Funding Healing: Why Philanthropy Should Center Mental Health and Wellness
📷 credit: Kyle Smith on Unsplash
Healing and wellness work must be understood and invested in as urgent systemic resilience work, especially for communities on the frontlines of change. The key is to act without reinforcing narratives of individual failure or obscuring structural harm. Healing and wellness work must be understood as systemic resilience work and a way to ensure movements can sustain their people for the long haul.
This crisis isn't about individual weakness or poor time management. It's about systemic under-investment in the people powering social change. When you frame wellness as "self-care," you're asking burned-out organizers to solve structural problems with personal solutions.
A team from Ktisis recently shared some high-level research with a client, offering context and specific recommendations for the field. We know many people and institutions are thinking about how to support grantees at this moment, and we hope sharing these thoughts may help with the next steps.
Seventy percent of Americans say financial anxiety is impacting their mental and physical well-being. Additionally, In a 2024 poll, 43% of adults reported feeling more anxious than the year before. This isn’t just a blip – it’s a steady climb from 32% in 2022. For Latinx/Hispanic, Native, and immigrant communities, these burdens are compounded by systemic barriers to care and the constant stress of discrimination, deportation fears, and economic instability.
Within the nonprofit sector – often the first line of response – the crisis is even more acute. Nonprofit staff experience burnout at nearly twice the rate of other sectors, with leaders warning of morale collapse and unsustainable turnover. In a recent Center for Effective Philanthropy report, nearly 90% of nonprofit leaders expressed concern about their own burnout and a similar percentage indicated burnout is impacting their staff.
From the CEP report, one nonprofit leader captures the reality, “A big challenge is not having enough time for staff and board members to reflect, assess, plan, dream, and celebrate victories. This constant daily grind and inability to come up for air and contribute to the organization’s vision and mission creates burnout and a revolving-door environment.”
Leaders in philanthropy are also experiencing the stress of striving toward a future that feels less and less attainable. In recent interviews conducted for a client, one foundation leader shared, "We are just at the tail end of a period of really immense exhaustion…just across the board. And it's not even just about capacity. It's emotional. People are tired."
The Philanthropic Imperative
For funders committed to racial equity and community well-being, this moment calls for more than sympathy and introspection on our own stress. It calls for sustained investment in healing and wellness as a core part of organizational capacity and movement infrastructure – not an afterthought or “nice to have.”
We also don’t need to wait for perfect research or pilot programs. Philanthropy can draw on an emerging ecosystem of models that already exist and are delivering results:
Rapid-response funds, such as the Solidaire Movement’s Protection Fund and the Proteus Fund’s Grantee Safety & Security Fund, are already resourcing the safety of frontline organizers, including mental health services.
Dedicated wellness programs, such as the Healing Trust’s Culture and Care Fund, the Durfee Foundation’s sabbatical program, and the Kataly Foundation’s Mindfulness and Healing Justice portfolio, offer examples of embedding wellness into long-term capacity building.
Culturally-grounded care initiatives, like the Healing Clinic Collective, Leadership Reimagined’s coaching circles, and the Windcall Institute, offer ideas of prospective grantee partners to provide culturally grounded, movement-rooted care.
These are not fringe programs – they are survival strategies for leaders and organizations navigating relentless demands and rising political threats.
What Funders Can Do Now
In the short term, funders can:
Make immediate grants to existing healing and wellness funds so grantees can access services without delay. Contact Solidaire, Proteus Fund, or a member of the Ktisis team for more ideas and introductions.
Cover participation costs for grantees to participate in healing cohorts, coaching circles, or rest retreats. Budget $2,000 - $5,000 per participant.
Add wellness line items to all current grants. Provide up to 10% in additional funding for staff mental health support and healing.
Longer term, funders can:
Create dedicated wellness funds for grantees, either individually or in collaboration with peer funders, learning from the models mentioned above. We suggest allocating at least $100,000 to start for small foundations or budgeting $10,000 per eligible grantee.
Build wellness and healing into grantmaking criteria and existing capacity-building programs. Ask grantees how they’re thinking about wellness and healing, and support their ideas with funding.
Fund research and listening sessions to understand how grantees – especially those in communities of color – define and prioritize wellness. Then use that information to take action and compensate grantees for their time and expertise in any research or listening sessions.
The evidence is clear. The need is urgent. And the solutions already exist. What’s required now is the will to fund them at the scale this moment demands. Leaders need funders who see mental health and wellness not as charity, but as infrastructure.