Why Funder Collaboration Is So Important

With Xin Liu from Enlight Foundation

TRANSCRIPT

Xin Liu: Wellbeing, being a global challenging issue and yet there's no universal solutions. So the Funders are hesitating and the field is really severely under-invested. But the risks for our young people are increasing due to internal and external challenges. And the bigger the issue, the more collaborations are required, because nobody can solve this alone. And we're only at the beginning of this journey.

And similar things happened to climate Funders 20 years ago. And look at how far they've come in that space through collaboration. So far, raising in youth mental wellbeing space has been very, very hard. To my surprise, because in the beginning I thought we all have children. Most of the funders care about education and will naturally attract so many Funders.

But it has taken so many conversations to invite and bring in new funders. But we're all working together at it, though. The silver lining is young people today. Talk more about their challenges of finding and finding solutions. And there are many reasons for us to hope and to really support young people to make it happen for them. So we're also seeing more funders, collaboratives.

Aside from a youth mental wellbeing collab. We also kickstarted a new Funders Collaborative for journalism reporting on youth mental wellbeing. We have $4.7 billion in California allocated to this issue, and our journalists need to follow how to fund is being used and how it is working to inform the public and also to hold the government accountable. So at Enlight Foundation, we have decided that we will start new initiatives with other funders to learn, co-design and leverage our investments for the most impact.

Funders collaboratives are truly low hanging fruit and a great way to get started. We created all these pooled funds with the intention to lower the entry barrier for the new funders.