How Morgan Stanley finds & funds solutions for youth mental health

Episode Notes:

• Listen to the previous episode featuring Rachel Miller from Closegap

• Follow Joan Steinberg on LinkedIn

• Learn more about the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health

• Learn more about The Alliance’s Innovation Awards

• Learn more about Closegap

• Follow Rachel Miller on LinkedIn

• See the video Morgan Stanley worked with Closegap to produce

• 2021 Study from the CDC on high school students who felt sad or hopeless

• 2022 study from the National Library of Medicine on child and adolescent mental health

• “Just over half of U.S. public schools offer mental health assessments for students; fewer offer treatment” from the Pew Research Center

• Study from Candid on overall foundation investments into mental health causes

Transcript

Before we get started, please be aware that this episode covers sensitive topics like suicide, abuse, and self harm in the context of creating and funding interventions and solutions. Listener discretion is advised.

This episode is the second of a two part series exploring what an effective partnership between Granter and Grantee looks like as they work together to address an urgent cause.

In our most recent episode, we spoke with Rachel Miller, CEO and founder of Close Gap, to learn how her organization is using technology to tackle one of the most underfunded cause areas in the US, youth mental health.

In twenty twenty three, the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health chose Close Gap as one of the five winners of their innovation awards. As a result, Rachel's team received one hundred thousand dollars along with other forms of support like public relations help and assistance with further fundraising. In the previous episode, we explored how this funding and support helps Closegap impact the lives of children and the people who care for them. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I encourage you to do so. This episode will reference some of what we discussed previously. In this episode, I speak with Joan Steinberg, Morgan Stanley's Global Head of Philanthropy and President of the Morgan Stanley Foundation, about her perspective as a funder.

As part of her duties, Joan oversees the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health, often just called the Alliance. The Alliance has run the Innovation Awards since twenty twenty one. When I sat down to speak with Joan, I wanted to understand how she and her team structure their awards, how they define innovation, and what advice she would give to other funders who would like to start similar initiatives.

Welcome to Impact Audio. I am Sam Kaplan, Vice President of Social Impact at Submittable.

As Joan and I settled into our conversation, I became increasingly curious about why Morgan Stanley chose children's mental health as a focus. She reminded me of how far CSR has come over the past couple of decades.

In particular, she reminded me of something David Hezekiel, the founder and former CEO of Engage for Good, said to me when I interviewed him for our Impact Studio event last fall. David said that when CSR and cause marketing initiatives started gaining traction in the early to mid 2000s, they often focused on popular, uncontroversial causes like breast cancer or funding arts education. In contrast, youth mental health is uncomfortable. It's a cause that is in dire need of more funding and attention, but it's not as easy to talk about.

And Morgan Stanley embracing such a tough cause area is in line with a trend David has been seeing in recent years, where corporate foundations are becoming more and more comfortable working to address those nuanced, difficult, and very important issues. So we'll pick up my conversation with Joan on why children's mental health is so important to her and the folks at Morgan Stanley.

We were already working on children's health, so I think it's important to note that children's hospitals were part of our grants even when the firm first got formed and when our foundation was formed in the 1960s. So this is, I'd love to take credit for all of it, but this is actually something that predates me. But I think what it really boils down to is employees have always been a critical part of how we give back in our communities, and children is a natural focus area when you think about our own employees, many of whom are parents, and it just became kind of the common and central theme to our giving.

And so since I got here, which is years ago, almost thirty years ago, it's really become more central. And I think about five years ago, we were looking at what we do, and we've done a lot around children's physical health. And there were a couple statistics that really stood out, but the one that really got us was at the time, and it's only gotten worse if that's possible, suicide was the leading cause of death among children ten and over. And we felt as children's health funders that we were doing something wrong if we weren't concentrating on the thing that was sort of killing the most kids and could be prevented.

And that's when we really started looking at children's mental health and expanding our definition of what health meant and making sure that mental health was in the front of our minds as we thought about what you could do to really give kids a healthy start.

So let's talk a little bit about So tell us about Closegap, like why you chose them and why you think their work is so important.

