How a New Funder Is Taking on the Thorny Issue of Youth Mental Health

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Earlier this week, as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made a remarkable call to add mental health warning labels to social media apps, he deemed the youth mental health crisis “the defining issue of our time.” It’s certainly one that could do with more philanthropic attention, and now, a new funder is stepping up and making this its singular focus. 

We recently came across The Goodness Web as one of three funders backing a funding challenge to promote youth mental health, alongside Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange. While it’s the smallest of the three, it’s also an interesting case study in mental health giving focused around a more modest level of donor. That includes aspirations to be a “coordinating force” for youth mental health philanthropy that can provide donors with resources and guidance on the nonprofit landscape.

The Goodness Web (TGW) was cofounded by Jan Swartz and Mark Verdi, who have been friends since they met in Harvard Business School 30 years ago. Swartz is president of the Princess Cruises Community Foundation, and Verdi is a founding partner at Avalt, a private equity firm.  

The organization was established as a nonprofit in 2019, but the small team, Swartz, Verdi — both of whom still have day jobs — and one employee, spent an initial two years exploring the issue and determining the best way they could have an impact. It was a family affair: Their spouses, Rob Swartz and Gina Verdi, were also involved. For both couples, mental health was an urgent concern. 

“It is an issue that both of our families have lived with and are living with,” Mark Verdi said in a recent interview. “It is just so hard for those of us who have resources and connections — it's hard and lonely. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people without resources, for single parents who are working two or three jobs just to keep food on the table, for example. So for years, we’ve said that at some point, we're going to do something about it. We’ve always thought about how we could use our business experience and connections to activate a movement around this cause.” 

The result was The Goodness Web, which had its official launch in 2022. It set out with the goal to raise $10 million and raised $13 million instead, mostly from individual donors. Since then, it has granted over $7 million to organizations “capable of driving systems change and expanding the availability of support for mental health and wellbeing across the adolescent mental health ecosystem,” according to its website. 

The Goodness Web isn’t stopping there: It recently launched a new $20 million fundraising campaign. It also hired Celine Coggins, who founded Teach Plus and more recently headed Grantmakers for Education, as its inaugural executive director. It seems likely to continue to grow, given the scope of the youth mental health crisis and the sheer numbers of families it affects — families that include potential donors. The organization’s website includes this quote from Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who is on the organization’s advisory board. “There are only two kinds of families in America: Those who are struggling with mental illness, and those who are not struggling with a mental illness yet.” 

“God’s work”

Other philanthropies have made youth mental health a focus. In California, for example, Blue Shield of California supported efforts to boost services in schools. The Duke Endowment has invested in college students' mental health, and Morgan Stanley’s philanthropic arm recently committed $20 million to support mental healthcare for very young children. 

Two influential women in philanthropy, Melinda French Gates and Susan Crown, have teamed up to support Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving through their respective philanthropies. And we’ve already seen how The Goodness Web recently joined Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange to support Young Futures’ $1 million Lonely Hearts Club Funding Challenge focused on digital mental health for youth, which announced its first cohort of awardee organizations earlier this month.

Despite these efforts, youth mental health is definitely an area that could use more philanthropic support, along with mental health in general. The group Mindful Philanthropy has called for funders to do more, pointing out that in 2018, funding for mental health was just 1.3% of all foundation giving, and 5% of all giving for health.

For its part, TGW has found that there is no shortage of nonprofit organizations focusing on mental health — but also that they’re not working together. “We figured out that there were about 10,000 mental health nonprofits in this country, there are probably more since COVID,” Verdi said. “It’s an area that is wildly fragmented. And everyone is well-intentioned, these are organizations doing God’s work, but we’re not going to bend the curve with a fragmented approach. So if we all put our business hats on, we’d say we need a coordinating force, and that's what The Goodness Web aims to be.” 

Verdi and Swartz believed that, given the fragmented landscape, many donors who care about the issue would likely have no idea where or how to contribute. If that’s indeed the case, it means there are a lot of potential dollars that aren’t being tapped.  

“We spent a lot of time trying to understand the landscape and the facts around the problem and where we could intersect with the highest impact with the dollars that we believed existed on the sidelines,” he said. “If we provide the diligence, using our private equity experience, on that pool of many-thousand nonprofits and provide a curated list of effective programs, that would benefit donors.” 

The Goodness Web’s inaugural grantee partners include the Jed Foundation, which works to prevent suicide and promote mental health on high school and college campuses. Another, Path Forward, is a coalition that advocates for expanded access to mental health services. Inseparable is pushing to improve mental health policies  in K-12 schools. 

Verdi said TGW’s policy is to provide multi-year grants so the nonprofits can scale their work.  

“Drawing in the $10,000 donor”

Verdi and Coggins hope their approach will unlock dollars from the many families touched by the issue of youth mental health. To date, they have raised money primarily from individuals, although they have also received funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.

“The initial wave of funding was from our personal network,” Verdi said. “The notion of the web is that if you start with a nucleus through your individual network, a set of people that are passionate about the topic, they're going to know people that have been affected and so on. So the initial $10 million was probably the first or second of those circles. We're now expanding beyond that by organizing salons in different cities around the country. We use these gatherings to begin to get to know folks that are passionate about the topic. So, yes, we hope to do partnerships with the big Pivotal Ventures of the world. But we’re also drawing in the $10,000 donor, inviting them to a salon, and helping them feel like they can be part of the solution. There's a both/and there that I think is really powerful.”

Coggins agreed. “Coming from Teach Plus and Grantmakers for Education, the common denominator was always building an active engaged community, so I really resonated with this notion of how we get the $10,000 donor off the sidelines. There are tons of folks in that smaller giving range who are deeply touched by this issue, who want to be a part of something larger than themselves, but don't necessarily have a vehicle for their giving or their activism.”

Gen X and jet fuel

When IP interviewed Celine Coggins in 2022 as she was leaving Grantmakers for Education, she wasn’t sure exactly what would come next. She knew she wanted to work in some way on issues that concern her generation, Gen X, which, as a group, tends to avoid political activism or civic engagement, perhaps because they missed major political inflection points like the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. Coggins noticed that as they reached middle age and moved past the demands of young children and early careers, many Gen Xers were looking for more meaning in their lives, and she wanted to tap into that energy. 

Coggins believes she has found the issue she wants to focus on: youth mental health, which is having a seismic impact on Gen X through their kids. “I remember when I was leaving Grantmakers for Education, I was like, ‘the world is on fire, and we need to get people off the sidelines, and I need to focus on an issue.’ It took a while, but I found exactly the right thing.”

Coggins comes to the issue both as a parent and as a former teacher who has spent most of her life working in and around education. “Our kids were the experimental generation on social media. I have kids between the ages of 17 and 20, all of whom — and all of their friends — have experienced some mental health impact, small, medium and large. I think many of us say, ‘Wow, I thought I was doing right by my kids. I have a close relationship with my kids, but there's this thing that I'm up against that is inhibiting their ability to thrive in the future.’ That is what pivoted me from classrooms, curriculum, tests, teachers. And that is what I'm most worried about for my own kids, my friends’ kids and the kids I see in K-12 schools.”

Mark Verdi believes when it comes to youth mental health, at least some of the solutions already exist. “As Tom Insel says, ‘It's not that we don't know what to do, it's that we're not doing enough of the things that work.’ That’s what we want to do and that is the hope and the optimism of The Goodness Web. We want to find the stuff that's working, give it jet fuel, and expand it and scale it.”