On Funders’ Surging Support for Mental Healthcare and How Universities Can Tap In
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The bulk of a recent $38 million gift from Steve and Connie Ballmer to the University of Washington will help grow the workforce for community-based behavioral health programs. Photo: VDB Photos/shutterstock
It’s become a common observation to call the pandemic an accelerant of existing trends. In the higher education space, for example, the crisis amplified funders’ focus on boosting student access and support. But the pandemic has also cast a harsh light on pre-2020 philanthropic blind spots. Consider funders’ support for mental health treatment.
Back in 2019, Inside Philanthropy spoke with financier Clifford Chiu, who, with his wife Leigh, made a big gift to the nonprofit healthcare system Ascension Seton to support mental healthcare initiatives for college students in Central Texas. “There’s a huge mental health crisis, and it’s under-researched,” Chiu said.
Last summer, IP guest contributor Ken Zimmerman laid out the case for why funders must prioritize mental healthcare moving forward. The field, he argued, is “rich with emerging leaders and promising innovations” and being shaped by a “growing application of institutional reform approaches that recognize how sectors like higher and secondary education must address mental health.”
It was a prescient observation. In just the last six months, grantmakers like the Kresge and Robert Wood Johnson foundations and the Lilly Endowment have made big gifts to universities earmarked for mental healthcare and research. We’ve also seen large gifts from major donors like Steve and Connie Ballmer, regional alumni, and corporate funders like BMO Financial Group.
A closer look at funders’ intentions reveals an instructive degree of nuance. Some funders explicitly link student mental health with student success and retention. Others aim to complement legislative efforts to address the surging demand for care across the adult population. And some funders, to Zimmerman’s point, are empowering universities to conduct research that serves the broader public and to combat stigma affecting vulnerable populations. Fundraisers will want to keep these differences in mind when cultivating funder support.
Mental health services as a component of holistic support
Funders’ efforts to combat the student mental health crisis are one good window into how grantmakers are approaching this constellation of issues. Last summer, IP surveyed 171 fundraising professionals in higher ed and asked them to name the most important trends in their field. Multiple respondents cited variants on the student mental health crisis, including “social, mental and emotional health” and “health services moving online post-pandemic.”
Around the same time, the American Council on Education, in conjunction with the TIAA Institute, asked 300 college presidents to select their five top concerns from a list of 19 COVID-related issues. Fifty-three percent of presidents cited the mental health of students as their most pressing issue, followed by long-term financial viability (43%) and mental health for faculty and staff (42%).
Funders have stepped up to the challenge by integrating mental health support into larger and more holistic approaches to student wellness and success.
For example, Duke Endowment awarded a $4.5 million grant to help Duke University create what administrators call a “new model for coordinated, whole-student support” that includes mental health services, counseling and stress-management education. In late April, Kansas State University alumni Charlie and Debbie Morrison pledged $10.2 million to establish the Morrison Center for Student Well-Being. The gift includes funding for staff, suicide prevention and bystander training, wellness research and mental health treatment.
Charlie Morrison is chairman and CEO of Wingstop Restaurants. He and Debbie serve on the KSU Foundation Board of Trustees. “Our gifts are to help students who are struggling, which is all students at some point. College is a big life transition, with stresses and pressure,” the couple said. “These investments will provide students access to the assistance they need, while maintaining their dignity without scrutiny.”
A “risk factor for college attainment”
Two influential higher ed funders—the Kresge Foundation and the Lilly Endowment—have also doubled down on student mental healthcare recently.
In February, the Kresge Foundation adjusted its education program’s grantmaking tactics. The foundation said it would now prioritize “student persistence” to “keep students connected to their studies and basic needs outside the classroom, including food, housing, internet connectivity and mental health resources.”
Education Program Managing Director Bill Moses drew a straight line between student mental health and the foundation’s goal of boosting student success, particularly among students of color. “We believe weakened mental health is a risk factor for college attainment, along with issues such as student finances, a lack of food, housing or transportation, inadequate academic and career advising, and weak academic preparation,” he said.
Kresge cited a July 2020 United Negro College Fund survey of students at 17 historically black colleges and universities, which found that more than one-third of respondents reported declining mental well-being due to COVID-19. “Students who noted a decline were twice as likely to drop out of college than those who did not,” Moses told me, noting that “racialized stress, as exemplified by George Floyd’s 2020 murder, has long been a factor in student mental well-being.”