There's a couple things about Closegap that really were of interest to us. It's a really cost effective way for schools to be able to identify kids who are struggling. And that might be enough, except they really thought about what you do with the data. And I think that was really important to us. Rachel wasn't interested, sorry, Rachel Miller, who founded CloseGap. But what was really interesting was she realized that schools are overwhelmed, they have all these kids that they have to manage through, what are the tools you can give them to identify the kids who need the help the most, and then how do you think about the resource connection? And so I really liked the way they thought about that.

She was onto something, the number of schools who asked for their help during COVID and helping to think about and identify their kids. And also that the technology they use is simple, but is effective for young kids all the way through to high school kids in identifying what's happening with them. They have been successful at identifying the kids who really needed it, getting them sort of same day and immediate care, and that's allowed them, I'm sure, save lives just by using technology effectively in an education environment.

So from a process perspective, walk me through what this was like when you came across the application for closed gap. Did this emerge as like, hey, this is really innovative technology and this is exactly what we're interested in? Or, you know, was this something that you and the team really had to like think through in terms of whether or not this made sense for a grant from your organization?

So let's start with the somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred charities apply for the Innovation Awards. So we're not able in first read to tell you who's gonna who's gonna make it to the end. We really have to read through every application. And then most importantly is I don't decide.

We have a team of experts who are pulled from our alliance, almost all of them are mental health professionals, and they're the ones who actually read and review these. So I might think something's innovative, but they're the experts who can tell us what's actually there. I think what we're looking for isn't, oh, it's tech innovation. We're actually looking for people who are solving the problems of mental health within kids in interesting and innovative ways and in ways that others can pick up and run with.

Because our goal isn't to support some new technology or some new measurement. Our goal is to figure out how we as a society figure out better ways to maintain the health of our young people.

Yeah, fantastic. One of the things here that I thought was really interesting is Rachel mentioned that having Morgan Stanley and being part of this program and really being able to associate their organization with yours really went a long way towards helping them to secure other funding. And she described it as being like a stamp of approval from a trusted name.

Well, she, that's exactly what we wanted the Innovation Awards to be, right? So it's, there is cash, it's a hundred thousand dollar grant, but to us, that was kind of the least effective part of it. I mean, money's great, but we really wanted to build this around using our channels, our voice, and our networks to get other people's eyes on the organizations that we'd identified. And that's what we wanna see, right? Which is folks like Rachel getting recognized where we can apply our PR sense, whether it's social media, like what are the things we can do to sell her? How do we bring our clients and others who might be willing to invest in nonprofits to the table.

We partnered with groups like Mindful Philanthropy and shared some of our winners so that folks can see what great charities look like in action. But we also are aware that for new entrepreneurs who may have just started their nonprofits, they might also need some strengthening, there might be some capacity building. So we also offer sort of a cohort series, and help train those entrepreneurs in scalability for nonprofits, marketing, public relations, fundraising, strategic planning, you know, what are the things that kind of help a nascent or smaller organization get to the next level? And we try to provide all of that learning as a part of getting the award.

Yeah, I absolutely love that Joan. Like it always strikes me as just being so important that beyond the grant award itself that a funder find ways to function as a strategic partner for their grant recipients. And it feels like that's a pretty important component of this program.

One hundred percent. And I think one note of something new that we sort of figured out as we went along. So we've now had fifteen hundred applicants and we've had ten winners. We were feeling really good about the number of applicants and our advisory board kind of pointed out, it's great, it just shows there's a tremendous need and you've helped ten out of fifteen hundred.

How do we help other organizations? What do we do? Because clearly the need is greater than we're providing, and that led us to build a capacity building platform. And this year, in addition to having winners of the awards, we're gonna provide another hopefully one hundred organizations with the capacity building training, where we're gonna have over a six to eight month timeframe, different cohorts, different subjects that they can engage in to at least better prepare them for other fundraising opportunities for their own development, for capacity building, for scaling, whatever it might be that they particularly need.

Yeah, yeah. Like one of the key challenges there is that you have this cause area in in children's mental health, which is so important, and there's not a lot of funding right now. Certainly not enough to go around, right? So that that brings us to like innovation in the mental health space. And so I'd love to know like why the focus on innovation in the mental health space right now? Like, how do you define innovation? Why is this so important?

