Introduction to the Goodness Web and Its Youth Mental Health Collaborative Fund in the US

With Celine Coggins from The Goodness Web

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: Thank you so much for joining us. Please, could you tell me about the Goodness Web and perhaps tell me a little bit about the ambition of the Goodness Web?

Celine Coggins: Yes, absolutely. Thanks for asking, Jules. So the Goodness Web is a collective philanthropic fund focused on youth mental health entirely. We don't work on any other issues. We have a group of founders who have known each other for more than 30 years who came together with a pretty basic theory of change.

Number one, this is the issue of our time. Number two, this is an addressable issue where really great work is happening, but it needs to be scaled. And then number three, that there are many, many families who have the capacity to give who we want to draw off the sidelines, into giving together. Making big bets on great organizations.

And so, we have about 150 donors giving between five figures and seven figures, to this collective fund. We give away about $4 million a year right now, and we hope to grow that. And our ambition is to really transform the youth mental health landscape in the United States. We focus on three issue areas. One is prevention and early intervention really meeting kids where they are.

Two is policy and advocacy. And three is expanding the workforce. So, we are working to make big progress on all of those with a group of really fantastic grantees. And our average grant size is about $1 million.

CMHI: So that's an incredible overview. Thank you so much for that. Perhaps if you could just tell us a little bit more about what you're able to achieve by working collaboratively in this way, and perhaps even give an example of something that you're able to achieve through this web effect. That would be really difficult for donors to do individually.

Celine Coggins: Yes. Oh, absolutely. So number one, we do a lot with donor engagement. So we know that people who care about this issue, come to it first with their hearts. Most of us who are in this space have lived experience with, mental health concerns, in our families.

And so we know that that can be a really isolating experience. What we often do is bring together our donors, in salons, in cities around the US as well as we just did our first major national retreat. So we had donors from 13 states around the country, come together with us in Boston, there are about 60 of us total.

And we learn together. So that's a really important part. We learn from our grantees and other experts in the field, and we create a space where people can talk about why they're here, why they care about kind of helping to accelerate progress on this issue. And we think that that's a really, really important thing for many of our donors.

And then on the grantmaking side, we see just tremendous amounts of progress with our grantees. So we fund an organization called the Jed Foundation. The Jed Foundation works on college campuses and on high school campuses to reduce incidences of suicidality, depression, anxiety, and they have been they just did a study of their first ten years on hundreds of college campuses and saw just really profound reductions in all of those things.

And so we know that it's possible. We do it by, making big bets because we believe that these organizations need to be well resourced. And they can't be. The average size of a of a grant in the US is $27,000. I've been a nonprofit CEO for dozens of years. And what you have to do is hire lots of development people instead of direct service providers to work with kids.

And so we feel so excited about being able to pool those dollars together and say to, great leaders, just go do the work. Just go work directly with kids and make those changes happen. Rather than running around and collecting, you know, $27,000 at a time. So for us, that's just a really, really important part of the way we do our work listening to you.

CMHI: It makes so much sense to be able to work collaboratively in order to be able to have those bigger impacts, and also to be able to take risk collectively by pooling our knowledge and our networks, etc. to be able to do that in a really sensible yet ambitious way than you can do individually. And yet there aren't that many collaborations doing what you're doing.

And so realistically, we know that it's not always easy. So bring us down to ground. What are the challenges that you faced? But importantly, how have you been able to overcome them to have the success that you have? Building the Goodness Web actually really very quickly?

Celine Coggins: Well, there are lots of collaborative fund mechanisms, but oftentimes what you see is those types of outfits, we'll say we're going to work on the environment, and we're going to pull together everyone who wants to put in some money for the environment, we're going to do one big fund on the environment.

Next, we're going to move on to mental health, and we're going to do that. And so that makes it easy for someone to drop in and, you know, and do a little bit with an organization. Then they move on to a new topic. We are exclusively and kind of forever focused on mental health. And so, you know, so my job is to find people who really care about this issue, who want to stick together over the long haul.

And that is, that's a challenge, obviously. You know, you need to build that coalition of the willing. You need to expand that coalition of the willing. We know there are just incredible grantees. The last call I was on was our team talking about our pipeline and talking about all the organizations we really, really want to fund who are doing great work in the youth mental health space.

And, you know, it's my job to say, you know, how do I go talk about those to people? And how do I keep the donors that we have, involved in our work? So one is just that this is our one issue, and, and we don't have other ways to engage people. I think that some organizations do, so that's a fundamental one, I guess.

CMHI: And actually, it's a really interesting point, you saying about the keeping donors engaged, because I think that is, again, what's really special about working collaboratively is that it should be, just an incredible experience to be part of a family that can you just say just a little bit about your donor engagement? Because I think that is something very special, about the way that the Goodness Web works.

Celine Coggins: Yes. And I founded and ran two prior organizations that were, also about kind of building a community where people feel like they're a part of something larger than themselves. So to me, that's a really, really important part of philanthropy is, you know, no one is going to solve big, intractable systemic problems on their own. And so finding that community of people where you, one, can just have that core connection to an issue that really matters in your personal life. Two, learn together so that you become better and better and better at figuring out how do we solve these problems?

Why are they, you know, so hard to make progress on who is doing the best work? And then, you know, and then bring some joy to it. You know, we I love to be able to bring our donors into our room, and, and we do this on a regular basis. And, bring our grantees in to talk about some of the work that they're doing in youth serving organizations.

Some of the things that they're seeing, those sparks and moments that are, you know, what we all kind of live for. And so, so for us, it's really important to do a lot of that in person. And then second, we do as much as we can online. So we do fairly regular, you know, conversations with our grantees.

I interview them. And just as a video, it's podcast-ish, but it's not a formal podcast. So anything that we can do to really kind of build those kind of through lines of connection and understanding are really important to us. And we think that, like, ultimately we're building the club that people who care about this issue want to join.

CMHI: Last question. What is next for the goodness Web? What's your ambition perhaps over the next few years? And for anybody listening to this who's excited and who really wants to get involved, how do new funders get involved with the Goodness Web?

Celine Coggins: Yeah. So we welcome anyone at any level of giving, for us, we really believe that there needs to be a galvanizing force in this space of mental health, specifically for us, youth mental health. That brings lots of donors together. So the model that's in our mind as our North Star is, something like the American Cancer Society. So the American Cancer Society started 100 years ago. At the time, cancer was stigmatized. No one talked about having cancer because there was a stigma around that. And then there was no money going into research, into doing the things that it would take to make progress on the issue.

And so we see ourselves as moving in that direction, becoming the galvanizing force in the United States on this issue of mental health, specifically youth mental health, bringing lots and lots of families together in many different ways. So it might be the ways we're doing it now with in-person events. It also might be doing things that are, engage young people themselves, that, you know, maybe will do things to bring lots of people together, like a fun run or event like that.

So there are lots of big things in our future that both involve, drawing lots of funds off the sidelines, giving them to the best grantees in the space who have the capacity to scale and touch lots and lots of young people, and then also building that community that creates space for everyone, regardless of your level of giving.

CMHI: Celine, thank you so, so much for your time. Really appreciate it.