Masawa Minute 25
The year of Masawa | Can the workplace be a source of wellness? | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
With December well underway, we’ve decided to share an overview of the year we had in mental health — or what’s still to come.
Get active!
🕶 Watch
Yesterday we hosted our 1st anniversary gameshow, #Mindgames, which was a great success, thanks to our five incredible contestants. It was fun, we played some games and had some open and honest conversations about mental wellness. To those of you who couldn’t be there — don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We’ve recorded the whole thing so that you could watch too (let’s be honest, we’re also going to go through it at least a couple of times). Enjoy!
🕺🏿 Attend
Health issues and social protection: Building an economy of well-being
Get your calendars ready, because on December 17th Masawa’s Founder & Managing Partner Joshua Haynes is appearing in a European Social Economy Summit’s event on social protection and wellbeing.
Joshua will speak about the intersection of the mental wellbeing of the economy and why investing in mental wellness can not only benefit each of us but also result in major economic gains and bring us closer to a system that holds wellbeing at its center. His speech is happening at 12–1pm CET, but if you aren’t overly busy that day, we highly recommend that you listen to other guests too!
What we’re reading…
💼 Mental health investment is surging
A Silicon Valley Bank report has taken an overview of global health tech highlights in 2020. We especially love the mental health section, which is filled with exciting news. Mental health funding in the year 2020 is set to surpass $1 billion, the rise that’s attributed to the deals raised by Lyra Health, Mindstrong, and Headspace. Virtual care companies have brought in 50% more annual mental health funding than they did in 2018 — the pandemic has contributed to this significantly, but it’s exciting to see the acceptance of virtual mental health care grow nevertheless.
Interestingly, 82% of New Series A mental health investors are non-healthcare investors. More public conversations about the importance of mental wellbeing and more attention directed to mental health issues in light of the pandemic seemingly drew the investors’ focus to the mental health space. Hopefully, this trend is only progressing upwards.
If you’d like to learn more about how HealthTech has been doing (there are numerous amazing insights!), take a look at the full version by clicking the link below.
HealthTech: Thrust into the Spotlight Amid the Pandemic
🖇 What have we learned about our workplaces?
The World Economic Forum has put together a list of 5 things we learned about workplace wellness this year, a summary of their gatherings from the One Mind at Work Global Forum event. Among them were some that we’re thrilled about, like the fact that employers are paying increasingly more attention to employee mental health. The momentum behind workplace mental health programs has been rising since March and it’s not about to slow down as the demand is higher than ever.
There’s another interesting, less obvious learning in the list. In 2018 Anthea Ong, a parliament member in Singapore since 2018 and founder of WorkWell Leaders Workgroup has raised a thought-provoking question: can a workplace itself be a source of wellbeing? It contradicts the paradigm of the workplace as a perpetual stress generator and we love to see this idea spread because that’s precisely the kind of workplace we’re working towards.
5 things we learned about mental health in the workplace in 2020
📱 The year of teletherapy
This year has been especially tough. But those who say there’s always a silver lining aren’t wrong — this year has definitely been a year of mental health startups. This inspirational article by the New York Times says so too as it highlights some people that have been working restlessly in their quest to innovate psychotherapy.
The three companies covered in the article seek to provide access as quickly as possible in an effort to help in mental health emergencies. The goal of Mr. Robertson, the co-founder of Cerebral, is for his clients to have someone to speak to within 10 minutes, all while complying with stringent privacy laws. They all also work with insurance companies to provide service coverage. Their ultimate objective is to connect the clients with the support that’s exactly right for them and contribute to the currently-lacking research on making a good therapy match. In the words of Mr. Katz, the founder of Two Chairs: “At the end of the day, if you form a great bond, the quality of care is so much higher.”
A Rare Pandemic Silver Lining: Mental Health Start-Ups
📆 Life beyond 2020 — what can we expect?
During the 2020 Psychiatric Times have reviewed numerous social psychiatric challenges, like the pandemic, racism, a significant rise in anxiety, grief related to climate change, issues that often intersect. For the end of 2020, they chose to examine some of the most significant psychiatric and social challenges in one article and offer a brief glimpse of optimism about the future.
Many of the psychiatric goals for 2021 correlate with social justice and research supports it — the greater concern for social justice leaves people happier and more satisfied. Combining the two, naturally, can lead to building improved and more mentally well communities in 2021. To see their take on the intersectionality of psychology and various social issues we’re facing, look through the article yourself. For now, we’re also trying to be cautiously optimistic and looking forward to seeing the changes the new year brings.
An Optimistic Prognosis for 2021
🎈 What has Masawa learned this year?
We’ve also made a year’s review of our own — after celebrating Masawa’s first anniversary, Joshua has taken a look at everything that has happened during this year and mused over what to expect from the upcoming one.
The most exciting thing is that Masawa has brought together an impressive group of people, is actively raising money and will make the first two investments very soon! But also, we’ve gone through a lot of learning about mental wellness, social impact, our place in the broader system, and, of course, our mission to use capital to transform mental wellness and make it more accessible.
Open the article to read more about what we’ve learned and why right now funds like Masawa are more necessary than ever (+ a poem about our vision for the next ten years!). There’s a lot to be done, but we’re ready to put in the work for the change we want to see in the world.
✨ Masawa Thoughts
As a celebration of our one year “anniversary”, it was a great pleasure to host our first #mindgames Mental Health Gameshow yesterday, a concerted team effort! We created an environment of openness and honesty for 90 minute for contestants and audience members, while having a few laughs. Yes, it was a little unconventional for an impact fund to host a virtual gameshow on mental health, but not only is unconventional a part of Masawa’s DNA, it’s crucial for helping address mental health issues from a complex systems perspective.
For one of the games, contestants received individual instructions in languages only they could understand. As the rules were being given, the other contestants and audience members initially felt a sense of “huh??”, followed by feelings of isolation, confusion, and not being able to logically deduce where this was all going.
But soon, the contestants were quacking, mooing, kissing, and clapping as one cacophonous, yet synchronized, group. The point of the game became clear that too often, we’re only able to react to the thing that’s directly in front of our faces, without being aware of the larger system and forces at play. First sitting with those feelings, as one of the contestants noted, might help us tune into the larger picture, something we all should do more often.
💭 In Closing
Like the Masawa Minute? Show your support by sharing it with someone else or tell us what you think! Or both.
Give someone a big [virtual] hug today + take care of each other! 🤗😘
Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
