The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need to thrive. We're the leading independent nonprofit in children's mental health, operating three Mission Areas: Care, Education and Science. We provide world-class clinical care in our offices in NYC and San Mateo, CA, and bring evidence-based mental health supports to underserved school communities in the surrounding areas. Our public education initiatives provide free, science-based resources on mental health and learning differences to end the misinformation and stigma that cause so many children to miss out on life-changing care. Our research is at the forefront of neuroscience efforts to identify biomarkers of mental illness and learning differences. Our landmark Healthy Brain Network study is collecting the largest dataset on the developing brain and sharing data freely with the scientific community.

Millions of children - as many as 1 in 5 - struggle with mental health or learning challenges. Fully 70% of U.S. counties do not have a single child and adolescent psychiatrist. Due to stigma, misinformation, and a lack of access to care, the average time between onset of symptoms and any treatment at all is over 8 years. Our children deserve better. That's why the Child Mind Institute was created. We're dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need. We've become the leading independent nonprofit in children's mental health by providing gold-standard evidence-based care, delivering educational resources to millions of families each year, training educators in underserved communities, and developing tomorrow's breakthrough treatments. Together, we truly can transform children's lives.

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Secure long-term capacity to treat children from under-resourced communities, expanding our existing financial aid and travel assistance programs for patients seen in our offices and via telehealth

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Two: Scale up our school program to additional cities, build in a focus on learning disorders, and extend our trainings for teachers and school mental health professionals across the country

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Three: Extend the reach of our vast catalog of mental health resources, reaching families who are of low socioeconomic status, geographically isolated, and Spanish-speaking

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Describe an investment in leadership

We have begun to provide educational workshops for our leadership to support the development of a formalized diversity, equity, and inclusion plan. We launched a learning series, offered to all employees, on topics like Fostering Inclusion in the Workplace, How to Be an Inclusive Leader, and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Training. We hired coaches to support the growth and development of our leadership team and leaders’ capabilities managing a diverse group of individuals. On an individualized basis, the coaches help our leaders understand personal strengths and areas of growth, and they provide feedback to leaders as they try out new techniques and skills to effectively reach and motivate team members. The goal is for our leaders is to be able to create a learning environment in which individuals come together to solve problems and, ultimately, to create a responsive culture which advances the Child Mind Institute’s mission.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Networks of Collective Impact Efforts

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

• Community Building

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

The Child Mind Institute is proud to be a member of the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health alongside fellow nonprofits that help deliver positive, tangible impact on the critical challenges of stress, anxiety, and depression in children and adolescents. The Child Mind Institute is also part of the Mental Health Coalition, a group of passionate and influential organizations, brands, and individuals who have joined forces to end mental health stigma. Corporate partners and cause marketers have helped us expand our education and advocacy efforts, which include building out digital mental health guides for families and training educators to address students' mental health needs in the classroom. Our researchers regularly present at conferences around the world, and our teams are committed to freely sharing all datasets collected with the larger scientific community on a prepublication basis. Thousands of researchers have published more than 700 articles using our data.

As the COVID-19 crisis forced much of the United States to shut down, the Child Mind Institute mobilized rapidly to pivot in all mission areas. Our clinics in NYC and the San Francisco Bay Area converted patients to telehealth, our editorial staff produced new content on COVID-19 and mental health, our researchers developed tools and technologies to garner information that will lead to more effective interventions, and our school and community programs responded to increased anxiety, grief and loss in school communities. Now, two years into the pandemic, not only has a “new normal” been adopted but the stigma around mental health has begun to recede. Open conversation is increasingly common. But receding stigma has revealed another problem. When families reach out for help, they often find that there is no one there to answer the call. We are meeting the need with far-reaching programs that scale solutions for societal impact. While we have since reopened our doors to in-person patients, we continue to offer telehealth services which allows us to reach more patients. In 2021, we delivered evidence-based care to nearly 4,500 children and adolescents from our clinical centers, completed 4,700 mental health and learning evaluations, and provided $580,000 in financial aid to families. We are providing services both in person and remotely to ensure our patients’ safety. The 2021-22 academic year has been one of transition, and the need for mental health support was great. Despite these challenges, our team reached over 5,200 students, parents, and educators through mental health supports and workshops this school year and trained more than 560 educators and school staff to deliver our mental health interventions independently. Because we digitally converted all of our trainings for educators and school mental health professionals at the start of the pandemic, we can seamlessly offer trainings remotely, as needed, to school communities across the country.