Masawa Minute 44
Let’s meet in Berlin! | What does an ideal city look like? | + More!
Welcome to the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
This Masawa Minute is about reimagining what we’re familiar with — from the cities we live in to outcome-based funding to how we approach mental health disorders. We hope that you see some ideas you like and feel inspired to find new ways of looking at your surroundings. Enjoy!
Masawa Thoughts
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve become familiar with being alone, too familiar. In order to reimagine what this looks like, Masawa is announcing two exciting opportunities for you and your organizations!
Enhance your org health via an exciting inner journey.
As part of our work around Nurture Capital, Masawa has partnered with ConsciousU to offer CU*i, a cornerstone experience for purpose-driven individuals, organizations, funders, and investors. This online 6-module program increases organizational health and resilience through self-inquiry and deep dialogue.
After completion of the CU*i course, participants will get access to Masawa’s curated community of conscious leaders, a toolbox of resources, a network of advisors, and the wisdom of peers to maintain and bolster the learnings of the CU*i program.
We’re offering three free deep dive reflective workshops to explore organizational health, a teaser of what you’ll experience in the CU*i program. The deadline to sign up is 14 October 2021.
If you would benefit from understanding and improving your org health, find out more about CU*i x Masawa program and teaser workshops here.
Meet In Real Life (in Berlin): Mental Chatter: Berlin
Let’s be real: we’re not going to be able to solve the mental health issues if we don’t reach across sectors and silos and forge the needed bridges.
As such, Masawa is partnering with Se Solutions and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt to host Mental Chatter: Berlin, an informal in-real-life (gasp!) gathering in Berlin for mental health enthusiasts and innovators! The live event in Berlin will be on September 21st from 7 pm — 9 pm. If you’re in Berlin (or want to come visit), sign up here.
Attend!
Global Mental Health Seminar Series
The global mental health monthly seminar series hosted by Yale strives to improve the understanding of the challenges in mental health access, care, research, practice and policy across the globe while coming up with solutions for improvement. As the series seeks to promote education, collaboration, and open conversations about the work done to address global mental health disparities, anyone is welcome to attend.
The next seminar will take place on September 7th, at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 6 pm CEST. It will discuss improving access to healthcare services, promoting social inclusion and rights of people with mental disorders and disabilities in historically underrepresented communities and will be led by Dr. Julian Eaton. Don’t miss it!
What we’re reading…
🌇 Masawa Special: What would an ideal city look like?
This is the second part of Masawa’s series “Building for mental wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities.” If you missed the first one, you could find it on our blog. In this article, we take a look at an ideal city — one that nurtures rather than harms our mental wellbeing. One that prioritizes wellness and provides us with an environment where we can reconnect with nature and each other. It’s time for us to start designing cities that serve us instead of working to survive in ones that don’t. Only once our surroundings fit our needs can we facilitate lifestyle changes and move away from illness and treatment towards wellbeing and prevention. So what would our ideal city look like?
For one, it would be filled with green spaces. Architecture would be created as an extension of nature, involving natural elements of lighting, ventilation, and landscape. It would benefit us by reducing stress, enhancing creativity, accelerating recovery and improving our overall wellbeing. Next to that, the spaces would be designed to promote physical activity, be it walking, cycling, jogging, or any other form of sports. The two are closely connected — research finds that the more green spaces there are, the more physically active the people become, not to mention that using a natural environment for exercise weekly is known to cut the risk of poor mental health in half. Cities should also be built to accommodate quality sleep and rest — there are numerous solutions to achieve that, ranging from planting trees to dampen the traffic noise to using downward-facing street lamps with warm-colored lighting to reduce glare and bring back a darker night sky.
Furthermore, a wellbeing-focused city has to bring people together. Social interaction is essential to our lives, and, therefore, urban design should focus on reinforcing inclusion and increasing the sense of community by creating spaces for natural and positive interactions. More importantly, all of it must be accessible to everyone — the cities have to be easy to navigate, contain spaces with different levels of stimulation, their streets have to be comfortable to all. An ideal city would also find a way to reconcile its communities with itself. Most cities have a painful, traumatic history. Design has the power to transform a place of trauma into a place of healing and offer individuals stability and peace.
