The Future Mental Health Collective is a community of private funders of mental health who regularly come together to share, listen and learn from each other. It’s an informal trusted space where members can meet peers to discuss what’s working, where the gaps are, or how to supercharge each other’s work.
Before the collaboration emerged, mental health funding felt like a siloed and lonely field with little mutual awareness of who else is working on what, who to turn to for advice, or what opportunities are emerging. As an impact investor, philanthropist and mental health activist, Natasha Müller wanted to bring together other funders and philanthropists around the world who equally felt this lack of community in the field. We didn’t have a clear idea of what we wanted the collective to be; rather, it was a collaborative and organic building process which began as a roundtable of eight individual mental health funders. A year and a half later, we now bring together over 75 private funders from across the globe, including High Net Worth Individuals, family foundations and corporations.
We are housed by Kokoro and powered by a partnership with NEXUS, a global community of investors, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists accelerating solutions to global problems. To foster connections and accelerate impact, the collective hosts monthly events. These include 'affinity hours', where funders share what they’re doing and find opportunities to join forces for more impact. We also hold 'solution circles', which explore current challenges facing the sector, and 'geek-outs' – where we bring in global experts who offer new insights. These often focus on intersections and applying a mental health lens to other work being done, particularly around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). All of this supports our aims to reduce duplication, build on each other’s work and amplify efforts through joint action and advocacy.
Our Collective offers an informal model of engagement with no time commitment. Members can choose to engage as much or as little as they need. Some funders actively attend every monthly session, while others look to our monthly newsletter for updates. Many find browsing our visual mapping of members useful for gaining a deeper understanding of the ecosystem within which they fund. The mapping shows where all the Collective’s members are based geographically, where they are active, what their focus areas and audiences are, and how they overlap with the SDGs. We are now building up an additional database mapping member-recommended organisations which have been funded in the past by someone in the trusted network. This means the due diligence processes can be shared and members of the Collective can build on work done by others.
Humans are at the heart of most challenges funders are working to address and directly impacted by problems we’re striving to overcome. Their mental health strength therefore needs to be at the centre of solutions we’re funding.
.jpg)
Just being aware of each other’s work means members can make more informed funding decisions. We frequently facilitate introductions between members who request to be connected or can learn from each other in a specific area, whether it be youth mental health in Brazil or maternal mental health. This is particularly beneficial for funders who are beginning to explore a new funding area and want to get to know the space. We also support funders who want to integrate a mental health lens into their giving to accelerate impact in other areas of work. Humans are at the heart of most challenges funders are working to address and directly impacted by problems we’re striving to overcome. Their mental health strength therefore needs to be at the centre of solutions we’re funding.
The Collective is also made up of humans who are building individual relationships. Creating a trusted safe space for the community is key to the Collective’s success. New Collective members will often come from word-of-mouth invitations or nominations by other members, and we regularly adapt our processes based on feedback from the Collective. We don’t share information on who’s involved, don’t accept solicitations, don’t record sessions, and have strict Chatham House rules for our meetings. Mental health is such a personal topic that we each will have different experiences of, and this trusted space means members are able to also open up to each other about their own experiences. In hosting the Collective, this human relational element is crucial to creating a culture of inclusion and respect.
Inspired to collaborate?
Explore the Hub to find collaboration opportunities that relate to your interests as a funder.
