A Corporate Funder’s New Award Backs Innovative Ways to Help Kids Overcome Mental Health Issues
/
fizkes/SHUTTERSTOCK
Back in May, we wrote about the Morgan Stanley Foundation and its then-newly launched Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health Innovation Awards. Mental health, particularly children’s mental health, has long been underfunded by philanthropic as well as public sources. But if the pandemic has one positive impact, it’s raising awareness of the importance of mental healthcare. And this awareness has begun to drive new energy and attention to the mental health needs of kids, particularly those in traditionally underserved communities.
The Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health, created by the Morgan Stanley Foundation, is one example of the kind of deep-pocketed corporate funder that advocates say the sector desperately needs. Morgan Stanley created the innovation awards program as another way that the alliance can incubate emerging nonprofits with focuses on diverse communities and geographical regions, and to pilot new approaches to get kids the counseling and other care they need.
The foundation carries out the corporate philanthropy of the financial services giant, targeting children’s physical and cognitive development with focuses on healthy food, places to play, and quality healthcare. Since it launched the Alliance for Children’s Mental Health in 2020, U.S. grantees have included the Jed Foundation, Child Mind Institute, the Steve Fund and New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.
The awards offer $100,000 to the winning nonprofits, along with consultation and training from industry professionals and the chance to build new professional connections and raise their profiles with others in their fields. The funder recently announced the five winning nonprofits for the awards’ first year, and will now work with the winners to implement and test their programs, with an eye toward regional and national scaling of the most successful ones.
“In almost all the cases, what was really compelling about the groups we selected was the newness of the idea, or the program, or the delivery, and the stark need of the community that they were serving,” said Joan Steinberg, president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and CEO of the Alliance for Children’s Mental Health Advisory Board. “So it was that combination of factors, and that, in many cases, we felt they were authentically the only group addressing these needs in the place where they were addressing it.”
Here are the five organizations, and their programs, in this first cohort of the awards.
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. Its suicide prevention program uses a novel 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. Its Mental Health Gathering Spaces model meets marginalized youth 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. Its Digital Screening Linked to Same Day Mental Health Care pilot project will identify and connect youth with an elevated risk of suicide to same-day mental healthcare 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, D.C. Its Address the Stress program is embedded in the community, engaging both parents and their kids in talk therapy and behavioral health counseling by developing 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. Its Latinx Youth Career Development pilot program will train Latinx youth to answer texts on the peer-to-peer hotline, aiming to encourage the pursuit of careers in mental health, increase the diversity of hotline volunteers, expand the hotline’s service hours, and build more Latinx mental health ambassadors.
Notably, the Innovation Awards will help some of the newer grantees advance and mature as organizations, learning about such nuts-and-bolts parts of the job as communications and public relations, finances and 990 forms. And Steinberg acknowledges that one or more of these programs may simply not succeed—and the foundation is OK with that.
“These are smaller organizations and they’re going to have some pitfalls, and that’s OK, because if you’re really dealing with innovation, then failure is a part of it,” she said. “We feel that all of these organizations have the ability to succeed, and our goal is to help them prove their approaches and bring them funders who would be interested in taking them to the next level.”
