The ongoing mental health crisis is one of the most pressing challenges facing our society today. With over 50 percent of Americans seeking mental health care and 80 percent of students in the U.S. experiencing anxiety, the need for innovative, scalable solutions has never been more urgent. At The Brookline Center for Community Mental Health, we are committed to addressing this crisis by designing, testing, and expanding new models of care that go beyond traditional interventions.
Thanks in part to a gift of $1 million from the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation, in 2023 The Brookline Center launched the Innovation Institute and began its evolution from an outpatient-centered community mental health care provider to an innovation hub for developing and piloting groundbreaking programs and services. As a hybrid care provider and innovation incubator, the Institute strives to narrow the gap between healthcare innovation and patient impact.
Through the Innovation Institute, we’ve expanded initiatives like bryt, a school-based intervention that helps students recover from mental health disruptions, and CEDAR, a coordinated care model for young people experiencing early symptoms of psychosis. We have also piloted the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM), which integrates mental health services into primary care practices. These innovations, made possible by flexible funding, represent just the beginning of what’s possible when organizations like ours have the freedom to explore new approaches.
The Tower Foundation first got to know the Brookline Center through a couple of grants to expand bryt into Tower Foundation geographies: first in Essex County, and later in Barnstable County. Funding bryt gave us insight into both the visionary and methodical approaches that the organization has taken to their rapid expansion of bryt throughout Massachusetts over the years. The programmatic strengths at the Brookline Center of course extend beyond bryt. Their leadership in developing and scaling these programs positions them well to act as a hub for mental health innovation in Massachusetts and beyond.
Mental health philanthropy is deeply rooted in project-based funding, which, while valuable, imposes restrictions on how organizations can allocate resources. This approach limits our ability to respond dynamically to emerging needs or explore innovative models of care. According to a recent report from Mindful Philanthropy, mental health organizations received just 1.7% of all philanthropic donations in 2022, representing less than 6% of all health-related giving. With such limited funding, the flexibility to experiment with new models or adapt to evolving community needs becomes even more critical.
In community mental health, the problem isn’t an absence of effective programs—it’s that these programs often lack the scale and reach needed to ensure timely access to care. Flexible funding, like the gift we received from the Tower Foundation, has enabled us to build organizational capacity, pilot innovative services, and test new ways of delivering care. This kind of flexible funding is essential for mental health organizations to explore scalable solutions and respond quickly.
The Brookline Center’s Innovation Institute requires dedicated and specialized staffing in order to be successful as it transitions from a service delivery-focused provider to innovation hub. Furthermore, launching the Innovation Institute requires The Brookline Center to strengthen its data systems, organizational structures, and culture; bring on new skills and talent; and increase financial, technology, and human resources.
At the Tower Foundation we have a history of funding programs, organizational capacity building, and collaborative efforts to change systems to better support the young people with mental health challenges, substance use disorders, intellectual disabilities and learning disabilities. In recent years, in the spirit of Trust-Based Philanthropy, we have also worked to give more flexibly and prioritize what our grant partners tell us they need in place of a funder-driven grantmaking approach.
Studies show that nonprofits need flexible funds to succeed. At The Brookline Center, we’ve seen firsthand the transformative impact of unrestricted giving. Through our Collaborative Care pilot, we’re seeing real changes in our patients’ lives. For example, at one site a young person struggling with anxiety and depression had been on a waitlist for over six months to see a specialist. With the help of her CoCM care team, she was able to get help right away. In addition to expanding access and improving clinical outcomes, CoCM leads to higher treatment initiation and completion rates, faster time to clinical improvements, greater patient and provider satisfaction, and reduced healthcare costs. Early signs suggest that it also creates a financially sustainable model for both patients and providers.
To fully address the mental health crisis, we urge funders to reconsider their approach—not only by providing flexible funding, but by working closely with mental health organizations to understand their evolving needs and empowering them to lead the way. Together, we can drive the innovation needed to build a more accessible, equitable system of care for all.
The Tower Foundation’s flexible grant to The Brookline Center’s Innovation Institute reflects our interest in investing beyond programming. A sizable grant to an organization committed to testing new ways of working is exciting for us. We see this support for the Innovation Institute as one not only with the potential to build capacity for an organization to iterate on a number of new and already strong services, but also with the potential to build capacity for the broader mental health field.
Continued programmatic funding for bryt would be an easy choice to make, but funding that exclusively targets project-based work cannot get organizations to a position of strength and equip them to lead. Investments that support infrastructure, creativity, and experimentation are also needed to work beyond the short-term fix to a responsive and vibrant future for mental health services.