There has been a blizzard of coverage of the U.S. mental health crisis over the last several years, but the precise causes — and effective solutions — to our collective deterioration are harder to identify. That’s why, when the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation decided to address mental health and wellbeing as a core funding area, it started with a wide-lens approach. The team wanted to understand the contours of the issue they were taking on, and began two years ago with a learning grants approach: working to understand the issues while supporting organizations on the front lines.
“Many times, foundations, when they’re developing a strategy, stop the grantmaking and take a period for that strategy development,” said Beth Brown, managing director for mental health and wellbeing at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation (AMBFF). “But the way we’ve approached mental health over the past couple of years, we’ve been making a series of learning grants. So rather than developing a strategy and then investing, we’ve been investing in learning.”
The urgency of the crisis drove the foundation’s approach. “It was an area the board and the chairman realized we needed to start to invest in pretty quickly, and not wait until we’d developed a strategy,” Brown said.
Arthur M. Blank, the billionaire cofounder of Home Depot, chairs the board at the foundation. The board also includes four of Blank’s adult children, along with foundation president and director Fay Twersky. This truly is a family foundation, as Ade Adenji underscored in his recent profile for IP. “Arthur Blank, now 81 and worth $8.5 billion, is increasingly looking to the next generations of his family to help shape their philanthropy going forward,” Adenji wrote.
Last year, the foundation celebrated $1 billion in giving and it has no intention of slowing down, as an announcement at the time made clear: “As the Blank Family Foundation surpasses the $1 billion mark in giving, it is preparing to accelerate its philanthropy over the next decade.”
Along with mental health and wellbeing, the foundation’s other priority areas include democracy, environment, youth development and Atlanta’s Westside, as well as Founder Initiatives. The foundation’s geographic footprint includes Georgia (specifically Atlanta, where the foundation is located and where the first Home Depot stores opened), and Montana (where the family owns four ranches), but it works in other regions as well. Some recent grantees include a new children’s hospital in Atlanta, the Center for Stuttering Education and Research at the University of Texas, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and the Atlanta Humane Society.
In the area of mental health, the foundation is also covering a lot of ground. “We’ve taken this time and made almost $20 million worth of grants,” Brown said. “We’ve been looking at the breadth of possibilities in terms of where philanthropy in general — and our foundation specifically — can be impactful in the area of mental health.”
Educating the public and reducing stigma
In its plunge into that “breadth of possibilities,” the Blank Foundation is working with a wide range of organizations addressing mental health. It supports, for instance, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a group of more than 600 local organizations that provide support for those with mental illness, educate the public and reduce stigma.
The Carter Center, the nonprofit started by former first couple Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, is another grantee. The center is known for its international work, but mental health has long been a commitment area as well. “Mrs. Carter was a champion of mental health, beginning 50 years ago when she was first lady of Georgia, and was outspoken about it at the time,” Brown said. Earlier this year, the foundation funded a Carter Center campaign to raise awareness in underserved communities about their legal right to insurance coverage for mental health and substance use treatment and care.
Workplace mental health is another foundation concern. It has invested in the organization One Mind at Work, which supports employee mental health. One Mind at Work typically consults with large corporations; AMBFF supports its focus on developing tools for nonprofits, which often lack the human resources infrastructure to deal with employee mental health issues.
Mindful philanthropy
A number of funders have stepped up to support young peoples’ mental health in the last several years. AMBFF joined two leaders in this area, Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange, in funding The Goodness Web, a new organization that aims to boost funding for youth mental health.
Some funders that support youth mental health are also zeroing in specifically on the impact of technology, including AMBFF. The foundation is a Hopelab funding partner. Hopelab, which is part of The Omidyar Group of organizations started by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, describes itself as a “social innovation lab and impact investor at the intersection of tech and youth mental health alongside entrepreneurs, funders, researchers and young change-makers to create systems change and build a thriving future for underserved young people.”
AMBFF is also a contributor to the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, a pooled fund led and fiscally sponsored by Hopelab. The fund supports youth and intergenerationally led nonprofits in the responsible technology movement. Along with the Omidyar Network, other 2024 funders include Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange (which have also teamed up to support the new Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard, and a competition to promote new approaches to youth digital health) as well as the Enlight Foundation, the Oak Foundation and others.
Beth Brown has seen growing philanthropic interest in youth mental health, and growing collaboration, as well. When AMBFF contributed to the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, for example, other funders were eager to sign up, too. “Our grant to the pooled fund was for $300,000, and our hope was that our funds would be matched and we’d have a pool of at least $600,000,” she said. “But the fund reached $2 million in about six months, and we had to stop the gifts coming in so that grants could be made.”
AMBFF has also helped promote collaboration among youth mental health funders in its home state, where it contributed $1 million to the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta’s Georgia Youth Mental Health Funder Collaborative last year.
For Brown, this kind of funder collaboration is essential, which is one reason the foundation is supporting Mindful Philanthropy. That organization was created in 2020 to raise philanthropic awareness of — and funding for — issues related to mental health. Last year, Mindful Philanthropy challenged philanthropy to do more to address the nation’s mental health crisis.
“It is so important to have a group like Mindful Philanthropy that can help develop strategy and encourage collaboration,” Brown said. “I think that will help us be stronger together as a mental health philanthropy field.”
From stability to flourishing
After this period of exploration, AMBFF is taking stock of what it has learned. Brown expects that by the first quarter of next year, the foundation will have finalized its mental health strategy going forward.
“We’re mining our learning right now — all we’ve learned from the grants we’ve made,” Brown said. “Then we’re going to be working with the Blank family to determine where we want to lean in, in some depth, over the next decade. We’re going to change from this breadth approach to one of depth.”
The ambition for Brown extends beyond helping people achieve a measure of equilibrium. “Part of the mental health conversation that I don’t think is always present is the fact that it’s not our dream for people just to be stable, to be out of a mental health crisis,” she said. “We’re also looking at the ways that philanthropy can play a role in moving people from a place of stability to flourishing.”
