Joan Steinberg, President, Morgan Stanley Foundation
The gap is widening between mental health care and our nation’s youth. The continued impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustices, and climate change are deepening this crevice and weighing on young people. The U.S. Surgeon General issued a stark warning on youth mental health, and doctors, hospitals, mental health organizations, and young people are also sounding the alarm.
Despite affecting about 20 percent of the U.S. adult population, mental health accounted for only 1.3 percent of overall foundation investments between 2015 and 2018–and even less funding is specific to kids and teens. Action to address the gaps in youth mental health is critical and urgent.
Huge Capital Need in a Highly Underfunded Space
The Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health was established to help bring together nonprofit partners and leaders in children’s mental health to address existing gaps in care by prioritizing innovative methods. As a result, the Alliance launched its inaugural Innovation Awards in 2021. The awards provided a total of $500,000 in grants to winning organizations to help pilot or scale their solutions, as well as included a cohort learning program and a showcase opportunity for the organizations to share their work with interested funders.
Given the scale and complexity of the children’s mental health crisis, we know one company cannot tackle this issue on its own. Through our Innovation Awards, we want to provide an open platform for funders to identify and support inventive solutions for children and young people. There is also no shortage of organizations trying to solve these problems; in the first year of the awards program the Alliance received more than 850 applications, which only reaffirmed the immense need in this highly underfunded space.
Diverse, Innovative Solutions
In the inaugural cohort, five winners were accepted that address a diverse set of communities, geographies, and needs through their transformative and culturally responsive models. The organizations and innovations selected include:
- Black Girls Smile provides virtual and in-person mental health literacy programming, education, therapy scholarships, and resources to help Black girls and women lead mentally healthy lives.
- Suicide Prevention Program: Building on its proven mental health literacy programming, the culturally and gender-responsive curriculum focuses on suicide prevention among Black girls and youth, with a new digital platform for enhancing virtual and on-demand programming across the country.
- citiesRISE is committed to transforming mental health through local innovation, coalition building, and youth-led action globally.
- Mental Health Gathering Spaces: The Gathering Space model meets youth, particularly those who are marginalized, where they are by integrating mental health enhancing interventions into existing community spaces, with potential for adaptation into a range of settings and scaling for nationwide impact.
- The Rural Behavioral Health Institute is focused on improving the mental health of those living in rural communities by disseminating clinically proven digital mental health care.
- Digital Screening Linked to Same Day Mental Health Care: This piloted project will identify and connect youth with an elevated risk of suicide to same-day mental health care and includes a universal digital suicide-risk screening of youth, linkage to same-day follow-up telehealth or in-person care, and an implementation template for replicating to other schools.
- Smart from the Start is a trauma-informed, multi-generational family support and community engagement organization with a mission to promote the healthy development of young children and families living in the most underserved communities of Boston and Washington, DC.
- Address the Stress Program: This program is embedded in the community, engaging both parents and their kids in talk therapy and behavioral health counseling by developing fun and interesting group activities that promote mental, emotional, and physical health while reducing stigma and barriers to care.
- Teen Line is dedicated to peer-to-peer support by providing teenagers across the country with an anonymous, non-judgmental space to talk about their problems with highly trained teens who are supervised by adult mental health professionals.
- Latinx Youth Career Development Program: This pilot program will train Latinx youth to answer texts on the peer-to-peer hotline, aiming to encourage Latinx teens to pursue careers in mental health, increase the diversity of hotline volunteers, expand the hotline’s service hours, and build more Latinx mental health ambassadors.
It is our hope that with the award seed funding these organizations can kick start their innovative programs. Some of the awardees have also received additional funding from other funders to extend their programs because of the Innovation Awards showcase and promotion. We welcome more funders joining us to support these great causes.
How Funders Can Help
For those looking to get involved, here are some ideas from our experience:
- Find ways to underpin mental health across your current grantmaking programs. This led to the formation of the Alliance and an intentional expansion of the Morgan Stanley Foundation’s mission to give children the healthy start they need in life to succeed. There are so many potential intersections with children’s mental health from physical health and education to workplace capacity, social equity, and criminal justice reform.
- Support innovative, culturally responsive solutions. While we are honored to work with more established organizations like the Child Mind Institute and the Jed Foundation, we are also excited to seed fund and support new approaches that need help getting exposure. Find the organizations doing the work that need your support and prioritize groups that are led by and serve people of color, who often struggle to get early capital and support. The Alliance for Children’s Mental Health Innovation Awards second call for applications has launched and we welcome your help spreading the word.
- Become a mental health advocate. Continue learning more about children’s mental health issues, fighting stigmas, and raising awareness among your communities and organizations. At Morgan Stanley, we have integrated and prioritized mental health advocacy through our own internal operations and employee benefits and have seen a positive impact.
I challenge you to join me in this effort. Together, we can help to address the many gaps and make sure our nation’s youth are on the path toward mental wellness.