So let's start with funding for mental health.

And I think we're due for a new study, but Candid did a study several years ago and found that only one point three percent of philanthropy was going to mental health causes, which means even less to children's mental health. Yet, if you look at the Surgeon General reports, other things that are out there, there's a real crisis. And I need to be really clear on this. There was a crisis before COVID.

COVID just maybe kind of pulled the curtain back on how bad it was, but this has been epidemic since way before that. And as I'm sure you're aware, about two thirds of kids who have mental health disorders don't get treatment. So this is a very big problem in desperate need of services. I think for us, when we started looking at funding mental health, there were so many things we saw that were interesting and innovative ideas, but hadn't reached scale yet.

And so we were gonna try to give to things that were already at scale with proven methods and get them bigger, because we understood that this is a really big problem. So how do you get the things that are working out as fast as possible? But there were so many topics that we saw that were really interesting, but weren't quite there yet. And that's really where we came up with the innovation awards.

How do you sort of seed fund some of those interesting ideas? Again, I don't define innovation in one context. Doesn't have to be technology. It doesn't have to be using different intermediaries.

It doesn't have to be school based. It doesn't have to be hospital based. To us, it was more how are people trying to solve the problem in their community in a way that could be copied and carried over to other communities that could really make a difference in the lives of kids. So it's not necessarily that it has to be new, it's that it has to be, you know, sort of ready to go to action, and then how do we bring other people along with us?

I want to ask you sort of touching back on that candid study. Why do you think it is that there is such low funding for youth mental health?

You know, think stigma certainly still plays a part in it. It's gotten a little bit better in my mind because of COVID because everyone kind of was struggling with their mental health during COVID and it was eye opening. I'm a little worried we might go back. But I think the other part is that unlike other physical things that kids might have, it's not as tangible.

And I think it leaves people feeling a little less like they can hold onto it or grasp it or understand it. So you have something you can't see, it's completely invisible, but it's deeply affecting young people. And that makes it a little harder for people to understand, like, what is your measurement gonna be? How are you gonna know the difference that you've made?

But I think what they're missing is that most mental health disorders are entirely treatable, that young people can thrive, they can succeed. We just need to intervene and make sure that they get the care that they need. So there's a lot of work that can be done. So despite the fact that it's a big problem, it doesn't mean you shouldn't tackle it because there's a lot we can do.

Yeah, yeah. Do you feel like this is a cause area that more funders are starting to pay attention to now, especially since COVID, or do you feel like we're in the same boat that we were in, you know, over the last four or five years?

I think more funders did pay attention to it sort of during COVID.

I'm jury out a little on whether or not that will stay. I hope it will.

It's very hard to ignore something that you've come face to face with.

Know, one of the things that I have sort of argued with my peer group of corporate funders is if you're an education funder, if you're a criminal justice funder, if you're, you know, name the topic, that mental health may very well be a big contributor to the thing that you're funding. It doesn't mean you have to change topics and suddenly say, I'm only gonna do mental health, but using education, for example. If you're an education funder and you care about student dropout, mental health disorders can cause dropout. Can cause young people, depression and anxiety disorders can cause young people to start failing in school, to not be able to pay attention, to lose interest.

This is the topic that if you care about that outcome, you should care about mental health outcomes. Again, it doesn't have to be everything you do, but take a look and see if mental health is factoring into the thing you're actually trying to solve for, and whether or not part of your grant should be addressing those issues.

We know that youth mental health cuts across sectors, corporate, public, nonprofit, right? In spite of the fact that this isn't a highly funded cause area, at least not yet, like what does successful collaboration across these different sectors look like?

Yeah, I'm gonna give you an example from our first round of Innovation Awards to kind of set the stage, and it's the Rural Behavioral Health Institute. It was a social worker and a teacher who started it. I think it was, you know, one year old and maybe it was a ninety thousand dollars budget when we met them. And they were looking at mental health issues in rural communities.