The foundation’s support for student mental health runs through its Capacity Building and Urban Higher Education Ecosystem (UHEE) strategies. Kresge’s Capacity Building support extends to the Steve Fund, which helps colleges promote positive mental health outcomes among students of color, as well as to Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholars’ (APIA Scholars) work to address AAPI mental health. For UHEE, Kresge is partnering with Tulane University’s Cowen Institute in New Orleans to engage local students on mental health issues.
Moses encourages higher education fundraisers to “approach funders with humility about mental health issues, particularly since some of the exacerbating conditions—costs, isolation, weak responses to COVID-19, hostile or unwelcoming campus environments—are attributable to colleges themselves.” Officials must ask themselves what they are doing to “address these challenges and change inadequate practices, whether they preexisted the pandemic or emerged because of it, to better serve the mental health and academic outcomes of their students.”
Urgency and impact
Back in the spring, the Lilly Endowment announced the third and final phase of its Charting the Future for Indiana’s Colleges and Universities initiative. The funder earmarked $70 million to help 16 Indiana universities “make the most impact on strengthening their institutions’ vitality and how they educate their students,” including improving and expanding mental health resources for students.
One grantee, the University of Notre Dame, is infusing mental health support through its residential life programs. DePauw University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and St. Mary-of-the-Woods College are focusing on providing more comprehensive and cost-effective student mental health services through a collaborative partnership.
Advancement officers elsewhere should take note of two key tactics employed by recipient universities. Lilly’s Communications Director Judy Cebula told me that officials conveyed a profound sense of urgency. “The endowment’s funding to address mental health needs was provided because the colleges and universities prioritized these needs over other needs or challenges in their Charting the Future proposals,” she said.
Officials also “made a convincing case through relevant data and narratives that the needs were compelling and their proposed strategies to address them showed real promise to achieve significant impact.” Echoing the sentiments of Kresge’s Moses, Cebula said that university officials “have conveyed to us the impact mental health can have on student retention and graduation, among other things.”
Mounting concerns for the fall semester
The pandemic may be waning, but there’s a risk the student mental health crisis could actually intensify as universities resume in-person classes this fall. Returning students will need access to “adequate mental health, financial and other support services” to facilitate the transition back to campus life, wrote David Rosowsky in Forbes.
Students of color, first-generation students and low-income students are especially vulnerable, Moses said. Many of these students will be grappling with anxiety related to college costs and student debt, as well as possible diminished academic performance due to a lack of engagement and support throughout 2020.
Government officials are also deeply concerned. In May, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced plans to increase funding for school and community counseling programs that will make therapy and other mental health services available to every Californian under age 26. In Ohio, the state’s Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee is considering SB135, a higher ed bill that calls on the state’s chancellor of higher education to issue a report about state universities’ mental health and wellness services.
The takeaway for university fundraisers is clear. When officials, researchers and politicians express concern about an urgent crisis, grantmakers tend to listen—and help.
For example, in January 2019, the Huntsman family made a rare, large pre-pandemic mental health commitment of $150 million to fund a new institute at the University of Utah. Speaking to the New York Times’ Paul Sullivan, Peter R. Huntsman, who oversees the family’s charitable arms, cited a study that ranked Utah last for adult mental healthcare among the 50 states and D.C.
Over two years later, funders are eager to plug holes in public funding or partner with state legislators in a post-COVID world. For one example, let’s turn our attention to Seattle, where Steve and Connie Ballmer’s millions will facilitate state efforts to meet growing demand for mental health specialists.
Funders as legislative partners
Washington State currently ranks “among the lowest in the nation in serving people with mental health challenges,” writes the University of Washington’s Victor Balta. “Nearly a quarter of adults with a mental illness reported not being able to access care, which is only being exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.” On May 13, Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill to address this urgent need by, among other things, allocating $200.5 million for a new behavioral health teaching facility.
But the state can’t do it alone. Enter the Ballmers. On May 14, the couple announced a $38 million gift to the University of Washington (UW) that will complement the state’s investments “through innovative and transformational approaches to growing and strengthening the state’s workforce,” Balta wrote. UW’s School of Social Work will coordinate close to $25 million of the Ballmers’ gift to expand the number and diversity of students who go on to work in community-based behavioral health programs.
The Ballmer gift applies an equity lens to the mental health crisis by supporting programs that serve individuals and families facing poverty and severe, long-term mental health or substance use challenges.
“The same inequities that plague every American institution apply to our behavioral health system, which is designed to cater to wealthy white people,” Connie Ballmer said. “Further complications of stigma, cost, and a fundamental lack of system capacity to meet the growing need are woven throughout our current behavioral health infrastructure. That’s why we were proud to partner with the University of Washington, state leaders and providers to lay a foundation for shifting our system through addressing workforce capacity, access and equity.”
