Episode 9: Inclusive Mental Health

As program manager for The Upswing Fund, Sierra Malia Fox-Woods has the privilege of supporting organizations that are improving kids’ mental health by breaking down barriers to access. Tune in to hear Sierra talk about the fantastic work being done to support LGBTQ+ students and children of color. 

Learn more about Sierra Malia Fox-Woods: Sierra’s LinkedIn profile.
And check out the important work being supported by The Upswing Fund for Adolescent Mental Health at: https://theupswingfund.org. 

Transcript

Announcer:

You're listening to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. Education is at an inflection point. As we grapple with complex challenges like funding and enrollment, as well as diversity, equity, and safety, we also have an opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine education. Now more than ever, we know the importance that students overall wellbeing plays in their success. They need to feel supported and safe and connected to be able to engage in their learning and achieve to their full potential. Join your host, Casey Agena, a former teacher turned instructional coach and technologist, as he interviews inspirational educators, school leaders, wellness professionals, and more to amplify their voices. You'll learn about the innovative work they're doing to support student safety, engagement, and overall wellness. And who knows, you may even spark a new idea of your own. Ready to reimagine education? Let's go.

Casey:

Welcome to episode five, the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, and I'm your host Casey Agena. In today's episode, really glad to be joined by Sierra Maria Fox-Woods from Panorama Global in Seattle, Washington. She works as a Program Officer, supporting organizations, both fiscally, programmatically to support adolescents and mental health and the work that they do to make sure communities and families are safe and feel supported. Listen in as Sierra and I talk about the work that she does and the important role that organizations such as hers play. 

Welcome, Sierra, I'm glad to have you here. Mental health is a hot topic now. And for particular groups of people it's been really challenging, whether it's younger adults in school, students in school, classrooms, at home or working adults. Tell us a little bit about The Upswing Fund, what it is and the work that you do and why you're so passionate about being there.

Sierra:

Thanks so much, Casey. It's great to be here with you today. Yeah. Super excited to chat about The Upswing Fund. As you mentioned, we're a collaborative fund that focuses on the mental health and wellbeing of adolescents of color and LGBTQ+ youth. We were launched in October 2020, as a COVID relief effort, responding to what we're continuing to see is just the worsening of the impact of the pandemic on adolescent mental health. So acknowledging the disproportionate impact that diverse youth face that's youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth, we are squarely focused on serving this target population. To dates, we are very proud to have awarded over $11 million to 92 organizations across the nation. We're currently supporting organizations in 33 states and Washington, D.C. Taking together looking at impact over this past year, our grantee partners have served just under two million adolescents and have hired over 500 staff.

And that's to provide surge capacity support, so that organizations across the country can meet increases in demand for mental health care. To your question around why I'm so excited to work for The Upswing Fund, I think we're just really proud to support organizations that meet youth where they are. That can be providing care to students in schools, through teletherapy or providing supports and resources online, or just new innovations in engaging youth through sports, through games, or even walks in the park and supporting therapists to meet youth when and wherever they can access their services.

Casey:

I think that's been the challenge, particularly with organizations that are supporting and serving youth, whether it's on campus or in school resources, people, that there has been and there is this money available to use to support organizations. There are organizations like schools, like after school programs that have these particular groups, and then there are those third party, right? Those solution providers that need the fiscal support and are looking for, or maybe have a little bit of connection to those particular clientele and how that triangulates. So tell us about the role that you have in helping to connect those dots.

Sierra:

Yeah. That's a great question. So our primary strategy for grantmaking this past year was to support primarily direct service organizations that are providing the care to these schools or to these youth and their families through nonprofits like youth development programs, but a smaller subset of our portfolio includes what we call system enablers. Those are project specific grants that are really focused on systemic changes to addressing these gaps in adolescent mental healthcare. So I'll provide two examples just to give some context.

Casey:

Yeah.