And one of the things that was really obvious to them was, you know, you could have maybe one or two care providers over a three or four hour drive area. So families not only weren't getting treatment, it would be very hard for them to. And they really took a very basic idea, which is could we get schools to work with us, do basic testing, and then if a kid was identified as problematic, provide same day care through a medical provider. So they partnered with the medical community, they partnered with the school community, with government, to see if this could work.

And the good news was it did work. But their expansion has really been a lot of states looking at their model and realizing how efficient it is. And again, going back to Rachel Miller, she's got a really efficient model too, right? How do we partner these public private partners where you bring a really important tool, you bring a medical community to surround this, you have to have that proper care somewhere in the mix for kids who really need it, and sort of state and local governments to team up on this.

And, you know, there are tons of models out there that are effectively meeting kids where they are. So how do we bring more money into those kinds of systems? And again, you need the state, you need the local municipality, you need the philanthropy community to kind of get it started, and you need the medical community to provide the care. I think there's tons of interesting collaborative models like that out there, because we cannot wait for sort of a federal government's gonna figure this out moment.

It's not gonna happen quickly enough to serve all the kids that need to be secured for today.

When you describe like sort of your focus on innovation, like I think in a perfect world, like philanthropy can be, I don't love the term risk capital, like there's a school of thought, right? That, philanthropy funds innovation and that the best solutions then sort of get picked up by other entities out there and by government and scaled. Have you seen any examples where whether one of Morgan Stanley's or something else in the mental health space, like an intervention by a nonprofit has scaled to become funded by government?

It's not funded by government yet. I'm going to say yet because we're still waiting, but I think I think a really interesting model is the JED Foundation, a very different approach to mental health. It's a suicide prevention organization primarily named after a young man who took his own life. So this comes from lived experience.

And they really started on college campuses, not focusing on direct sort of care models, but focusing on systems models of what happens in a college campus and how can you make the entire campus safer. Everything from literally physical building structure to the way medical care is provided on the campus, to very critically in training faculty, RAs, teaching assistants, the police on campus to all work together as a system. And they started on a few campuses. We gave them a grant, others have supported them as well, to get everywhere.

We want it to be a tipping point that every college campus looks like this. But we also worked with them on a high school model, and here's where the public can come in. We worked with them on developing a public model for high schools where they can provide that same kind of systems management in a high school environment. What makes a high school safe?

How do you create a high school that manages, detects, and cares for young people as they're sort of going through daily struggles? They've created that model and piloted it. They're now partnering with a superintendent's association to try to deliver this on multiple campuses kind of across the country.

This is a great opportunity as they're proving the model, I think, for states to step up and say, we want this model on every high school in our state or every high school in our community. And that's where you can start to see scale. If it becomes the norm, then you're going to see this permeate every environment, and I can't think of anything better than having teenagers all have access to that same kind of care model.

Yeah, I love that. So whether it's closed gap or any of your other recipients, can you tell me like how do you evaluate and measure the success of any of these awards that you're providing?

Well, think there's several layers to it. The first is there's a grant involved and we want to make sure that they use the grant the way that they, the money the way they said they would and that the grant does what it's supposed to. So success is they've successfully done what they said. I think for us is success is also how many times that we can get them recognized, how many audiences we can put them in front of, how they're able to use the cohort trainings we create to advance themselves. And certainly we look at how much additional capital they're able to attract to what they're doing. And ultimately, all of those are how were they able to extend their mission based on, you know, our start, you know, did they go from serving one hundred to one thousand kids?

You know, was that impact deep? So we kind of look at all of it, and that's how we think about the success.

That makes perfect sense. Any advice that you would give to nonprofit organizations out there that in the future will be applying for an award from Morgan Stanley?

Please apply. We do actually read them all. I think, you know, we try to run these little webinars and educate people on what we're looking for. Strongly recommend that people actually attend them.

It'll strengthen your application, I promise you. It'll also let you know if you're applying to the wrong place, we don't, last, look, I was a professional fundraiser, the last thing that I ever want to do is waste anyone's time because, you know, these are hard jobs, and you need to focus on your best shot. But now with our new training cohort, we're really excited to have, you know, smaller entities, groups that are just getting started. We're looking at you, we're happy to try to include you in things like our new cohorts to strengthen you.

