We’ve been covering mental health philanthropy closely over the last five years, tracking what appears to be both a growing societal recognition of the huge and unmet scope of these needs and a growing willingness to address them. Part of this shift can be attributed to the COVID pandemic bringing mental health home to virtually everyone and opening the conversation more publicly. People started to read about celebrity athletes who sit out important competitions to protect their own mental health, for example, something you wouldn’t have seen just a few years ago.
But far larger issues are also drawing needed attention, like the dysfunctional criminalization of mental health issues, the alarming number of children and college students whose struggles with serious mental illness too often lead to suicide, and other burdens that drag down the ability to work and thrive for millions.
Fountain House, a national mental health nonprofit that’s been operating since 1948, named noted policymaker and civil rights attorney Ken Zimmerman as its new chief executive officer. Zimmerman is well-known throughout mental health policy circles through the positions he held in the Obama and Clinton administrations. He is also founder and co-director of the Mental Health Strategic Impact Initiative think tank, which addresses interconnected matters of mental health, criminal justice, education and employment. And he’s known further throughout philanthropy for his time as director of U.S. programs at Open Society Foundations.
Zimmerman is also a contributor to Inside Philanthropy, and has written with great clarity about the need for philanthropy to prioritize mental health and about hopeful signs that such increased funding and focus may be taking shape. Zimmerman’s insights draw upon his own tragic personal experience, the loss of a child to mental illness, and his articles are required reading for anyone in this area of philanthropy and policy.
Zimmerman’s an informed and important voice in mental health policy and philanthropy, and he steps into the leadership role at Fountain House at a time when increasing resources, public and private, are being directed to mental health work. His appointment comes in a year that saw significant new funding for Fountain House from several givers, including $12 million from MacKenzie Scott, $750,000 from the Ford Foundation, and sizeable grants from Trinity Church Wall Street Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, among others.
“This is a transformational moment in mental health,” Zimmerman said. “Federal investment is increasing, new innovations are emerging, and people at a large scale are grappling with what’s needed, including in areas like criminal justice and education. The idea that transformation is both possible and needed is taking hold.”
Fountain House pioneered the clubhouse model of community mental healthcare in which people who are themselves living with serious mental health conditions take the lead in efforts to support and empower others with such conditions to thrive. This voluntary, peer-led model not only proved effective in New York but has scaled well nationally and internationally — having been replicated more than 300 times in 40 states and to 30 countries around the world.
Ford Foundation President Darren Walker says his organization’s new funding to Fountain House, along with the appointment of Zimmerman to the leadership role, is a sign that philanthropy more broadly is moving to take on issues of disability rights and justice. “Part of what philanthropy can do is to fund efforts to destigmatize mental health issues and normalize the reality that this is a part of the lives of millions of people,” he said. “Ken will bring a terrific perspective, having been a donor and through his own lived experience.”
New and significant levels of federal and sometimes state investments in mental health are making billions available to communities, with growing interest among philanthropic institutions and individuals to support the nonprofits and intermediary organizations that are working along the avenues where mental health plays a role, including homelessness and housing, mass incarceration and jail diversion, healthy schools, and crisis response.
For the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, whose mission includes equity and inclusivity, criminal justice and mass incarceration issues, support for Fountain House and mental health is now being recognized as central to their goals. “We’re not generally a public health funder, but there’s so much overlap with public health and the criminal justice system... that it’s a critically important issue,” said Nancy Fishman, senior director of criminal justice grantmaking for the Schusterman organization.
Statistics show that prisons and jails hold disproportionate numbers of people with mental illness, despite data showing that people with such conditions are no more likely to commit crimes than the general population. “But other problems put people with mental illness in contact with police and the legal system, particularly in Black and brown communities,” said Fishman. “This has led to a vast criminalization of people with mental illness.”
The growing problem of homelessness, specifically among formerly incarcerated people, is another area connected to mental illness, said Neill Coleman, executive director of Trinity Church Wall Street Philanthropies, another funder that has committed new support to Fountain House. “We work with homeless populations and former incarcerated populations, where mental health is up there as a real and important need,” said Coleman. “So we’re focusing on the intersection of those two systems, the people cycling between them, and trying to break that cycle and divert people out of the criminal justice system.”
The big question is whether the recent signs of increasing funding and focus on mental health will not only continue, but grow — and support more work on the ground in communities and at the state and federal policy levels.
“Fountain House is poised to have broader influence by showing what is possible when one centers those with lived experience and working with many others to build a movement,” Zimmerman said. “My goal is to ensure that the power of Fountain House and the other community-based efforts it inspired is distilled and translated into policy and practice.”