Sierra:

The first towards expanding the mental healthcare workforce, we know that there's a shortage of providers and even worse there's a shortage of culturally response to providers. Providers that look like you, when you go to seek help, which we know is really important to establishing trust and being able to have a level of understanding with your provider. So towards expanding this mental healthcare workforce, we partnered with Active Minds based out of Washington, D.C., where they trained 120 students to develop mental health campaigns in their schools, to address mental health needs in culturally responsive ways. So really putting youth in a driver's seat for asking, Hey, what is it going to take to improve your mental health and that of your peers and what would you do if you were given resources to change them?

Casey:

With that, I think one thing missing is that we know, or maybe unknown of what the capacity is of youth to be able to run these campaigns. That their engagement with their peers actually really helps move this expanding effort in terms of mental health awareness and then solutions for that. I think we sometimes miss out on that particular group.

Sierra:

Totally. A consistent theme that we've been hearing from our grantee partners is that youth are now more interested and engaged than ever in mental health. They care about this topic. Gen Z wants to see improvements, they want to see resources and they want to be that resource for their peers. It's really up to us to be able to provide opportunities, to provide a seat at the table to help them help us to co-develop solutions or even evaluate existing ones. I think, especially in work with schools, we've heard from some of our partners that there's not enough resource to support this work and youth are interested in it. It's really a great opportunity to leverage that energy and momentum, but we have to let youth lead the way.

Casey:

Yeah. To that point, I think the way that youth are engaged in schools on a daily basis, how they have been engaged in schools previously in remote teaching and learning models to even now, as we're seeing some schools pull back into some hybrid learning. Those digital tools and those interfaces that they have both for learning as well as beyond school time, where they're finding ways to connect with their peers. Finding ways to have a chance for others to hear them, whether it's I need help or do you need help? Or whatever it may be. What have you seen out there in terms of that expansion of digital tools as it addresses social-emotional learning, and or mental health?

Sierra:

Yeah. This is definitely a space that is rapidly evolving. We've seen a lot of digital health tools gear towards various populations, but particularly for youth acknowledging that, Hey youth are on their phones, a good part of the day, and it's a confidential, easy to access resource. There's two organizations that I want to highlight here that we support and partner with that are working to expand the use of digital tools. What I want to earmark here is I think there's a benefit in expanding tools, but our focus is really on by and for youth of this population. So our work is looking to support organizations that are supporting co-developing solutions, not just with youth, but with LGBTQ+ youth and with BIPOC youth that can share their lived experience to help inform the creation of these solutions. So the first one is a partnership with Colorado Education Initiative and Grit Digital.

What they've done this past year is engaged youth to co-design an app for high school students to reduce loneliness. There's a Nod app that exists and it is geared toward to college students, and what they found is that it is successful in reducing loneliness. So what they've done this past year, is how can we transcreate or translate this to be effective for high school population and specifically in BIPOC and LGBTQ+ population? So we're really excited. This is rolling out in the spring across the three high schools in its first pilot.

Casey:

Awesome.

Sierra:

Yeah.

Casey:

It's sometimes a marketplace where we don't know that it is a marketplace. It's like that diamond in the rough, it's a diamond, it's something that's there that we need and we want, and we want to address, but we don't necessarily know that it's there. Having organizations and initiatives like this to help bring it up to fruition, "Wow, I didn't realize that's a place of need."

Sierra:

Completely agree. In addition to doing all of this research and creating the app, they're really intentional around marketing and trying to put this in front of not just youth, but their parents and their caregivers, because it's really important that you can socialize and help familiarize these tools for caregivers as well.

Casey:

Let's take a short break to hear a word from our sponsor.

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Casey:

And now back to the interview. Thinking about teens and particularly those here in the U.S., where we do much of our work. What about access to mental health care and digital solutions for them that they can get to?

Sierra:

Yeah. So another example would be one of our grantee partners, also a collaboration, The Fox Lab & The Lab for Scalable Mental Health. What they've done is acknowledge that many U.S. teens are unable to access mental health care. They've developed a no cost solution through single-session interventions and what this is, it's research based, it's proof to reduce depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in adolescence. It's based on the premise that a single-session intervention or a single-session engagement can be effective. It doesn't have to be seeing a therapist or using teletherapy once a week for four months to see results. That for some youth, and this is tied back to MTSF and stepped care, for some youth they can really benefit from single-session from saying, "Hey, I'm struggling with this right now." And having that intervention be connected with a care navigator that can say, "I totally hear you. It sounds like you need help in X, Y, Z, here are some resources that can help you." And so it's based on this assumption that you can still be effective in short single-sessions.

