Masawa Minute 1
Sugar & Depression | Verantwortungseigentumsmodell | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute, a snippet of what we’re reading in the areas of mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing.
Podcast 🎧😁
One of the best podcasts about mental health we know, The Hilarious World of Depression (THWoD), is a great take on humanizing — and making fun of — depression.
This episode exposes 11 lies that depression tells its victims, again and again. It’s a great reminder of the power of depression and the many ways it tries to control.
Bonus: all the THWoD funny bits of the first two seasons rolled into one!
Short Documentary 🇰🇪📽
An inspiring, short documentary on mental health in Kenya, from the crushing stigma to the hope for a better future by Be Forward. [Thanks, Paul!]
Research Study 🍭😿
“The depressogenic potential of added dietary sugars”
Depressogenic — what a word!
In this research paper published in the January 2020 journal of Medical Hypotheses, researchers show that sugar has a depression-generating impact and posit that more research needs to be done to create new preventative and therapeutic approaches towards depression. [Thanks, Georgia!]
Article 📝🌍
“Busting the myth that depression doesn’t affect people in poor countries”
Following the work of Vikram Patel through the UK, Zimbabwe, and India, this long-form article in The Guardian highlights the fact that depression affects people everywhere, even in developing countries.
Corporate Structures 🏢🥰
Corporate ownership structures are important topics in the impact investing area. One structure gaining popularity is the steward-ownership model (Verantwortungseigentumsmodell in German, in case you were wondering!), where independence and commitment to purpose is built into the corporate DNA by decoupling who decides from who profits.
Companies like Bosch and Zeiss have long been steward-owned companies and 70% of the value of the Danish stock market is derived from steward-owned organizations.
More resources at the Purpose Foundation. [Thanks, Nadja!]
✨Masawa Update ✨
We announced the launch of Masawa on December 5th to much fanfare! Maybe we’re biased (we certainly are), but there seems to be a huuuge need for impact investing around mental wellness. Thanks for being part of the journey!
The “Friends and Family” funding round is now open and the inaugural advisory board in coming into place. We were recently in London, Frankfurt, and all over the Internets meeting with scientists, doctors, social impact experts, investors, and investees.
Give someone a hug today + take care of each other!
Joshua Haynes
Joshua is the Founder and Managing Partner of Masawa. He believes that investing in mental wellness, focusing on maximizing positive social impact, and founders’ mental health, and supporting their resilient organizations makes sense for society and for business.