While this is a picture of an ideal city, that doesn’t mean it’s not achievable for us. These inventive approaches are already being implemented in cities around the world, and it’s time for the other cities to follow. An ideal city of today is the city of the future — a future where our living spaces are designed to improve our wellbeing and encourage us to thrive. Let’s take action so that the future begins now.
Building for mental wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities Part II
🧘♂️ Headspace and Ginger merge to create an integrated platform
Last week Headspace and Ginger announced some groundbreaking news — the two companies made a decision to merge and form Headspace Health. The new company, now valued at $3 billion, is planning to move beyond a direct-to-consumer model while providing a full range of mental health support services for all types of patient groups. They hope that the merger puts them in a unique position to tackle various mental health needs — from prevention to medical care — and do so from one integrated platform.
This move may come as a surprise to some, as both companies seemed to be doing great on their own — after all, Ginger just raised $100 Million in Series E funding in March and shared their plans to continue expanding their partnerships with multinational employers and health plans. However, it’s not the first partnership of big and successful mental health service providers to take place (for instance, Lyra Health and Calm have announced their collaboration back in December) and, according to Ginger CEO Russel Glass, there’s more consolidation in the sector to come. Integrated care is the future of wellness, and this decision seems to reflect the trend.
This leaves us with a few notable takeaways, besides the announcement itself. If this move is going to turn out to be successful, Headspace Health could be a great example of what a holistic and integrative approach to mental health care would look like. People that use mental health services might seek a combination of approaches that work for them, and their needs may vary over time — the industry is evolving to fulfill this demand and present the users with more options. Next to that, now it’s no longer enough to connect a user to a specialist. Many platforms face the challenge of how to provide nuanced patients with solutions targeted to their specific needs — according to Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir, the secret lies in integration. Finally, in 2021, consolidation is happening everywhere, and digital health is no exception. We can’t wait to see what comes next!
Want to be a more holistic healthcare company? Add some Ginger
💰 What’s next for outcomes-based funding: social impact guarantee
Meet a social impact guarantee — the next leap forward in outcomes-based funding. It works the same as the money-back guarantee we’re all so familiar with, only it’s based on impact outcomes. If the project fails to meet the agreed-upon goals, the third-party guarantor must reimburse the funder for any unachieved impact. In exchange, guarantors may ask for a small premium. It requires no modifications to existing funding processes and works effectively as an insurance policy, which governments and philanthropies already employ to protect themselves from other types of risk. Social impact guarantees help impact-focused funders manage impact-related risk, broadening the range of funding opportunities and helping the capital flow to the causes that need it the most.
Social impact guarantee has already been successfully applied in practice — Tri-Sector Associates (the team behind this article) launched it together with the YMCA of Singapore, the Lorinet Foundation, and the TL Whang Foundation in June 2021. The social impact guarantee compelled the TL Whang Foundation to contribute $150 000 Singapore dollars (about $111 000 US dollars) to help YMCA enhance their Vocational and Soft Skills Program. Consequently, Lorinet Foundation guaranteed that the program’s re-engagement rate would increase to 75% over four cycles and committed to returning the funds to the TL Whang Foundation if the target is not met. This opportunity was attractive to the funder due to the ability to ensure that every dollar achieves the intended outcome, as well as the overall likelihood of realizing those outcomes increasing. The guarantor has benefited from two leverage points for its contribution — the time value of money and the risk-pooling effect. And for YMCA, this was a chance to obtain new funding, improve focus on its outcomes, and build internal capacity.
Social impact guarantee has great potential. To begin with, new types of social impact funders can apply it to their spending. Not only can it persuade governments to increase their social spending, but it can also assist the growing blended finance and impact investment movements in attracting capital. Next to that, the guarantee can help attract new players who haven’t yet participated in outcome-based models to take on the role of guarantors. Impact investors could become guarantors too with some creative adjustments: the guarantee could eventually work like a catastrophe bond, with investors buying a bond knowing that their funds will cover the insurance payout if an agreed-upon trigger occurs and getting an attractive return for the risk. Finally, funders could use the guarantee to increase the range of the relevant areas for outcomes-based funding. In these times of uncertainty, the social impact guarantee offers insurance that every dollar will truly make a difference. It’s one of the solutions offering a way forward, and it’s exciting to see where it takes us.