The Ballmers join a list of funders seeking to leverage research universities’ expertise to address long-standing health inequities. In early May, BMO Financial Group announced a $10 million donation to create the new Rush BMO Institute for Health Equity at Chicago’s Rush University System for Health. The institute will focus on building funding partnerships to address community issues like mental health, food security, addiction and weight loss. BMO Financial Group’s commitment is the largest-ever gift to Rush in support of health equity initiatives.
Combating stigma
In his IP guest piece imploring philanthropy to ramp up support for mental health services, Ken Zimmerman cited “combating stigma” as a “key objective” for funders. Stigma has been identified as a major reason why only about half of all Americans with a serious mental illness seek treatment. As Zimmerman noted, it can disproportionately affect certain populations like Black Americans, LGBTQ youth, veterans and rural Americans.
Connie Ballmer got the memo. She cited stigma in her statement laying out obstacles keeping people of color from receiving effective mental healthcare. Similarly, Kresge’s Moses told me that the foundation’s support for the Steve Fund, APIA Scholars and MetaPro, a teletherapy app, “seeks to break down the stigma associated with seeking mental health resources by making them more accessible, culturally sensitive and affordable.”
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is also looking at how culture can affect stigma. In May, it announced a $502,140 grant to Texas A&M University Health Science Center earmarked to “generate new knowledge about mental health stigma as portrayed in Spanish language media and develop effective stigma-prevention strategies to foster a culture of mental health in the Latinx community.”
Lori Melichar, a senior director at RWJF, told me that stigma is a “compelling reason” why Latinx people in the United States experience greater mental illness, yet use fewer mental health services compared with non-Latinx whites. Compounding matters is the fact that few studies have looked at the causes and impacts of stigma in the Latinx community, limiting specialists’ understanding of how “anti-stigma policies can close mental health treatment gaps for medically underserved Latinx groups.”
The Texas A&M gift aims to close these gaps by looking at how Spanish-language media can contribute to stigma. Researchers will gauge Latinx populations’ use of contemporary media sources like TikTok and TV networks like Telemundo and analyze how these outlets present mental illness in their programming, how significant it is to storylines, whether mental illness is portrayed in a way that is stereotypical or negative, and whether information about mental illness resources is included. Equipped with this information, researchers will identify disparities between that content in Spanish- and English-language media.
“As stigma blocks the use of mental illness care, attentiveness to those knowledge gaps in mental illness communications is critical to addressing the low use of services among Latinx populations and attain mental health equity in the future,” Melichar said. Looking ahead, we anticipate other funders will look to partner with universities to combat stigma across disproportionately vulnerable populations.
Emerging opportunities for research institutions
Prior to the pandemic, funders earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for research activities in fields like engineering, artificial intelligence and data science. And while we don’t expect grantmakers to drastically curtail this support anytime soon, the grants from the Ballmer Group, BMO Financial Group and RWJF suggest that even a minor pivot toward mental health treatment could open the funding floodgates for research institutions all over the U.S. Universities with a pre-existing footprint in the mental health research field stand to benefit the most.
The Nock Laboratory at Harvard University works with the Brighton, Massachusetts-based Franciscan Children’s Mental Health Research Program to improve outcomes for children and adolescents living with mental illness. In January, Franciscan Children’s announced a $5 million gift from RoseMary and Dan Fuss to establish the Fuss Family Research Fund at Harvard, which will promote research aimed at understanding and preventing youth suicide. The fund will complement the Tommy Fuss Fund, a private foundation established in 2007 by the Fuss family to support research and advance the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
In early April, the John S. Dunn Foundation made a $25 million commitment to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) to bolster the university’s behavioral health initiatives and address significant gaps in mental healthcare services in surrounding communities. In honor of the gift, UTHealth will establish the John S. Dunn Behavioral Sciences Center to support innovative behavioral health research, education and patient care.
The commitment is part of the university’s first comprehensive campaign, Many Faces, One Mission, which aims to raise $500 million to advance brain and behavioral health and to secure the institution’s future as a top health science center. Since the campaign’s quiet phase began in 2015, the university has raised more than $400 million.
“Mental illness has a significant impact on the physical health and well-being of individuals and families, and it reverberates across our community,” said Charles M. Lusk III, president of the John S. Dunn Foundation. “Our continued partnership with UTHealth will carry on John S. Dunn’s legacy and support a cause that was important to him while improving the lives of countless individuals long into the future.”
