In this blog, Ember's leadership team explores the model behind our work: investing in a diversity of community-led innovations and working closely with organisations to strengthen their impact and long-term sustainability.

These reflections are part of What’s Working: Youth Mental Wellbeing, a new knowledge hub from Solutions Insights Lab, developed in collaboration with the Youth Mental Wellbeing Co-Lab. The hub brings together insights from organisations across the field on what is being tried, adapted and put into practice.

I wish people would be talking more about investing in a diversity of solutions, not just a few.

- Anna Kydd, Co-Founder & Director, Ember Mental Health

For all the attention being paid to the youth mental health crisis, one of the most hopeful stories often goes untold.

Across Africa, Asia, South America and beyond, young people and communities are not waiting for solutions to arrive. They are creating them. <<peg for social media>>

In community centres, schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, art studios and open fields, people are developing their own responses to mental health challenges, responses shaped by culture, lived experience and local realities. 

Some use theatre. 

Others use mountain biking, music, storytelling, poetry or art. 

Many combine mental health support with education, livelihoods and community building.

At Ember Mental Health, we have spent years learning from and investing in these grassroots innovators and what we have discovered is both simple and profound:

Innovation in mental health is not the problem. The problem is whether we are willing to trust, resource and connect it.

The Myth of the Silver Bullet

There is a persistent belief in global health and philanthropy that complex challenges can be solved by finding a handful of interventions and scaling them rapidly.

Mental health does not work that way.

Mental health is deeply contextual. What supports wellbeing in rural Uganda may look entirely different from what works for young people in urban Kenya or mothers in a village in India. Communities face different challenges, possess different strengths and develop different ways of healing.

Progress in mental health starts with investing in community-led innovation that tackles mental health challenges in creative, culturally grounded ways. 

When we launched Ember Mental Health seven years ago, we wanted to test a simple idea: What if we stopped searching for the one solution and started investing in many?

The response was overwhelming.

In our most recent global call for applications, more than 1,800 organisations applied. We interviewed over 900 of them. What emerged was not a shortage of ideas but an abundance of creativity, commitment and leadership.

From organisations supporting incarcerated young people in Madagascar to collectives using arts and storytelling to address mental health and gender-based violence in Mozambique, we witnessed extraordinary innovation already flourishing at community level.

The lesson was clear: the solutions are already out there. What many grassroots organisations lack is not vision, it’s access to funding, networks, visibility and support.

The importance of holistic, tailored support

At Ember, we seek a deep understanding of the needs of the organisations we support and offer a depth of support tailored accordingly, ranging from flexible funding to mentoring, wellbeing and connection with a supportive network.

We’re able to do this through our multi-disciplinary team and our extensive network of providers.

Our approach optimises investment, and funds go further to ensure a higher impact return on investment.

Young People Are Leading the Way

One of the strongest themes emerging from our work is the growing leadership of young people themselves.

As Zuzana Figerova, our Head of Development and Philanthropy reflects:

The young generation is leading in this field.

Many of the organisations applying to Ember are youth-led or youth-centred. They’re being built by young people who are responding directly to the needs they see around them.

In Kenya, young leaders are creating psychosocial support programmes for university students and using participatory theatre to spark conversations around wellbeing. <<link>>

In Myanmar, young women leaders are creating accessible, stigma-free, and culturally grounded care through child-centred play, expressive art workshops, trauma-informed psychosocial care, and counselling support. <<link>>

In Mozambique, young people are creating spaces for healing through music, poetry, visual arts and storytelling. <<link>>

These initiatives remind us that when young people are given agency, they are not simply beneficiaries of mental health programmes, they become innovators, leaders and change-makers.

Beyond Resilience

The language we use matters.

For years, resilience has been a dominant theme in youth mental health. But through our work with adolescents and young people, we have begun to hear a different message.

Adolescents don't want to be resilient. They want to be supported and nurtured.

That insight, shared by young people participating in our programmes, has challenged us to think differently.

