Mental Health & Wellbeing continuously emerges as a top priority in our community, weaves the fabric of human experience, shapes our emotions, relationships and overall resilience. Mental Health & Wellbeing ultimately influences our collective strength and vitality of our communities.
We’re starting our Grant Round by understanding what Mental Health & Wellbeing means to our Bay Area community, day to day and in practice.
1 in 5 US adults experience mental illness each year and 1 in 6 youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year – yet <50% receive treatment. Mental illness has an impact on the individual, family, community, and world. The Bay Area, known for its vibrant culture, technological advancements, and thriving economy, struggles with its unique challenges to mental health and wellbeing. These challenges are a fast-paced lifestyle, intense work environment, and high cost of living. All these stressors can increase the risk of both substance use and mental illness.
In December 2023, SV2 will allocate $150,000 of unrestricted, three-year funding across two organizations ($75,000 each). SV2 will also offer the selected organizations beyond-the-dollars support as helpful and friendship! SV2 Donor Partners, Grantee Partners, and Prospective Donor Partners are warmly invited to participate in our Grant Round! This Grant Round is led by SV2 Partners Tara Maddala and Tanja Powers, and Amy Badiani, SV2 Director of Community Engagement.
We’ve launched an “Open Call” community nomination process. Do you want to nominate your organization? Do you know an inspiring Mental Health & Wellbeing nonprofit or fiscally sponsored organization in the Bay Area? By Friday September 1st, 2023: please nominate here for our funding and support: bit.ly/communitynominations.
While our scope is currently broad, we’re actively gathering insights about what mental health & wellbeing means in our Bay Area communities to advance a community-centric and grounded approach. We invite you to participate in our learning process. In addition to nominating organizations through the link above, here are some ways to get involved:
- Help us spread the word about our Grant Round | We’re trying out an “open call” community nomination process. This means we’re sharing this nomination form broadly and hope to reach changemakers outside of our direct (sometimes biased) networks. Feel free to share our nomination form with others who would like to nominate. Here are some posts you can edit and share along with the nomination form link. Please direct any questions to Amy Badiani, SV2 Director of Community Engagement, abadiani@sv2.org
- Join our Grant Round Informational Open House on Tuesday, August 15th 12:30-1:30PM on Zoom: RSVP here.
- Share names and contact info. for community changemakers you think we should chat with as part of our learning process | Share with abadiani@sv2.org. These would be individuals not affiliated with nominated organizations, just so we can keep things fair! You can just share names and email addresses with us, we can cross check whether or not we’re actively considering them for our grant. We’d love to learn more about their experience and insights as it relates to mental health & wellbeing in the Bay Area, and also ask for their org nominations.
- Share any resources you resonate with – e.g. articles, publications, etc. | Share with abadiani@sv2.org. We’ll upload these to our intranet so they are accessible to all who participate in our Grant Round.
- SV2 Partners, Teens, and current Grantee Partners:
- Participate in our Community Engagement and Research Team | This includes chatting with 1-2 community stakeholders, researching ~5-7 organizations that are nominated in more detail, participating in our shortlisting process in which we’ll select five finalize organizations to invite to our Grant Round, and participating in our grant decision making process. This will all happen between August – December 2023. Contact abadiani@sv2.org by Tuesday August 15th if you’re interested!
We’re looking forward to an insightful and impactful experience together!