningful social connection.”
Funding youth mental health in a “rapidly changing world”
The Susan Crown Exchange was created by the daughter of the billionaire Chicago-based family; she headed Crown Family Philanthropies for a number of years before starting her own philanthropy. Youth wellbeing is a primary focus; its tagline: “Preparing youth to thrive in a rapidly changing world.”
Meanwhile, youth mental health is just one of Melinda French Gates’ priority areas through Pivotal Ventures, but the organization seems to be making a strong commitment. It has supported research in the area to determine the best way to approach it, and is backing a variety of partners and projects. Philanthropic competitions like Young Futures’ Lonely Hearts Club Funding Challenge appear to be a model French Gates likes. She and MacKenzie Scott both supported Equality Can’t Wait, a Lever for Change funding competition focused on gender equality. French Gates is also working with Lever for Change, which organizes regular philanthropic competitions, in the $250 million open call she announced last month.
It will be interesting to see how Pivotal’s work in the area of youth mental health develops now that French Gates has split from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is setting out on her own with considerable resources.
As funders like Pivotal and Susan Crown look to back them, will initiatives like those developed by the YF Innovators make the digital world an easier place to grow up? It’s too early to say, but it’s clear that digital technology isn’t going anywhere. Since that’s the case, finding innovative ways to coexist with our machines while staying connected with the human beings who share our planet is a good thing.
As Young Futures Executive Director Katya Hancock put it, “All of the YF Innovators take into account the unique challenge today’s youth face: striving to have a healthy relationship with tech while living in a world saturated with it.”
