Tamara Toles O’Laughlin had just left her position as the North American director for 350.org — and she wanted to prove what she had seen first-hand: Climate activists, particularly youth, were not all right.
“These kids are heartbroken, they are disillusioned, they are not sure what’s next and they are descending into a mental health fog that is going to matter for the future of the work,” she said, recalling her thinking in 2021.
O’Laughlin found little support within the movement for making the work more sustainable and some people did not see a problem at all, partly due to a lack of data. So she cobbled together enough funding for a study.
The result was “The Climate Burnout Report,” produced by her nonprofit Climate Critical in 2023 and based on a survey of 108 organizations, with support from small-dollar donors and volunteers. It found burnout was widespread across the climate and environmental space and compounded by systemic and structural racism impacting Black, Indigenous and people of color in the movement, while resources were insufficient.
The report was one of a number of studies in recent years that have found climate anxiety, grief and other emotions are increasingly common, not only among activists. It built on work by trailblazers like the late Joanna Macy, whose workshops and books were among the first to address what was then called eco-anxiety. Today, nonprofit leaders regularly make the case for backing services like mental healthcare for children and climate victims.
Yet funding for this area remains minimal, according not only to O’Laughlin and other nonprofit leaders in the field, but also based on Candid records of funding at the intersection of climate work and mental health. Health is the most well-funded area in philanthropy after education, and total funding for climate has risen dramatically over the past five years, but anecdotal accounts and funding data show few dollars go toward addressing climate-related mental health concerns, even as support for youth mental health has ticked upward.
Take the experience of Sarah Newman. In spring 2021, around the time O’Laughlin was looking for funding for her report, Newman — suffering from climate anxiety herself — had just launched the Climate Mental Health Network and was trying to attract support. She kept hearing the same responses.
“‘No, we do youth engagement,’ or ‘we do education,’ or even, like, ‘we do mental health, but we don’t do climate and mental health,’ or ‘we don’t do mental health when it comes to youth and climate,’” she said. It felt, she recalled, “like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
Her organization now has the support of a half-dozen funders, and those chats — which, when she started, were often the first time funders had spoken to anyone about the mental health impacts of climate change — have taken on a whole new tenor.
“Now, when I’m having conversations, it’s more personal, because things have changed so rapidly,” she said. “It’s much more of like: ‘OK, I get it, I have climate anxiety.’”
Recognition has meant funding, but only up to a point. Her organization has four part-time staff, a paid intern and Newman, who is full time, along with a budget of less than $1 million. It is one of the space’s largest nonprofits.
How much money is going to climate mental health?
There is, for now, no reliable tally of funding supporting climate-change-related mental health work. A Candid search for issued grants tagged with both “climate change” and “mental health care” turned up just 120 awards totalling $2.3 million — and that’s over the past 20-plus years, and includes international grants.
The data reflects a new field with few big players. The average award on Candid’s list was for only $19,167, with just eight grants in the six figures. Nearly 87% of grants, or 105 of the 120 awards, were made since 2019.
“This is very much a nascent field,” said Sarah Newman. “A few years ago, there was pretty much zero funders.”
Granted, Candid typically has very limited data to work with, so there are almost certainly additional uncounted awards. It’s also not clear how many of the awards turned up in my Candid search are specifically for climate-related mental health. Many go to community groups who have tagged those areas, but the actual grant descriptions indicate the money is for things like civic participation or cycling. There’s one clear area of agreement with what experts had to say: Funding is limited.
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Which nonprofits are working on climate mental health?
While there are many organizations whose work includes climate and mental health, there are just a handful of organizations focused primarily on that intersection. Most have formed within the last few years, but a few date back nearly a decade, largely thanks to Lise van Susteren, a psychiatrist who Newman calls “the mother of this movement.”
In 2016, after a decade of climate activism and growing frustration with her own profession’s lack of movement on climate, van Susteren cofounded both the Climate Psychology Alliance–North America after hearing about a similar group in the U.K. and, around the same time, the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, as laid out in an Inside Climate News profile last year. A serial social entrepreneur, van Susteren also also helped launch Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, Ecopsychepedia and the ebook “Climate and Your Mind.”