Our goal here is to lift all ships, right? So we can only have a certain number of winners, but if we can do something to improve the whole sector, we're in. So if you're thinking about this and you're doing something innovative or interesting in mental health, please think about applying.

Tell me more about how you engage Morgan Stanley employees in all of this.

So for most of our programming, they can be direct volunteers. So we've done a ton of work around providing sustained access to healthy fruits and vegetables for young kids as part of our health campaigns. And our employees will physically sort boxes, pack backpacks, you know, the physical labor of it. With children's mental health, obviously, do not have employees who are providing counseling services, which I'm sure most folks do not want their investment bank or financial advisor to also be their therapist.

But I think for us, it's really been more both users of the services. A chunk of our employees are parents. This is very personal for them. We have huge attendance when we do internal sort of lunch and learn sessions to learn more about children's mental health and how to protect their own kids. But they often also share a lot of our materials with their clients and include their clients in the things that we're doing. So that's a part of our sort of network building is when do our employees kind of introduce and share us out in their world, and they have huge reach.

So that's part of the opportunity. And then where there are physical opportunities, of course, we're going to engage them as much as we can. Do need to know it, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood. I would say pre COVID, we're getting back to it now, but pre COVID for sure, about ninety percent of our employees volunteered or were engaged with at least one of our programs in the course of a year on a global level.

So that's something that we take incredible pride in that are one of our core values is giving back and our employees definitively live that out year over year over year.

Yeah, I asked you earlier like what sort of advice you would give to applicants, but I'm wondering like do you have any advice that you would offer or lessons learned based on all of your work and experience for other corporations who are looking to make improvements or changes to their own corporate giving program?

Yeah, I think this was our first big experience with our Innovation Awards of wild RFP out there, anyone could apply. And I think we were scared when we started. We were scared no one would apply. Then we were scared that everyone would apply. Then we were scared.

So I just say it's worth the jump.

It's worth doing. It is a lot of work that should not be sort of underestimated because you do have to read them all. But I think it's a really, really important way of connecting with your communities. We are getting applications from tiny, tiny, tiny communities that we might have overlooked.

It gives us tremendous opportunity to allow those local and authentic voices to be sharing what's happening. A lot of our organizations are led by and serving people of color, LGBT communities, communities that we may not always hear the voices of, and this is a tremendous opportunity for us to get to hear directly. So I think that's worth it. And I think if you can get over the discomfort that they're new, they're startups, they might not be as well established, and that feels shaky when you're a corporate funder, it's totally worth making the investments.

And it's a tremendous opportunity for your firm to get your name out there about something you really care about, but more importantly, the impact you can have on all the other things you take for granted, like your strategic planning programs, your marketing expertise, your financial expertise, your channels, those are all things that these organizations can desperately use, and that's not a big lift at all in order to be able to deliver. So it's worth really considering adding this to your existing grant portfolio.

At the end of both of these episodes, I'm struck by how important a network of support is for the helpers. In a cause area like youth mental health, teachers and counselors are the frontline helpers. But these people need more than admiration. They need a network of technology, funding, and innovation.

To get that, we need innovators like Closegap, and they need funders like Morgan Stanley. Together, these two organizations give teachers and counselors the tools to offer a helping hand to an incredibly vulnerable population.

As we explored in the first episode, the award Rachel and her team received went well beyond just the funds. Morgan Stanley provided a ton of support that was truly transformative.

I hope to see more funders like Morgan Stanley and the Alliance in the coming years.

The Innovation Awards from the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health aims to identify and fund transformative mental health care solutions for children and young adults across the US. The Alliance recently announced its third cohort of winners, which each received one hundred thousand dollars to scale their solutions.

This year, the Alliance also launched an education and capacity building program called the Leadership Learning Series, which will provide more than one hundred additional nonprofits access to expert led learning sessions and networking opportunities.

If you're interested in applying for next year's Innovation Awards, applications will open in spring twenty twenty four, and all registered five zero one(three) public charities based in the US are eligible to apply.

That's all from me today. Thank you for listening to Impact Audio, produced by your friends at Submittable.