The Youth Mental Health Crisis: A Half-day Convening Focused on How Philanthropy Can Make All the Difference Post-Convening Report – October 2024

The Youth Mental Health Crisis: A Half-day Convening Focused on How Philanthropy Can Make All the Difference
Post-Convening Report – October 2024
By: Laurel Dumont and Devon Arp, Intentional Philanthropy

**Read the full report in the document uploaded below. We are also excited to announce that Philanthropy New York’s Youth and Education Funders Working Group and Health Working Group are planning a follow-up convening on September 9, 2025. Please register here and stay tuned for additional details!

Overview

In October 2024, Philanthropy New York’s Youth and Education Funders Working Group convened over one hundred funders interested in learning more about the youth mental health crisis for a half-day convening focused on how philanthropy can make a difference in the youth mental health crisis. A recording of the convening in its entirety can be accessed here. 

The convening provided an in-depth exploration of several aspects of the youth mental health ecosystem, fostering connections and shared understanding among philanthropic leaders who have long invested in youth mental health, and others who are newer to the topic. Together, funders explored how philanthropy can play a pivotal role in supporting the well-being of young people in New York City by fostering a thriving, interconnected youth mental health ecosystem.

The mental well-being of our youth is a critical indicator of their overall health and future success. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing challenges, leading to a growing mental health crisis among young people. Recent data reveals the alarming reality that over 2.7 million American youth are grappling with severe major depression. According to the NY Health Foundation, 1 in 5 New Yorkers experience poor mental health, 1 in 4 young adults (ages 18-35) report anxiety and/or depression, 25% of Hispanic New Yorkers report poor mental health, and food-insufficient New Yorkers report anxiety twice as often as others.

While timely intervention and clinical care are crucial, many young people face significant barriers to accessing these services due to cost, waitlists, or other obstacles. Nonprofits across New York City are rising to the challenge, developing innovative approaches to address the growing mental health needs of youth. However, the ecosystem of providers, educators, healthcare systems, government agencies, and funders is complex and often fragmented.

This conference was initiated by members of the Youth and Education Funders working group who have been increasingly compelled that mental health is so closely connected with their foundations’ missions and priorities that addressing this crisis began to feel like a moral and strategic imperative. 

One of these funders is Laurel Dumont, Senior Director of Grantmaking for the Solon E. Summerfield Foundation and Co-Chair of Philanthropy New York’s Youth & Education Funders Working Group. She opened the convening by welcoming the many funders who gathered for the event in both the main conference space and the overflow room and briefly summarized how the Summerfield Foundation found itself entering into the youth mental health space. She explained that, in support of the board’s decision to triple its grantmaking during COVID, staff conducted some field research and a listening tour of grantees about the biggest challenges facing young people on their college and career journeys, all of which kept pointing towards the need for more mental health services for youth. Specifically, they pointed to:

• Access in places where young people already feel comfortable 
• Proximate providers with cultural competence
• Healing-centered and trauma-informed approaches
• Support from peers, “near-peers” and/or trusted individuals.

While there are trusted and high quality providers in the city, systemic challenges contributing to those organizations’ inability to meet all of and keep up with demand, including:

• Service gaps (not enough quality providers, long waitlists)
• Access issues (insurance, referral, mechanism, location)
• Wellness gaps (staff/leaders of youth-serving orgs need wellness too)
• Pipeline issues (market/system failure, career ladder, low wages).

The convening aimed to create space and provide content for funders, coming together from youth and education, workforce, health/mental health contexts, to discuss and understand:

• What are the gaps, challenges, and opportunities nonprofit service providers face in providing, sustaining, and resourcing youth mental health services?​
• What are career pathways in mental health, and how can we build more pipelines and on-ramps for people at all career stages?​
• How can funders be better allies in supporting positive mental health outcomes for youth in a way that centers youth voice?​
• Where can philanthropy make a difference  in a large and complex system of private insurance and public funding?​

Itai Dinour (Executive Director, Carmel Hill Fund) thanked Philanthropy New York for making space for youth mental health at the forefront of recent conversations in the health arena as well as in education and youth development, noting that this is the kind of attention and energy that is needed to support young people in the ways that they deserve. He shared about his foundation’s “learning-by-doing” approach to developing a grantmaking strategy around youth and adolescent mental health, in community with the people doing the work, with young people themselves and with peer funders. In that spirit, the Fund joined a co-funding partnership with the Summerfield Foundation and Gray Foundation that directed $5M to eight high-quality organizations that are providing direct services to young people at low or no cost so that they can expand their clinical capacity and reduce waitlists citywide by the hundreds. 

Before Itai introduced the first panel, representing several of the eight organizations funded by this funding partnership, Itai invited others in the room to join Carmel Hill Fund on its learning journey, as it continues to learn from partners in the field and seeks to understand both where philanthropic dollars can support services directly, as well as “how philanthropy might help nudge policymakers to do more on their end so that we are not reliant on philanthropy to hire social workers and psychologists and psychiatrists which we know is not going to scale and is not going to be as sustainable.” 

Panel 1: The Practitioner Perspective on Funding and Delivery Challenges in Youth Mental Health Services

The first panel, “The Practitioner Perspective on Funding and Delivery Challenges in Youth Mental Health Services,” was moderated by Jen Curry (Founder and CEO, Change Impact) and was comprised of panelists Asha Alexander (Assistant Director of Counseling & Case Management, Hetrick-Martin Institute), Barbara DiGangi (Director of Community Wellness Initiatives, University Settlement), Phoebe Richman, Director of Mental Health Services, The Door – A Center of Alternatives), and Marina Stolerman (Clinical Director, The Fostering Connection)...