Place-Based Philanthropic Collaboration in the US
With Alyson Niemann from Mindful Philanthropy
ABOUT
Mindful Philanthropy catalyzes impactful funding for mental health, addiction, and well-being, partnering with funders to align bold investments with evidence-based solutions. Their four-part Mental Health at the Center series offers funders a roadmap to guide priorities, track trends and measure success. Through the Bridging States, Building Systems action network, Mindful Philanthropy convenes collaborative leaders to scale place-based models. Join Mindful Connect to explore their collaborative guidebook and connect with 200+ peer funders.
TRANSCRIPT
CMHI: Tell us more about, particularly place-based philanthropy. And tell us a little bit about how it came about, but also why it is so effective when it comes to mental health.
Alyson Niemann: Yeah. You know, early in Mindful’s work, we started to see that as we were making the case for why mental health was important, that many funders were doing place-based work.
In fact, it was very hyperlocal and we weren’t engaging with funders that were national funders. So at this point [as of 2025] Mindful has a network of approximately 1100 funders that we engage with. And we found that the bulk of those, the majority of those funders were really focused on a few zip codes or at the state level. And in fact, as funders got more and more involved in mental health, they realized that if they wanted to do work at the zip code level or the city level, that they actually had to work at the state level on policy and collaboration and advocacy efforts in order to see outcomes improve in their communities.
So in 2021, we first started working with a group of funders in Montana. I remember it was in September of 2021 and we brought together about 25 to 30 funders, and we were walking across the parking lot, and most of the funders had never funded mental health before. They were focused on housing. They were focused on rural health.
They were focused on education and youth, and they saw that outcomes in those areas were declining. And there was a funder in the midst of them, a funder from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation who knew and who saw that if we were to focus on mental health in that area, in the state of Montana, that we would actually see those outcomes improve.
So, in partnership with her, we brought together funders who said, I really don't know why I'm here. I was invited. You know, I don't focus on mental health, but I, I'm excited to learn. And so we brought them together. We started educating funders on what it meant to fund mental health at the intersection of other issue areas.
And over time, that work progressed. In fact, over a year and a half, we had a few different convenings in Montana with these funders. More and more of them started to fund at the state level, and integrate mental health into their initiatives. We also were guiding that group of funders. We provided a statewide landscape analysis, a statewide strategy for going after youth well-being in the state.
And we provided a slate of grant recommendations. The group of about 25 to 30 funders. Ultimately, we started breaking up into working groups that would work on different issues, such as narrative change and policy. And through a very small investment in some of the policy efforts, we were able to partner with another organization that brought in some lobbying and over just honestly, it was like four months with a very small investment and the collaborative effort of calling senators, calling legislators that the relationships, the investment of a small grant, led to the formation of a public trust of $300 million.
And so I think that is the that is honestly the strategic, the strategic lever of collaboratives is that especially place-based collaboratives where the relationships are rich. You can bring people together and the sum is more than its parts. And that's what we saw in Montana in those early days, was that the small investment, the relationships produced the statewide trust around youth mental health that's now in its implementation phase a few years later.
CMHI: That's amazing. And I love the description of it as a strategic lever. Tell me a little bit more about how one place-based collaborative has now inspired other place-based collaboratives and how those groups then work together.
Alyson Niemann: Yeah. So following our work in 2021, in Montana, we you know, we had been very deep into this work in Montana, but we started to see that there were efforts across the United States that were there were forming other place-based efforts in Washington and in Georgia.
And Mindful started to support those efforts. So rather than being deep in the work as we were in Montana, we started to zoom out a little bit and support the efforts. And working with those in Colorado and Georgia. And we became more of the connective tissue. And that was when we all of these efforts, led to right now the formation of about ten place-based efforts or state collaboratives focusing on mental health, addiction and well-being across the United States.
And by learning from those early days in Colorado, Georgia, and just supporting them with the guidance documents that Mindful was putting out. You know, one of the things that we were hearing from funders at that time as a barrier to funding mental health was that, we don't know what the priorities should be for mental health.
We don't know who else is funding this work. And so by Mindful releasing guidance into the field through our Mental Health at the Center, work and other guidance efforts, it started to set forth kind of a national strategy, if you will, for place-based efforts and other funders. And in addition, we were inviting these funders to many of our convenings that were taking place across the across the country where they were, and they were meeting experts, that would inform their work whether it was on, reimbursement rates changing the workforce ladder, thinking about ways that they could collaborate with one another.
And so from 2022 to 2024, we were kind of just supporting these efforts and really an organic way and learning the best way that we could take national strategy that we were releasing and support the place-based efforts. In 2024, we launched something called the Mental Health at the Center Road Show, and this is where we took our guidance and the things that we were learning from the field, from the barriers to funding, to the case for investment in mental health, the roadmap that we had released and we took it on the road, to about seven states where we were bringing together funders that we know of, that were part of Mindful’s network and putting them all in a room.
And sometimes these were funders that had been meeting, and we were bringing other funders to that format and plugging them in to the collaborative, and other places they were saying we know of each other, but the only time we're in a room is when Mindful Philanthropy gathers funders in our state. And so we started to see that Mindful had a unique role to play with these Place-based collaboratives, that we could connect them to experts, we could connect them to a broader national strategy that was taking place that we were helping to guide the entire field. But we could also connect them to one another.
So other place-based funders, that didn't know what was going on in their state and weren't connected to other funders that Mindful had a unique role to play in connecting them into the work that was happening in their state. After the roadshow, we did a lot of learning. We had we had done survey work in each one of the road shows, during the day long workshop, and we found that there were specific interests, we had set forth five priority areas, that we were focused on as a field. So the youth and their support systems, community workforce, implementing what works, and crisis.
And we found that there were there were certain issue areas that funders were excited about working on together and collaborating around. And so this led to the idea that Mindful really could serve as this national connective tissue to these play space collaboratives where they were already in place and help serve to be a catalyst for other place-based collaboratives that were looking to launch.
We knew how to launch them. We had done it in 2021. We had been supporting the efforts. And so we brought in someone who had led the effort in Colorado that actually passed almost 60 pieces of mental health legislation, and she joined Mindful’s team to lead a national strategy around place-based collaboratives. So now we're on a we're on a mission to help, launch about 40 play space collaboratives over the next few years.
That work has already started with interviews and connecting them, hosting them at convenings, quarterly convenings, through digital means, but also in person. So we're launching the first in-person meeting, those leaders of collaboratives in the fall. And this effort is, is really to increase the scale of what's working, and help these funders learn from one another.
For example, Georgia has done innovative work around reimbursement rates and data collection. Colorado has had some huge wins, as I mentioned, with passing legislation. Workforce is a huge topic that has been worked on in Washington. And yet the leaders do not know each other, they don't know the wins. And also, we know that collaborative work is incredibly challenging.
It takes a lot of work to align and create priorities within these play space efforts, and to understand what's in and what's out. You know, some organizations, some foundations can't work on policy or maybe they don't from a values perspective. And so being able to think about what's the governance structure, how are we going to function, what are what are the outcomes that we're seeking together.
That takes a lot of work. But in the end we know that if we are together, we can actually go further and that we can reach scale in terms of the impact that we're seeking to have, especially as these funders are not only aligning funding in these collaborative efforts, but it serves also to align funding within their individual efforts as well.