Casey:

It's I think scaled support, right? That there's some who would need a check in, and I need the ability to check in with somebody. Versus somebody else who needs ongoing support because of some trauma or whatnot, or an individual identified by a school counselor or an adult or whatnot, that needs that support. And having those scaled solutions in your portfolio to address the multitude of different ways that mental health is coming to the top in terms of our own observations.

Sierra:

Definitely. These single-sessions or resources and tools can be an entree into more supports or more frequent supports, just like you're mentioning. I think there's a spectrum of care and a continuum of care that digital tools can fall anywhere on that spectrum. The earlier that we can get them to youth, so that they know that there's preventative care options the better.

Casey:

That's where I think to your point on those working with direct providers, where you have folks who are already working in this space, working with youth, and we're not trying to take over that space, but it's more of, we want to amplify that, want to be able to do more with it. And as we are starting to see with the challenges with even school counselors, finding third party therapists, or finding folks who can come in to help students who they work with at a small scale or a large scale is challenging in our current environment. And to have these solutions there and available to them, I think really can make a difference.

Sierra:

Completely agree. A majority of our portfolio are social service providers and youth development programs that offer a range of programs, not just mental health. So when a youth goes to an afterschool program for a career dev or workforce development opportunities, their program manager can see and help this youth to access other services before they even know what to call it or know that they want it.

Casey:

Right. Right. So with that in mind, I think looking ahead, you had mentioned this term and I had highlighted this idea of surge capacity. I'm defining it interestingly, in a way of looking at it through the lens of students, K-12 arenas, and even beyond that, but the way that they are learning, the way that they're interfacing with programs, the way that they're interfacing with solutions, it's changed. Some may voice for the better, some may voice for more, but it has changed in terms of how they're connecting, what they feel is important. So in terms of this surge capacity, thinking ahead, and not just about this calendar year or this fiscal year, really looking ahead, this is developing possibly for the next three to five years in terms of what programs and solutions are available and are going to be available for folks beyond some of the organizations that you're already supporting. What does that look like in terms of that capacity for you all and what's ahead in terms of The Upswing Fund?

Sierra:

Yeah. That's again, such a great question. I think the end game is to ensure that all adolescents of color and LGBTQ+ youth can access supports when and where they need it. So that doesn't have to look like traditional therapy, that doesn't have to look like teletherapy. It may look like increased supports in schools. It may look like community programs that are building out their mental health programming, offering mental health training to peers, to be able to provide that peer support. But really we're just looking at what are those gaps that are continuing to prevent these diverse adolescents from accessing care and that care coming to them? And what can we do to help close those gaps? Philanthropic funding, I think is just one vehicle, of course, that we're focused on, but it will take, I think, a coordinated approach.

And so to your last question around, what's ahead for The Upswing Fund? We are going to continue to focus on grantmaking. We know that philanthropic funding provides a key resource for organizations that are providing care for these adolescents, that in some ways Medicaid can't cover the full cost of care. So we know this is important to be able to support that. We are focused on partnership development, so creating programmatic partnerships to be able to provide resources to our grantees and also collecting data and insights from our grantee partners and serving as a megaphone to what they're experiencing and what they need in the field.

Casey:

Well, I want to highlight for everyone listening as well, just a number of solutions and providers and organizations that The Upswing Fund has really helped to just in the very short time being around uplifting those particular organizations and direct providers. Particularly looking at youth that we may have forgotten about and bringing them to light. We've seen a lot of that from cultural competencies, to supporting BIPOC students and the LGBTQ community. I want to thank you, Sierra, for your time, sharing with us about The Upswing Fund, lending your voice to the Voices In Education podcast. So thank you.

Sierra:

Thanks so much, Casey. Pleasure to be here.

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