Love letter to Philanthropy

To our past, current, and future philanthropic partners,

We love you, we thank you, and we need you now more than ever. The undersigned are past and present recipients of your philanthropic support, committed to working with you collectively to address the present and future challenges created by the current political and economic environments. 

Your investments have profoundly shaped the landscape of children’s and youth health. While new federal and state policies present many new challenges, there is universal agreement that behavioral health is an immediate crisis for America’s young people. Lurking behind that crisis is a shortage of professionals and support staff willing to work in under-invested communities and their schools.

For the last few years, our organizations and yours have worked together to improve the systems that support young people’s mental health, which is shaped by their environments, social determinants, policies, and systems they navigate daily. Thanks to our collective work, we have created an evidence base for and made meaningful strides toward improving lives and changing systems that support the behavioral health of youth in the United States. 

Thanks to your partnership, we have achieved meaningful wins that have improved lives and changed systems. 

This Is Our Moment

The current policy climate threatens our work and success. As federal and state policies shift dramatically, young people in crisis cannot wait for perfect solutions. The behavioral health crisis affecting our youth has reached unprecedented levels, and traditional approaches are insufficient to meet the scale of need.

This moment of uncertainty and upheaval is precisely when transformative change becomes possible—but only if we act together, quickly, and boldly.

Moving Beyond Competition to Collaboration

We must be honest about a dynamic that undermines and disincentivizes organizations working together: traditional funding structures inadvertently create competition when collaboration is what communities need most. When grants require organizations to position themselves as having “the solution,” or when foundations seek to be “the catalytic funder” of individual initiatives, we are forced into artificial competition rather than authentic partnership.

The truth we all know is that no single organization can address a crisis like this. The communities we serve need us working in concert, not in competition. Our solutions must be comprehensive, holistic, and realistic regarding the time it will take to achieve the desired results. For example, simply providing the resources to hire behavioral health professionals, without recognizing the workforce pipeline issues that exist in many communities (particularly rural ones) is short-sighted.  And failing to understand the timeframe it will take to achieve success is naive. Collectively, we do not have the luxury of failure. Our children and youth deserve our best efforts.

Everyone who has signed this letter is already committed to collaborative action. We are working together across organizational boundaries, sharing resources and expertise, and willing to play whatever role is needed—not only to address the immediate crisis, but to build the pipeline of leaders and community-based workforce that will enable better mental health, wellbeing, and dignity for all.

What We Need From You

We have strategies, proven partnerships, and readiness to move to impact policy change in our communities. We ask you to consider some critical investment principles:

• Multi-year general operating support that allows us to work collaboratively without the burden of competing for individual recognition or credit.
• Shared agenda setting in strategy development that includes those with lived experience and deep community knowledge, rather than strategies designed in isolation.
• Flexible funding for direct service, convening for collective impact, and strategy development that enables rapid response and adaptation as we learn what works in different communities.
• Investment in existing partnerships rather than creating parallel new programs that further fragment our efforts.
• Continuation of funding for existing projects where, though significant progress has been made, federal and state funding cuts threaten the sustainability of those investments you have already made.

This is not the time for hesitation. Young people are in crisis now. Systems are failing now. The opportunity for transformative change exists now.

We know that together, we can not only meet immediate needs, but also co-design the radical system changes required for lasting impact. We cannot do this without philanthropy’s participation. 

We are ready to share our collaborative strategies and discuss how your foundation can help with this collective effort. The infrastructure for partnership exists. The commitment to shared power and shared success is real. The need is urgent.

Let’s schedule time in the next 30 days to move from conversation to action.

The organizations represented in this letter are part of systems of care that collectively serve millions of young people annually across all states and have hundreds of years of combined experience in youth behavioral health, school-based healthcare, and public health.