For Anna Kydd, director of The SHM Foundation, progress in youth mental health starts with investing in community-led innovation. Through its flagship program, Ember Mental Health, the foundation supports local initiatives across the globe that are tackling mental health challenges in creative, culturally grounded ways. Kydd rejects the “silver bullet” mentality common in global health funding, arguing that meaningful change depends on nurturing many small-scale solutions rather than scaling a few top-down models.

Her team responds by:

• Providing unrestricted, flexible funding so organizations can adapt to changing community needs.
• Offering one-on-one mentoring and tailored support from SHM’s interdisciplinary staff, including researchers, designers, and social enterprise experts.
• Prioritizing the wellbeing of leaders through a dedicated Wellbeing Fund, launched during COVID to help prevent burnout and sustain frontline mental health workers.
• Creating connections between grassroots initiatives to strengthen what Kydd calls the “ecosystem” or “connective tissue” that allows community innovations to grow together.

Partners supported by Ember have stabilized and expanded, from an art therapy project with incarcerated youth in Madagascar to youth-led theater initiatives in Kenya and Mozambique. The Wellbeing Fund has also proven transformative, with some recipients using it for therapy, team retreats, or creative outlets that improved morale and resilience.

Kydd’s reflections point to a shift in mindset: community work is not a “nice-to-have” but an essential driver of mental health progress. She believes funders must embrace trust-based philanthropy, reduce restrictions, and measure impact in ways that make sense to communities themselves. For Kydd, the real opportunity lies in supporting the diversity of voices and methods that already exist—and in ensuring they have the space and resources to flourish.

Zuzana Figerova, head of development and philanthropy at The SHM Foundation and the Ember Mental Health Fund, oversees programs in global and youth mental health with a focus on participatory, community-led approaches. The organization began its youth mental health work in South Africa in 2014, co-designing psychosocial support programs with adolescents affected by HIV. Over time, this expanded to include education and employment support in South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, addressing the combined effects of health, economic hardship, and stigma.

Figerova explains that the foundation’s approach is intentionally small-scale and personalized. Each adolescent receives detailed and holistic support, and programs emphasize community, belonging, and shared leadership. She notes that young people “don’t always want to be the strong ones,” and that real change comes from creating nurturing spaces rather than focusing solely on resilience.

The SHM Foundation’s work includes:

• Running long-term psychosocial and educational programs for youth affected by HIV.
• Funding over 50 grassroots organizations through the Ember Fund since 2018.
• Supporting local, youth-led initiatives in Africa, Asia, and South America that use creative and context-specific methods such as mountain biking, poetry, or art to promote mental health and collective healing.
• Providing in-kind support and mentorship alongside funding to strengthen organizations’ storytelling, fundraising, and monitoring capacity.

The impact is reflected in the growth of these grassroots organizations, many of which have moved from small budgets to financial stability and greater reach. Hundreds of adolescents in SHM’s own programs have completed university or secured jobs while maintaining good health and sense of purpose.

Figerova acknowledges continuing challenges, including limited funding for global mental health and exhaustion among grassroots leaders. The foundation’s focus remains on listening, collaborating, and sustaining a “collective approach to addressing the current challenges.”

At the SHM Foundation, June Larrieta leads impact work across the organization's programs, with most of her time focused on Ember Mental Health. Her role has two layers: leading the foundation's own impact work, and supporting partner organizations to do impact work themselves in ways that fit their values and resources. Through close collaboration with grassroots partners, Larrieta has come to see the limits of conventional measurement — arguing that the field has been "stuck in thinking of impact as a reduction in symptoms" from a biomedical approach, when the metrics that matter to community-based organizations are often far broader.

Ember's approach to supporting partners includes:

• Providing a mentorship program alongside funding, connecting innovators to resources and expertise outside the Ember team and to one another, including across cohorts.
• Offering a Wellbeing Fund with dedicated one-on-one support from a head of wellbeing, covering everything from team gatherings and games for shared spaces to therapy, coaching for founders, and retreat support.
• Working with partners to capture and communicate impact in ways meaningful to them — including Photovoice projects, case stories, animated films, and photography — rather than defaulting to quantitative metrics alone.
• Conducting financial check-ins and narrative reporting to maintain accountability within a flexible, trust-based funding model.
• Interviewing over 900 organizations during their most recent call-out, using the process both for selection and to amplify grassroots voices and inform the wider mental health ecosystem.

The results of Ember's wellbeing focus are visible in concrete organizational changes. At one partner organization in Argentina, ACUFA, a psychologist brought on through the wellbeing fund created therapeutic spaces for family members — a practice the organization later integrated into its core budget. At another organization, regular check-in spaces facilitated through wellbeing support allowed younger staff to take on more responsibilities, relieving pressure on the founder. Larrieta also points to the value of connection: bringing together innovators who have worked with Ember for years, as happened at the Global Mental Health Summit in Cape Town, generates what she describes as an energy where "that impact multiplies."

Larrieta acknowledges that communicating the value of community-led work to funders remains an ongoing challenge, particularly around impact measurement and risk. She notes that some funders still don't engage with grassroots organizations simply because they don't know who is working in particular geographies. Her response is to push for a broader definition of what counts as meaningful impact: "There's a lot of focus on reach. For me, that's not necessarily meaningful if we don't know the stories behind those numbers."

For Rini Sinha, head of strategy and creative at Ember Mental Health, supporting community-based organizations means going beyond funding. When Ember's most recent open call received over 1,800 applications — up from 300 in 2021 — it demonstrated that innovation exists at the grassroots level. For the organizations Ember partners with, Sinha explains, funding alone is not enough: they also need time to strengthen team capacities and build trust within new communities.

Her team responds to this by:

• Building relationships with partner organizations through a year-long capacity strengthening program before the investment phase begins.
• Providing flexible funding alongside support for setting up systems to manage funds effectively, and ensuring organizations include team costs and emergency budget lines.
• Introducing tiered awards including Ember Spark Awards, Ember Creative Awards, and Storytelling and Impact Fellowships to reach organizations at different levels of need.
• Running a Caring for the Carers Grant and a Wellbeing Fund, supported by a head of wellbeing who holds one-on-one conversations with each partner organization to understand their specific needs.
• Creating spaces for organizations to connect and showcase their work, including the Sparks Meet-Up and arts-focused webinars in partnership with Alliance Magazine.

Through this expanded model, Ember now supports more than 90 organizations, compared to an original plan of 12 to 15. The Wellbeing Fund has prompted a mindset shift among partner organizations, many of whom had not previously considered their own wellbeing — with Sinha noting it is often "the first time someone has asked them that question." Peer connections made through Ember's convenings have led to new collaborations between organizations that had felt isolated in their work.

Sinha acknowledges that defining scale in mental health remains an ongoing challenge, shaped by assumptions she says are "coming from tech." Measuring impact across diverse cultural contexts is equally difficult, with indicators often borrowed from other fields and not always suited to mental health's longer timelines. She also points to lack of trust and lack of knowledge as barriers to channeling resources toward locally led initiatives — "that's not on anyone," she notes, but reflects a prevailing narrative that grassroots solutions are unavailable.