Mental Health Grantmaking

In the paper “What Do We Really Know About Foundations' Funding of Mental Health?” Ruth Tebbets Rousseau and Andrew D. Hyman present findings from their brief scan of quantitative data from the Foundation Center and qualitative information from foundation leaders. The authors note that grantmaking for mental health continues to decline as a proportion of health funding through 2006, with the top ten grantmakers in this area providing nearly 50% of grant dollars.

How can the mental health community and funders address this decline in giving, and identify areas to focus on? As mentioned in our last blog post, the nonprofit sector is gravitating toward integrated systems to assess nonprofit impact at the field level, and these approaches may help discover successful mental health programs and priority areas where more funding can be directed to.

In addition, Brousseau and Hyman note that since mental health is often an aspect of broader program areas, tracking and analyzing grant data is challenging and requires more information and analysis. As the mental health community further explores giving in the field, the authors suggest key questions to consider:

“How is mental health defined?”

“How are grants for mental health counted?”

“How do foundations make decisions about funding mental health, and what are the strategies underlying their approaches to the field?”

You can read more about Brousseau and Hyman’s findings in their GrantWatch essay in the July-August 2009 issue of Health Affairs (p. 1210-1214).

For other readings related to health funding, view our topical resource list.