Melinda French Gates Backs a Funding Challenge to Help Teens Navigate a Tech-Driven World
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Kelsey Noonan, Strategy Lead at Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, works with youth as part of the Headstream Accelerator Program, a Pivotal Ventures grantee.
This week, a brand-new nonprofit introduced itself and unveiled a $1 million funding challenge to help young people chart their way through the digital landscape, terrain that can be both exhilarating and perilous.
The mission of Young Futures is simple — and ambitious. “We really have one goal, and that is to make it easier to grow up in the digital age,” said its founding executive director, Katya Hancock. “We're focused on helping kids age 10 to 19, that's our audience, and we're going to do that by helping the helpers. We are going to fund and support the nonprofits and the grassroots organizations that are on the front lines, that are working tirelessly to help serve youth and improve their wellbeing in different ways.”
Young Futures plans to do that by initiating two $1 million funding challenges per year. Up to 10 organizations will be selected to receive support through each challenge, and representatives of the selected organizations will participate in a six-month program called Young Futures Academy, which will provide organizational support as well as a peer community to share experiences and ideas.
“Along with cash grants, we'll provide critical support to help [participants] level up their organizations and increase their impact,” Hancock said. “We're really all for focusing on solutions. There's a ton of conversation around the problem right now, and we all know that it's a hard time for a lot of teens. We're here to say, OK, what are we going to do about it? Let's get more solutions out there into the ecosystem.”
Hancock emphasized that the goal is to involve young people and give them agency. “We're not about coming in as adults and telling them what to do,” she said. “They're going to be adults in a few years, and they all have different experiences with technology. For some, it's positive; for some, it's negative, and they need the tools to have a healthy relationship with it.”
The new organization received seed funding from Pivotal Ventures, the Susan Crown Exchange and The Goodness Web — three funders that share a commitment to supporting young people and boosting their wellbeing and mental health.
Pivotal Ventures, which was created by Melinda French Gates, has been a key longtime backer of youth mental health work, an area it has been funding since 2016. Meanwhile, the Susan Crown Exchange — founded by another billionaire, Susan Crown — describes its mission as “preparing youth to thrive in a rapidly changing world.” Pivotal Ventures has worked closely with the Susan Crown Exchange before: Both were founding funders of the Center For Digital Thriving at Harvard, as IP reported.
Finally, The Goodness Web, which was cofounded by Jan Swartz and Mark Verdi, works to identify and accelerate promising initiatives to improve and promote youth mental health. Since its launch in 2022, The Goodness Web has has provided over $7 million in multi-year grants that prioritize areas including on-campus awareness, prevention and early intervention, increased access to mental healthcare, and policy change to promote youth mental health.
Philanthropy has been slow to fund mental health work — last fall, the organization Mindful Philanthropy pointed out that support in this area makes up a tiny fraction of foundation giving overall and called on philanthropy to do more. Young Futures, and the heavyweight funders backing it, are an encouraging sign that the philanthropic sector is stepping up for mental health — and for youth in particular.
Lonely Hearts Club
The first funding challenge, which Young Futures announced this week, is called Lonely Hearts Club, and it will provide support for early-stage organizations that foster teen social connection and belonging. All Young Futures challenges will focus on digital wellbeing for youth. Hancock said future challenges will explore topics like cancel culture, tools for educators, intergenerational tools, youth activism and gaming. “The pipeline for future challenges is very rich,” she said. “We're really learning as we go, we're a collaborative organization, so I'm sure there will be challenges that come onto our radar that we haven't even thought of yet.”
For the Lonely Hearts Club Challenge, Young Futures is working with the Foundation for Social Connection (F4SC), which provides public education and research to combat loneliness and promote social connection. F4SC helped Young Futures develop criteria to evaluate applicants and create programming.
Asked about the types of organizations that will be selected for the Lonely Hearts Club challenge, Hancock expects them to vary widely. “The theme is social connection, but I don’t expect that most of the organizations will necessarily identify themselves that way,” she said. “What we’re looking for are organizations that bring kids together around shared passions or interests in ways that build community and a sense of belonging, so the amazing byproduct is social connection.” As examples, she pointed to arts organizations and programs that encourage youth activism and other types of positive youth development.
For the challenge, Youth Futures will also prioritize nonprofits that demonstrate a commitment to equity and involve young people closely in the development and direction of their organizations. “We want this to be youth-led as much as possible,” Hancock said. (The deadline for applications for the Lonely Hearts Club Funding Challenge is April 5, 2024.)
“We are long overdue for innovation”
Melinda French Gates launched her hybrid giving and investment vehicle Pivotal Ventures in 2015 “to accelerate social progress in the United States by removing barriers that hold people back,” according to its website. Kelsey Noonan, Pivotal Ventures’ strategy lead, described how the organization tackles those barriers when it comes to youth mental health.
“We currently focus on making mental health care more accessible and affordable for every family,” she said. “That includes championing new policies to make mental healthcare affordable across the country, getting care resources into schools, supporting both nonprofit and venture-backed solutions. We do a lot of work on the tech side there. And then we also support more equitable data and understanding a holistic measure of youth wellbeing, including their social, emotional and mental wellbeing.”
Digital wellbeing is a key part of the picture. “Young people are growing up in the social media and technology era,” Noonan said. “They're navigating all of the normal ups and downs of adolescence — from puberty and first crushes and navigating their identities and hobbies — in a more connected lifestyle than has ever been the case before. And technology is really an amplifier of both those highs and lows.”
“We are long overdue for innovation that will meet the changing needs of America’s youth in the digital age,” Noonan said when the new organization was announced. “I am proud to see philanthropy come together to make a big impact on youth wellbeing by providing seed funding to Young Futures.”
You can’t just “put an emoji on it”
When Pivotal Ventures first began working on youth mental health, it supported a number of research projects to explore the issue, giving it early insight into the role technology plays there — something that makes intuitive sense in our era of rapid digital development, but also lends itself to stereotyping and oversimplification.
“A lot of that early research led us to understand that, while technology does have a relationship with mental health, it's really nuanced,” Noonan said. “It varies for different kids at different ages, and even with the same technology and the same kid using it. We also found that a lot of reporting on the issue focuses on technology and teens as a monolith: Technology is all one thing and teens are all reacting the same way. It becomes binary — either you're online or you're off. But for young people, technology is part of the milieu of life. They use it to play, to learn, to connect in ways that are developmentally normal for teens. What we really found was the need to help them navigate the healthy, empowering parts of technology, but also to mitigate some of the challenges.”
Like Hancock, Noonan underscored the importance of involving young people in assessing the challenges and designing solutions. “I think there's a lot of assumptions that you can take an intervention designed for adults, and maybe put an emoji on it, and it will be relevant for young people,” she said. “That's very much not the case, and young people are really good at sniffing out things that are not designed for them.”
The partnership between the three funders allows Young Futures to hit the ground running. “It's an interesting example of collaborative funding, bringing together different funders who are mission aligned,” Katya Hancock said. “We're fortunate to be seed funded so we can immediately begin granting and operating.” She is hoping that other funders will step in, too, because the goal is for Young Futures grow and scale. “So yes, we'll be be opening up to other sources of funding as we go.”
