How Philanthropy Can Fight Substance Abuse And Promote Mental Health

Health Affairs Aug 30, 2018
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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Mental-health-substance-abuse

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Health Affairs discusses a recent report that lays out recommendations for how we can address the addiction and mental health crises in this country through policies and investments.

• The main takeaway is that foundations and funders shouldn’t be afraid to fail. Only through risk-taking and empathy will we come up with sustainable solutions for those who are suffering.

• Here’s a success story for improving mental health care in Virginia.

In 2017, Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and Well Being Trust embarked on a joint effort to advance policy solutions to the drug, alcohol, and suicide epidemics. The first product of this partnership was a report, Pain in the Nation: The Drug, Alcohol and Suicide Epidemics and the Need for a National Resilience Strategy, funded by Well Being Trust and the RWJF, and published by TFAH.

That report focuses specifically on practice and policy solutions to reduce deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide — ranging from expanding the use and availability of rescue drugs, sterile syringes, and diversion programs, to limiting hours and density of alcohol sales, to supporting state suicide prevention plans, to expanding social-emotional learning and mental health services in schools.

The following highlights specific actions mentioned in the report that could be taken to solve some of the problems around substance misuse and mental health.

  1. Investing in prevention and creating more resilient families and communities must be a higher policy priority — especially for foundations.
  2. Foundations can be instrumental in helping their communities create consistent standards for identifying and treating mental health and substance misuse for multiple conditions and across community and clinical delivery settings.
  3. We must make accessing services for mental health and substance misuse conditions easier and make services more affordable for everyone.

To truly move the needle, we must be policy-influencers and advocates. Foundations can harness the power of our endowments through impact investing — using our knowledge of the financial world to ensure that everyone can realize their fullest potential.

Read the full article about fighting substance abuse and promoting mental health by Benjamin F. Miller and Anne De Biasi at Health Affairs.

Advocacy and Policy is a complex topic, and others found these selections from the Impact Giving archive from Giving Compass to be good resources.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    How Evidence-Based Policy Can Address Social Problems

    To help inform your impact giving about evidence-based policy, we've included the report's highlights below. For a detailed analysis, please download the PDF. Best for advanced donors. In recent decades, policymakers have grown more likely to use research evidence to guide their attempts to meet social and educational goals. Researchers have identified many reforms worthy of broad expansion, including changes in the welfare system and programs that help low-income parents foster their children’s early development. Yet despite these successes, on the whole it remains hard to implement large-scale interventions supported by evidence. Even when interventions are grounded in current knowledge and show positive effects in early tests, those effects are often modest, and they often aren’t repeated when the programs expand to other settings. Generally speaking, the prevailing paradigm for building evidence about programs or policies is a linear one: A new intervention is developed in response to a social problem. It undergoes early tests. If those tests find positive results relative to what participants would have otherwise experienced then additional impact studies are conducted in new locations (replication). If the replication studies are positive, funders will support further expansion (scaling up), expecting to see similar effects as long as future versions implement the core elements of the intervention faithfully. This pipeline paradigm is sometimes accompanied by a tiered funding model, in which more funding is made available to expand a program to a larger scale as it generates more — and more rigorous — evidence of its continued effects in more locations. This paper updates the pipeline paradigm for evidence building with a cyclical paradigm that encompasses evidence building, implementation, and adaptation. Download the full report about evidence-based policy and social change by Virginia Knox, Carolyn J. Hill, and Gordon Berlin at mdrc.org.

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