Elisha London, a social entrepreneur and global mental health advocate, founded the U.K.-based advisory firm Prospira Global five years ago to guide businesses and philanthropists seeking to address mental health. The needs she saw: How to understand mental health in all its forms and all its many contexts around the world, and how best to direct financial resources into these exceedingly complex challenges to human wellbeing.
In a mental health funding field in which many U.S. donors focus, sensibly enough, on U.S. work, Prospira is a window on the wider global picture — which mirrors the U.S. in that over the past five years, more infrastructure has come into place to help private funders step up.
In 2021, London already had multiple global policy and philanthropy roles under her belt. Through the previous decade, she’d been campaign director for the Heads Together Campaign, a program coordinated by the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 2017, she established United for Global Mental Health, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health policy and funding. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic further underscored global mental healthcare needs.
Those roles put her in a position to see firsthand the bad news and potentially good news. Bad: government funding for mental health was woefully inadequate. But more hopefully, increasing numbers of potential funders across the whole spectrum of private capital — philanthropy, impact investors and business — were interested in helping. They just weren’t sure how.
“What I had noticed was the private sector accelerating its interest in mental health over the last few years,” London told me. “And I was being approached by some larger brands that were starting to think about mental health for the first time.”
Accelerating interest: Why London formed Prospira Global
London saw the potential for private capital to bring assistance in many underserved areas, including women’s health, children’s wellbeing, and to address trauma in conflict zones. In 2021, London left her role as CEO of United for Global Mental Health, which she previously started in response to a dearth of funding for mental health needs internationally. The COVID era was by then well underway, and for all its many harms, can perhaps be credited in part with forcing greater awareness of the role of mental health in so many aspects of health and wellbeing, and the need for more philanthropic support.
London had been pondering how to move capital most effectively into the mental health space, and to service providers. “The space had been massively underfunded, particularly globally,” she said. Though she is a native Australian, prior to forming United for Global Mental Health, London was the founding U.K. director of the Global Poverty Project and has consulted and worked for the World Bank, the U.K. Department for International Development, and the Overseas Development Institute.
All this led London to establish Prospira Global, which now provides a number of services, including advising funders, landscaping worldwide mental health needs, helping funders develop strategies, assessing nonprofits and potential grantees, designing pooled funds and philanthropic collaborations, and producing research reports. Prospira does not make any grants itself.
“I wanted to set us up to be a bridge between the fields of experts — what works and how you do this well — and philanthropy, as well as those stepping in for the first time,” London said.
The Prospira team is split between mental health experts, philanthropy veterans and management consultants. It works to map the mental health field for interested givers, quickly, across multiple countries. Some of its work involves the production of reports, such as a recent study exploring how integrating mental health work can enhance outcomes across several funding areas, including women’s health and child and youth development.
How does a global mental health advisory firm work — and how does it help philanthropists?
Like any advisory firm, Prospira aims to help clients discern how they can participate in a way that is most meaningful or makes the most sense for them. The team works to understand potential donors and their perspectives — whether it’s a brand, impact investor or a traditional philanthropist — and align that identity with the gaps in international care where they can have the biggest impact.
All this requires strategic positioning. “Most people entering the field philanthropically, or from a brand perspective, are often coming from personal experience or a very specific area of interest,” London said.
Because mental health is such a multifaceted and complex topic, many funders find it hard to navigate, raising questions that Prospira spends a good deal of time investigating. “From a philanthropic perspective: What are the common metrics? What are good outcomes? What are the theories? What is working?” London said. “The field itself is grappling with all these questions.”
Part of Prospira’s approach involves connecting philanthropists who have shared interests in other fields, such as climate change, ocean conservation, safeguarding democracy or gender equality. Prospira also seeks to enable co-funding, encouraging donors to pool resources for greater impact and to maximize efficiency for grantmakers and grantees.
For example, Prospira Global has partnered with ICONIQ Impact — a collaborative funding platform and the philanthropic arm of ICONIQ Capital, a San Francisco global investment firm that manages more than $100 billion in assets, including those of many of the country’s wealthiest people. Prospira and ICONIQ Impact launched the Youth Mental Wellbeing Co-Lab, a collaborative fund that aims to raise $200 million to support the mental wellbeing of young people around the world. (Also see our coverage of ICONIQ Impact’s Women’s Health Co-Lab, backed in part by Melinda French Gates and her daughters.)
Prospira’s clients and partners have included a number of well-known brands and organizations, including the Cotton Foundation, Global Coalition for Youth Mental Health, Kate Spade, Pinterest and Zoom, among others.
For the last several years, Inside Philanthropy has been covering aspects of the mental health crisis in the U.S. and globally, and how funders are approaching a field with many unaddressed needs. The refrain has generally been the same: some but not enough public money, some but not enough philanthropy, and a general agreement that philanthropy wants to do more but needs all the guidance it can get. A small number of organizations have been established to help funders understand the topic and fund effectively, such as Mindful Philanthropy, a U.S.-based network organization also founded in the COVID era that works to catalyze effective funding.
Research suggests that the majority of funders in global mental health have entered the field in the last five years, London said, meaning that deep experience and expertise are still in short supply on the funding side. As more philanthropic and other non-public funders seek to step up, advisors like Prospira have a role to play in accelerating the flow of capital and boosting the effectiveness of those funds.
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