Update from Confluence’s 2024 Practitioners Gathering: Using Impact Capital to Support Mental Health and Community Wellbeing

We’re in a nationwide mental health crisis. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a 38% increase in people seeking mental health care. This crisis, like so many others, disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities who often lack access to care, and especially care that is culturally grounded and relevant.

At the 14th Annual Confluence Philanthropy Practitioner’s Institute, we hosted a session titled "Investing in Mental Health: Centering Communities for Collective Wellbeing" to create a space where funders and investors could share successes in building and strengthening community-led efforts to support people in healing from trauma.

We took our role in creating space for this conversation seriously. We started with a grounding exercise that asked participants to share their own relationship to the topic and what called them to this session. Sitting in a circle, many of our participants shared personal and familial experiences with mental health challenges, highlighting the pervasiveness of mental health struggles, particularly among our BIPOC peers. Inviting folks into this personal and brave space during an investment conference felt like an important way to allow people to bring their heads and hearts to this work.

We then invited folks to share ideas and issues related to investing in community well-being in culturally responsive ways, and asked for examples of this that might provide good learning opportunities about what to pay attention to in considering investment moving forward. There were rich ideas shared, but with only 75 minutes, we could barely scratch the surface of this complex subject. There were many great examples of work at local and state levels, including brief examples each of us shared from our organizations:

● Felix Family Foundation’s partnership with Aprendamos Family of Services serving border communities in the Southwest providing culturally-specific mental health and wellbeing services to families and organizations

● Empire Health Foundation’s investment in a community-led process to develop an Integrated Cultural Healing Model in Indigenous and Tribal communities

We believe we must prioritize the interests and needs of those most impacted by these challenges, while also recognizing these communities present critical spaces for increased investment, if done appropriately. As such, we hoped to envision more holistic, culturally-specific, wellness-based approaches to lifting up these communities.

Before we left, we asked: If Confluence was to develop a common perspective or statement about effective philanthropic investment in community well-being, healing, and mental health, what other voices would you want to inform or shape this? There was overwhelming interest in continuing the conversation, and supporting Confluence in codifying a perspective on investment in community well-being. At the same time, there was a push to center community voices, perspective, and wisdom in this discussion.

Folks are eager to frame this potential investment area around the critical knowledge of those most impacted by the ineffective and fractured mental health systems we all face. Recognizing this challenge as a critical barrier to health and prosperity for all, there is significant energy to unlock investment dollars to accelerate the change necessary to build a more vibrant system of wellness across all our communities. The field of mental health and community wellbeing is a great opportunity for Confluence’s membership to build innovative investment strategies in and with under-resourced communities across the continent. We should do so by truly centering the wisdom of those most impacted by current challenges.