Author: Tomika Rodriguez, M.Ed.; Senior Consultant, LFA

Overview: July is National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, an annual observance that “raises awareness about the unique challenges that affect the mental health of racial and ethnic minority and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations.” It is alternately denoted as Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) Mental Health Month. This post explores a landscape study conducted by Learning for Action (LFA) that may have important implications for philanthropy in addressing BIPOC college student mental health.

In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General named youth mental health as a national public health crisis; this crisis predates, but was exacerbated by, the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent headlines (“The Worst of the Pandemic is Behind Us. College Students’ Mental Health Needs are Not”) are a clarion call to continue to center the work yet to be done on this long-standing issue.

As a firm whose mission is to partner with social sector organizations to strengthen their learning culture and practice in service of equity and justice, LFA reflects this month on a recent project examining college student mental health and the role of philanthropy in addressing this challenge.

Background. College Futures Foundation commissioned LFA to conduct a landscape study to better understand college student mental health concerns and philanthropy’s response, based on national trends and mental health systems in California. Given College Futures’ mission of increasing postsecondary completion for learners who are underserved, the landscape study included an explicit effort to uncover research on equity implications for college student mental health. 

The study, which employed desk research and interviews with seven experts on college student mental health in California and five college student researchers, intended to inform philanthropy professionals on the state of the landscape and gaps and opportunities for the field. The study’s findings inform several resources:

• From Persisting to Thriving: How We Can Act Now to Support College Student Mental Wellness - a brief accompanying the broader landscape study report

• College Student Mental Wellness in California: A Landscape Scan of Systems, Supports, and What Students Need - LFA’s full-length report including research methods, complete findings, analysis, and sources

• Answering Calls for Care in College: Steps to Support Student Wellness Webinar - College Futures’ webinar. I joined in my role as an LFA consultant and co-author of the aforementioned report and brief

Findings. Our findings on the challenges of meeting college students’ mental health needs shed light on key areas, offering insights for philanthropy and for future studies and applications. Key findings include:

• Mental health systems often don’t work optimally for anyone. California’s mental health systems have historically been decentralized and fragmented, with little data on system-wide effectiveness or outcomes to support accountability.

• Recent national and statewide funding that might apply to college students–a result of COVID response funding or due to renewed agendas for elected officials–are promising. However, these funding sources can be a potential “funding red herring” without concomitant targeted efforts to meet their growing and diverse mental health and wellness needs.

• Higher education’s current approach presumes mental health is something that only affects some people, sometimes. Current interventions largely respond to acute clinical needs, only (and often, inadequately) serving a fraction of the campus population. BIPOC students, students from low-income backgrounds, and undocumented students are disproportionately impacted by ineffective systems and narrow ideas of what it means to holistically serve students’ mental wellness needs. It is this last point that we explore further below.

BIPOC Student Mental Health. Countless articles document disparities in access to high-quality mental health care for BIPOC communities due to systemic racism and a mix of other cultural and socioeconomic factors. A recent article on trends in college student mental health and help-seeking by race/ethnicity reviews a national sample of over 350,000 student survey participants between 2013 and 2021. It found a significant, near double increase in that time for students across all races/ethnicities who met the criteria for one or more mental health problems.

Findings also indicate that BIPOC students fared worse than their white counterparts in terms of increased prevalence of symptoms of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and one or more mental health problems, and had the lowest rates of mental health service utilization. The authors state that this treatment gap persists and has even worsened, “suggest[ing] a lack of attention and resources devoted to serving these populations and their unique needs”.

We find that narrow definitions of mental health (often focused on diagnosed or commonly presenting symptoms) minimize what we define as mental wellness: a state of well-being characterized not only by the absence of illness or mental health concerns, but by the presence of the internal resources (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) that enable a person to thrive. Further, while important for all students, safety, belonging, and culturally-competent support are underestimated in their significance for underrepresented student populations.  Our findings identify potential areas of impact for funders interested in tackling these important issues.

So, what does this mean for philanthropy?

Opportunities for Philanthropy. Philanthropy publications suggest “mental health philanthropy remains a giving blind spot”.  Funding of mental health supports for college students and young adults, and distinct groups within this population, may be even more insubstantial.

Our landscape study found four potential categories of high-impact activities (starting on page 60 of our report) that experts, research, and analysis point to as promising opportunities for funding high-impact activities:

• Use voice and influence for policy and advocacy;

• Fund direct support efforts;

• Engage in research and innovation; and

• Build capacity for respective and related college systems.

Significantly, the interviews and desk research we conducted surfaced a gap in going beyond a race-neutral approach to an identity-conscious approach, or developing mental health interventions that holistically center student identity in their design and outcomes. This shift is necessary to counter long-standing and ongoing practices and effects of systemic oppression and exclusion. Ideally, such support would: acknowledge and affirm diverse identities, embrace trauma-informed educational practices, examine the need for holistic interventions like basic needs support, and be provided by a diversity of campus and community practitioners, with cultural understanding and humility.

No findings were more significant than the voices of the students with whom we spoke. We encourage you to access the above outputs of this project and to take heed to what we resoundingly heard from students, represented in this quote from a student interviewee:

“The college experience reduces our identity to just being students. We hold other identities as well… have outside responsibilities. When the college experience only sees us as students, that doesn’t give us enough space to take care of other things outside of school … other factors [that] affect how we perform in school as well.”

This month reminds us to reflect on mental health concerns for BIPOC communities and to take action. The work of our project with College Futures Foundation is significant because for many students, college is a vehicle to develop their perspectives, pathways, and potential. We know college students are often at a critical period of their development, and their wellness is a precursor to them thriving as our future leaders. For us, for philanthropy, and for the future, focused attention here is an imperative beyond the population itself.