“What can philanthropy do to address the nation’s vast mental health challenges at this moment?”
That was the question Ken Zimmerman, a former U.S. Programs director at OSF who now heads the mental health organization Fountain House, asked in a 2020 Inside Philanthropy guest post. It turns out that a number of mental health funders had the same question. That same year, representatives of Peg’s Foundation, Well Being Trust, Scattergood Foundation and the John Heller Fund launched the network organization Mindful Philanthropy “to catalyze impactful funding in mental health, addiction and wellbeing.”
As Alyson Niemann, Mindful Philanthropy’s CEO, told Inside Philanthropy in 2022, just 1.3% to 1.5% of foundation giving was going to mental health and addiction, even though COVID-19 had both exacerbated and exposed a widespread mental health crisis in the U.S.
Today, philanthropic funding for mental health still hovers below 2%, but the issue is now on many more funders’ radar. “In those early years, there were funders who didn’t even know what we were talking about when we said mental health or wellbeing, and weren’t really interested in having the conversation,” Niemann said in a recent interview. “Now, a number of funders are trying to integrate this into their portfolios, into their giving.”
In its first year, Mindful Philanthropy’s network of funders numbered around 112; today, that total is close to 1,200. Collectively, those funders manage a total of $525 billion in assets and mobilize over $50 billion a year (not just for mental health causes). It’s a good example of how diverse funders can come together around an underfunded priority. But as Niemann pointed out, increases in overall mental health funding still haven’t matched the network’s own exponential growth.
Raising philanthropy’s awareness and financial commitment to mental health
Mindful Philanthropy has played an important role in uplifting mental health as a focus for grantmakers. It has held in-person and digital convenings, provided advice for funders who want to add mental health to their portfolios but aren’t sure how to do so, and acted as a forum for communication and collaboration in the sector. It has made the case for why and how funders can prioritize mental health in a series called Mental Health at the Center, and issued reports on specific topics and populations, including women and girls, people experiencing homelessness, and young people (see Mindful’s Guidance Library).
From the start, Mindful Philanthropy has pointed out the many ways mental health affects — and is affected by — other areas and issues that funders may already be prioritizing. “One of the driving principles of our work is that mental health is a foundational issue to so many other social issue areas,” Niemann said. “So whether it’s education, homelessness, criminal justice, or youth, mental health is one of the things you need to address if you want to further impact those areas.”
In 2023, Mindful Philanthropy directly challenged philanthropy with a call to action and a concrete goal: It urged the sector to invest five times more in mental health by 2035 — $35 billion annually — “through greater collaboration and bigger, bolder bets.” But to achieve that goal will require significantly larger commitments than philanthropy has offered to date.
Flourish Together: Mindful Philanthropy’s strategic priorities
Now in its fifth year, Mindful Philanthropy is charting its course for the next five. Last January, the Mindful team began conducting a series of interviews with members of its funding network to get a read on what mental health grantmakers wanted to focus on through 2030. What emerged from those discussions and the team’s own experience were three interconnected strategic priorities — community connection, behavioral health workforce development, and youth wellbeing — which the organization has brought together under the umbrella term “Flourish Together.”
“We heard pretty loud and clear that there were a number of priorities,” Niemann said. “The first is community: How do we think about isolation and loneliness, and how do we think about developing belonging and purpose and creating that social connection that’s so important for us to thrive? We also heard about workforce: We can’t talk about anything in mental health without addressing workforce shortage issues, and the barriers to entry and retention. And we heard loud and clear from funders that youth is an issue that they were working on or wanting to work on.”
Over 80% of the funders in the Mindful Philanthropy network are already funding youth mental health, or are seeking avenues to do so. A number of funders, large and small, have stepped up to tackle youth mental health in recent years, focusing on very young children, mental health support in schools, the impact of digital technology, and more.
Mindful Philanthropy also created Mindful Connect, an online community that provides information and a platform for funders to share information and collaborate.
“What we found in the first five years of our work was that people had such a profound and incredible experience at our in-person convenings, but being able to take that home and connect the dots and break down silos within the field was really absent,” Niemann said. Mindful Connect provides a venue for funders to carry on the conversation, learn more about the issues, and collaborate. “It enables the field to be more effective at getting the funding to the places where it’s most needed and where it will have the most impact,” she said.
Another Mindful Philanthropy initiative, the Collaborative Action Network: Bridging States, Building Systems, brings place-based funder collaboratives together to share information and resources, and build on each other’s work. Participants include the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Dakota Foundation, the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation and others. “The Collaborative leaders now regularly interact on Mindful Connect,” Niemann said. “We’re in touch with about 15 of these state collaboratives, and our hope is to grow that over the next few years.” The group met in September, and will continue to meet quarterly.
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Measuring success in mental health philanthropy
Most funders understandably want to know what and how much difference their dollars are making, and those that are channeling resources to mental health are no different.
As Niemann put it, “We’re at an inflection point, because for funders who have been at this for a few years, they’re trying to figure out, how do we actually demonstrate impact in the philanthropic work that we’re doing?”
Mindful Philanthropy set out to answer this question in a recent report. There likely isn’t a simple way to calculate impact when it comes to mental health funding, given the complexity and breadth of factors that influence mental wellbeing, and the report doesn’t try to provide one. Instead, it urges funders to address mental health by “moving beyond the individual level to consider outcomes at the community, systems and population level,” and as mental health interconnects with other issues, like education, housing and health.
In any case, philanthropy has yet to provide the level of funding that could significantly move the national needle on mental health. When Inside Philanthropy first spoke to Alyson Niemann in 2022, she observed, “In general, what we’re seeing is that funders are not coming to the table with big commitments.”
Three years later, awareness of the issue has grown among funders, but the overall scale of the funding has not matched that growth. It has also not met the urgency of the mental health crisis, which the Trump administration’s cuts to mental health programs seem likely to only exacerbate.
“I’ve been surprised by the levels of investment, honestly, and where we still are in the field,” Niemann said. “We’ve not seen those major gifts go into the field over the last five years. And there are incredible solutions out there. I would love to be surprised in the next five years about the level of major gifts going to these solutions.”
