Masawa Minute 35
Share power, not just capital | Impact-first investments | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
This week’s newsletter is all about opportunities for change. The opportunities to make our actions more equitable, to rethink our approach to impact, to start taking care of our collective wellbeing, to make mental health more accessible… Opportunities to make a change are all around us, we just have to use them. Cheers!
Masawa Thoughts
These past two weeks for us have focused on gaining more balance internally, especially as it seems there is less of it globally. In some countries, the weight of fear and uncertainty is beginning to lift, while in others, stress and despair are holding on even tighter.
We’re more aware than ever, that this balance is not just what we will to be internally, but includes the environments we are part of / belong to externally. The balance in ourselves is a prerequisite to the balance needed in our immediate circles, community, and societies.
Ultimately, the opportunity for change exists in each of us, already.
Attend
Conversations on Investing for Impact
Many social and environmental challenges have been brought to our attention in the last few years — partly because they are becoming increasingly more complex and partly due to the pandemic uncovering just to what extent our systems are broken. That’s why we have to rethink the solutions and approaches to creating lasting social change and amplifying positive impact while learning how we can collaborate better.
If you’re intrigued, join the event tomorrow! You’ll hear from some amazing speakers — Walter Sweet from Rockefeller Foundation and Heba Aguibfrom BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt will be there to share their thoughts. Faye Walsh Drouillard, Founder & General Partner of Masawa’s friend WakeUp Capital, will moderate the conversation. For everyone who has an interest in impact investing, this is something not to miss!
Listen
Joshua Haynes on Creating Masawa, The World’s Only Mental Wellness Impact Fund
We have a new podcast recommendation for you! Masawa’s Founder and Managing Partner Joshua Haynes sat down with Kathy Varol to chat about Masawa, venture capital, organizational health, mental wellness and more. It’s a fun conversation about a range of serious topics — a perfect thing to listen to on your next walk. Enjoy!
What we’re reading…
🔋 It’s time to share power, not just capital
Capital can be an impactful force of positive change or destruction, depending on the intentions of those deploying it. When directed towards the right opportunities, it can accelerate positive social impact and help shape the system for the better. The lack of access to it, however, has acted as a barrier to equity for marginalized communities for a long time. It’s still a problem now — one that’s finally gaining some traction as investors and foundations pledge to increase the capital flow to organizations and initiatives led by individuals affected by the social issues that are being addressed. Yet moving money around is not enough to overcome deep-seated systemic injustices — the power needs to shift along with it.
The power imbalance is a significant reason why inequity continues to exist and perpetuate itself. If it’s not addressed, there will be no shift in the system. To change that, there are some questions that every investor, and especially those working for social impact, needs to ask themselves to determine how equitable their investments truly are. They need to examine how they value knowledge and whose knowledge is valued more, who benefits from the investments, who makes important decisions in the process, whether the deal incentives align with the mission and so on.
We must move away from the idea that capital alone has enough power to truly disrupt things (although it sure does help). It’s essential that we look into the power dynamics underlying our operations and think about how we can redistribute it in order to be able to meaningfully collaborate with the people, organizations and initiatives working towards the same goals as we are. It’s time we realize this is the only path to achieve equity in the investment process which, in turn, is the only way to create lasting change in the world. Let’s do it!
Impact Investors Need to Share Power, Not Just Capital
💼 Investments where the impact comes first
There are impact investors, making the case that positive social outcomes and financial returns can go hand in hand. There are philanthropists, who make financial contributions to organizations working to solve social challenges without expecting anything back. There are critics, saying that lower financial returns will be the price to pay when striving for social impact. Is there a middle ground between them all?
It turns out that there is — a new report by the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit philanthropic consultant, suggests the approach they call impact-first investing. It means focusing on the positive impact first and considering the financial return second. Impact-first investing is positioned as a way to accelerate emerging technologies, create new markets and get to the social impact goals as fast as possible.
Surely, this approach is not for everyone — not many investors are willing to take such high risk for lower return potential. Before taking up an impact-first opportunity, there are two essential questions to consider: how can one determine that the investment qualifies, and how will the impact be measured? Finding answers to these questions isn’t always easy, but it’s certainly possible. Impact-first can be just the correct answer for your business — if you are willing to find out.