Social Impact Guarantees: The Next Evolution in Outcomes-Based Funding
☺️ When is it time to be mindless?
All of us have heard about the benefits of mindfulness — the increased focus, better control of emotions, more easily achieved relaxation and calmness. We’re constantly reminded to be present, become continuously more aware of ourselves and our surroundings, experiencing every moment to the fullest. Mindfulness, of course, does offer some great benefits. However, psychological research has suggested that in certain situations, it’s better to be mindless. That refers to the ease which we develop when repeatedly performing certain tasks until paying much attention to these tasks isn’t necessary anymore, like riding a bike, taking a shower, or routine chores we do around the house.
Behind this state of “automaticity” lie mental processes that can be performed without conscious awareness, like a chain of mental events. While we don’t perform all tasks this way, many can be executed like this once we’ve practiced them enough. So what’s the benefit of doing things mindlessly? Apparently, research has revealed that paying too much attention to what we’re doing can negatively affect our performance, especially if the activity requires skills that we have mastered. One of the studies related to the subject examined skilled golfers and their ability to perform under different conditions. Counterintuitively, experienced golfers performed significantly worse when they focused on the action of swinging the club as opposed to those that were listening to irrelevant sounds.
The lesson that we could take away from this is that with all the effort we put into being more present, we should avoid focusing too carefully on certain things, including the actions we know by heart. Overthinking never does us good — not only can it lead to self-doubt and various mistakes, but it also harms our mental health, leading to increased stress, depression, and anxiety. This is not to say, of course, that we should go for another extreme and cruise through our lives on auto-pilot, missing opportunities to connect with our environment and each other. Still, there are situations where letting our instincts and skills take over and guide us through the task will benefit both the outcome and our wellbeing.
Sometimes Mindlessness Is Better Than Mindfulness
🧠 The key to successfully treating mental disorders lies in our brains
Mental health disorders affect many people all around the world. Unfortunately, although the number of treatments available is increasing, they continue to involve a lot of guesswork. For example, many people with mental health problems will be prescribed medication or therapy. While these treatments are somewhat effective — each treats depression successfully in about 50% of the cases — there’s no way to tell which treatment a particular patient would respond to better. Instead, it’s based on trial and error. Here’s the important question: can the brain changes evoked after specific treatments explain why some people get better after each specific form of treatment?
The default answer to this question appears to be “yes.” However, understanding how the brain changes in mental health conditions hasn’t revolutionized how we approach and treat mental health disorders, partly because we’re just starting to learn how existing treatments affect the brain. Coming back to the initial consideration of medication versus therapy, it was found that there’s no overlap between the brain changes induced by either of them. Yet both of these regions were part of the brain’s affect network, meaning that while they acted on distinctly separate regions, in the end, they targeted the same area. Such findings have important implications for treatment, suggesting that these treatments could be more effective in combination. It also shows potential value in examining each patient’s brain to determine which treatment would be more effective for them. Not to mention that a brain-focused approach to treating mental health disorders might help develop new treatments.
In the end, it seems like the most important consideration is not whether mental health disorders change the brain but how. There’s a lot of potential for future treatments to leverage this understanding and personalize their approach by, for instance, measuring patients’ brain changes or even utilizing a smartphone app to determine key aspects of behavior and offer each patient treatments that work best for their specific brain or behavioral metrics, regardless of their diagnosis. While some studies testing this are already underway, a lot needs to happen before we can have a solution — measuring the cognitive and biological changes occurring on an individual level and mapping out their relationships with treatment outcomes is going to be a great scientific challenge of our time. Nevertheless, this knowledge will transform mental health treatment as we know it and hopefully will eventually improve the lives of billions of people by helping them find the right solutions.
Mental disorders are brain disorders — here’s why that matters
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.