Van Susteren believes funding will rise, even as obstacles remain. “Mother Nature is making the point… everybody’s freaked out,” she said. “I fully assume and believe that more money will be available. That said, the idea of psychology and mental health is still scary for people.”
More recently, other groups have emerged. There is Newman’s Climate Mental Health Network, which runs youth programs and provides online multilingual resources for parents and teachers. Another is O’Laughlin’s Climate Critical, which runs programs and networking events for leaders in the movement. But O’Laughlin is less optimistic about the space’s funding.
“Over five years, I have raised funds from a very small number of folks, less than a handful, mostly people in this community who have given money because they see it, they’re experiencing it,” she said.
Other efforts that these founders mentioned include Unthinkable, a newsletter started by “Generation Dread” author Britt Wray; the letter-writing project Dear Tomorrow; and the nonprofit Good Grief Network, which runs peer-to-peer support groups on climate emotions.
“It’s all small groups, and each one has kind of a slightly different approach,” Newman said. “It’s all very collaborative and supportive of each other.”
Who’s funding climate mental health?
The answer to this question depends on who you ask: Candid offers one set of answers, while the founders of groups in the space largely provided another.
O’Laughlin, whose day job as president and CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association gives her a broader view than most into where foundations are sending their dollars, named the youth-focused Enlight Foundation, the CO2 Foundation and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Global, which is also known for its support for Buddhist practice and nonprofit worker wellbeing. She noted the Growald Climate Fund also provided seed funding for her nonprofit, Climate Critical.
Several other organizations, including Youth Climate Justice Fund — which I profiled in 2023 and last year — and the now-defunct Power Shift Network, were formed in part to provide “services for climate youth disaffected by lack of support from older-generation green organizations,” O’Laughlin said.
Newman’s organization’s funders include Cisco Foundation, Park Foundation and Blue Shield of California.
Ask Candid, however, and you’ll get a different set of funders. Its data appear to be dominated by large grants from funders to community groups that work in these areas, but are not necessarily specialists. “I’m not aware of any of these [foundations] funding the leading organizations in the climate mental health field,” Newman said in an emailed statement after reviewing several funders listed by Candid.
Candid’s top funders making grants tagged both with “climate change” and “mental health care” include Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust and Jack Dorsey’s Start Small LLC, as well as three regrantors: MADRE, Frida: the Young Feminist Fund and Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism.
The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice is another regrantor that provides resources on this front via unrestricted awards, reported Nonprofit Quarterly, a reminder that flexible support allows organizations to use grant dollars for mental health support as needed.
There are also several donor-advised funds supporting this space, according to Candid, which seems to overlap with anecdotal reports that individual donors often back this area for personal reasons. Van Susteren said backers often hold “deep concerns” about climate and have “deep pockets” or, in some cases, are “people who have lost children to suicide because of environmental fears and concerns,” among other factors, she said.
IP’s archives turn up additional names. My colleague Mike Scutari wrote about climate mental health support from the Manchester, Massachusetts-based BESS Family Foundation, and there are funders large and small who make grants related to both mental health and climate. Examples include the $50 billion, U.K.-based Wellcome Trust — which previously funded a project, Connecting Climate Minds, that included Newman’s Climate Mental Health Network — and the Greece-based Stavros Niarchos Foundation. American grantmakers in this category include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Rihanna’s well-regarded Clara Lionel Foundation.
In short, the field has shifted since Newman started fundraising four years ago, with more program officers knowing what she’s talking about, sometimes firsthand — and there’s a chance it will shift more.
For now, the challenge remains that many foundations fund climate and health, yet very few specifically fund climate mental health. Newman’s hope is that funders from across the philanthrosphere begin to see the issue as key to advancing their own priorities.
“If you address the mental health impacts of climate, it is going to strengthen the outcomes of funders’ existing portfolios, whether that’s youth engagement, education, advocacy, growing the movement, communications — all of that,” she said. “I feel like addressing mental health is… the missing ingredient, in many ways.”
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes all feedback, as well as tips and requests.