An Argument for Investing Where the Return Is Social Change
🩺 Healthcare companies celebrate the first quarter
It has been another incredible quarter for healthcare companies — collectively, they raised a total of $31.6 billion in equity, boosted by a record-breaking number of 96 mega rounds. Healthcare tech was particularly successful. For instance, telehealth has raised a record $4.2 billion, with six companies becoming unicorns. AI had achieved a funding record as well, with nearly $2.5 billion raised.
The first quarter of 2021 was also generous for mental health companies. They saw an increase in funding by nearly 54% QoQ, receiving $852 million in total, accelerated by mega rounds raised by late-stage mental health and wellness platforms like Lyra, Modern Health, and Ginger. A psychedelic and non-psychedelic therapeutics for mental health treatments startup ATAI Life Sciences was ranked among the top five new unicorns of the quarter by valuation after raising $415 million and boosting their valuation to $2 billion.
Mental health saw an all-time high in interest in the month of March. It’s safe to expect this trend to continue, fueled by concerns for the Covid-19 aftermath and continuous innovation in health tech. The highest number of investments in healthcare, however, was directed to North America with a total of $19.86 billion raised. Europe came in third with $3.72 billion. It signals there’s a significant untapped opportunity for healthcare and, particularly, mental health investments in Europe as promising mental health startups continue to pop up. We hope to see the investment numbers for Europe go up before the end of the year.
State Of Healthcare Q1’21 Report: Investment & Sector Trends To Watch
👯♂️ Addressing mental health on the collective level
Mental health is usually positioned as an individual issue — just like any other health-related matter. However, that’s not all there is to it. We often talk about organizational health — the wellbeing of people within the organizations. The reason why organizational culture and company policies can affect individual wellbeing and, more specifically, mental health so much is that collective mental health is a strong determinant of the individual one.
To address the problem of deteriorating collective mental health, first, we need to understand what exactly the collective mental states might be. Depression. delusion, obsessive-compulsive behavior, trauma all could be suggested to be relevant. Each of them can be diagnosed at a collective level, even though we can expect to see significant differences within groups and organizations as status and power are known to correlate quite well with mental and physical health measures.
Many organizations use wellbeing indicators, such as levels of anxiety or job satisfaction. Unfortunately, it doesn’t accurately reflect the state of the collective mental health and therefore not only makes it more difficult to discern the negative patterns but also prevents us from understanding what can help people thrive. The best predictor so far appears to be the question of whether one has a support network that can help them during a crisis. Some organizations, such as Action for Happiness, now have robust evidence on boosting the feelings of wellbeing and connectedness. With new and enhanced measures, we could understand it better and start improving not only our individual but our collective mental health too.
Here’s how your mental health depends on collective wellbeing
🧠 Neuroscience shares tools to make mental health more accessible
During the last year, global mental health has deteriorated significantly, setting up the already immense social and economic costs of mental illness to rise even more in the near future. We know that prevention and early detection of an illness reduce costs and save lives, yet we haven’t been employing that approach effectively to deal with the mental health crisis on our hands. However, there’s a hint of a silver lining — neuroscience can help.
Neuroscience is able to provide tools that can scale up the response. As we’re already working and learning online extensively, digital neurotherapies (DNTs) can be just the right response. DNTs employ the neural pathways and processes that create the brain’s functional systems in order to improve them. For instance, DNT for depression would consist of tasks that stimulate the neurosystems responsible for regulating the areas that produce negative emotions and stress hormones, which are weakened in depression. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is an approach that’s similarly effective as it enables the weakened systems to regain control through various cognitive strategies.
The barriers to scaling those tools are relatively low — one year of DNT can be cheaper than an hour of psychotherapy. Employing the rigorous vetting of programs on the national level as well as monitored implementation in some cases such as schools, the tools can be effective and accessible. The action is needed now to turn around the effects the pandemic has had and will continue to have on global mental health — science and innovative technology are ready to lend a hand.
Digital neuroscience can help alleviate the mental health crisis
In Closing
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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.