Resilience can sometimes suggest that young people must adapt endlessly to difficult circumstances. But what we hear repeatedly is that young people want something more fundamental: relationships, belonging, opportunity and care.

The goal is not simply helping young people cope.

The goal is helping them flourish.

Supporting the Supporters

Another lesson that has transformed our thinking is the importance of caring for those who care for others.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we watched grassroots leaders carry enormous burdens. Demand for mental health support was increasing at exactly the same moment that many organisations were experiencing stress, uncertainty and exhaustion.

In response, we created the Ember Wellbeing Fund.<< link>>

Initially, it began as a simple experiment. Small grants were given to organisations to use however they felt would support their wellbeing.

The results were remarkable.

Teams organised retreats. Staff accessed therapy. Some bought gym equipment or attended creative classes. Others simply created more opportunities to connect with each other.

What mattered was not the activity itself. What mattered was the message: your wellbeing matters too.

As Rini Sinha, our Head of Strategy and Creative highlights what many leaders said:

This is the first time someone has asked us how we are doing.

Over time, the Wellbeing Fund evolved into a much deeper offering, including one-to-one support, therapy, coaching, wellbeing workshops and peer learning opportunities.

We’ve seen founders move away from burnout, organisations become more sustainable, and teams develop healthier ways of working. 

For too long, the mental health sector has overlooked the wellbeing of those delivering support. We now see caring for carers as an essential part of strengthening mental health systems.

Redefining Impact

Because behind every metric is a human story.

One of the questions we ask every partner organisation is deceptively simple:

What does impact mean to you?

For June Larrieta, who leads our impact work at Ember Mental Health, that question is where everything begins.

Too often, impact in mental health is reduced to standardised indicators or narrow definitions of success. While measurements and evidence matter, they do not always capture what communities value most.

For one organisation, impact may be improved family relationships.

For another, it may be increased belonging among marginalised young people.

For others, it may be confidence, creativity, community participation or hope.

The challenge is not that communities are failing to measure impact. The challenge is that funders and institutions do not always ask communities what meaningful impact looks like from their perspective.

At Ember, we believe stories and lived experiences deserve a seat at the same table as statistics. Photovoice projects, films, photography, case studies and community narratives can reveal dimensions of wellbeing that numbers alone cannot capture.

The Missing Piece: Connection

If there is one insight that has become impossible to ignore, it is that many community innovators are working in isolation.

Again and again, we hear organisations say the same thing:

We thought we were the only ones.

Yet through our interviews and partnerships, we have seen countless examples of people working on similar challenges who have never met one another.

This is why we increasingly foster connections between grassroots initiatives that strengthen the connective tissue of the ecosystem, allowing community innovations to grow together.

Mental health innovation is happening.

The opportunity now is to help innovators learn from one another, collaborate, exchange ideas and build collective solutions.

When organisations connect, something powerful happens. Knowledge spreads. Confidence grows. Partnerships emerge. New possibilities become visible.

As a sector, we often invest heavily in creating innovation. We spend far less time investing in the networks that help innovation thrive.

That needs to change.

A Future Worth Building

Despite the scale of today's mental health challenges, we remain hopeful.

Not because the work is easy.

Not because the barriers have disappeared.

But because every day we encounter people proving that change is possible.

We see it in the founder in Ethiopia who found the support needed to continue her work rather than leave through burnout.

We see it in Ecuador in an urban gardening collective run by people living with schizophrenia.

We see it in artists, activists, therapists, mentors and community organisers finding creative ways to support mental health in places that have long been overlooked.

And we see it in the more than 1,800 organisations that reached out to us, each carrying its own vision of what mental health care can look like.

The future of youth mental health will not be built by a single app, a single intervention or a single organisation.

It will be built by communities. 

It will be built through trust. 

It will be built by listening.

And it will be built by investing in the extraordinary diversity of solutions that already exist around us.

The question is no longer whether those solutions are out there.  The question is how they can be supported to flourish.