Grantmakers and Mental Health

I attended my first Grantmakers in Health (GIH) meeting in 2000 shortly after joining the staff at The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati. GIH is a membership organization of funders from across the country. Being new to philanthropy, I was very excited to hear from other grantmakers about their experiences in making grants in mental health. Much to my surprise, there was not one mention of mental health in the whole three-day conference that year.

I decided this was not acceptable. Over the next few years, I made informal contacts with other grantmakers interested in mental health. We started submitting session ideas for each GIH meeting. Many of these sessions were accepted. Last year, our core group of mental health grantmakers formally launched a Behavioral Health Funders Network at the GIH annual meeting. At the meeting, we held a preconference session and had three sessions focused on mental health/behavioral health.

Over the past year, we have had over 50 foundations join our Network. At this year's annual meeting, from which I just returned, mental health again was represented at a preconference session (I talked about our social enterprise initiative) and three sessions. We also held a special meeting of the Behavioral Health Funders Network which was well attended; we had a special guest, Dr. Eric Broderick, Deputy Administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). We talked about how grantmakers and SAMHSA can collaborate together. In addition to the mental health sessions, mental health was frequently mentioned in other sessions including the plenary sessions.

GIH staff told the Behavioral Health Funders Network that we are the most active network in GIH. I expect our membership numbers to increase after this most recent meeting and we have webinars and other activities planned for 2010. I now have a strong network with other mental health grantmakers who see great opportunities to make significant impact in the field of mental health. We learn from one another and together we promote mental heath grantmaking across the country. We have come a long way since 2000.