By Diana Chao
The more I see funding calls for youth mental health, the more I want to throw up. I’m supposed to be ecstatic. This is a cause I’ve dedicated over half of my life to, from my teenage years until now. But the reality is like studying for an exam for years, only to finally show up on test day — and the exam is in a language you’ve never seen before. Your stomach drops somewhere past the Earth’s mantle. Then the exam administrator comes and tells you to be grateful — do you even know how hard it is to get a seat at that exam table?
Recently, two major funding announcements in the youth mental health space caught my attention. Both positioned themselves as equity-driven game changers, focusing on youth-led work, breaking down systemic barriers, and uplifting marginalized communities. One even required birth dates for every decision-maker to “prove” youth leadership.
And yet:
Which makes sense until you actually try to do it. In many countries in the Global South, this can take years without the need for bribes or political connections. In one of the countries where my team works, Zimbabwe, it took us 2.5 years just to get one single amendment approved for our charitable trust status. Otherwise, we’d better be ready to invest thousands of dollars to “convince” agency workers.
Despite claiming to break down the financial barriers of communities that have historically lacked access (the funder’s words, not mine), this requirement automatically excludes grassroots youth-led organizations that haven’t had the same systemic access to wealth, regardless of their impact.
Some of this irony and frustration comes from representing my organization, Letters to Strangers. Our entire team is Gen Z; we’re not a token advisory board that meets once a year to tick off boxes. We’re a majority Global South and BIPOC organization with over a decade of measurable impact, recognized by international media, honored by multiple governments, and validated through peer-reviewed research. For Fund A, we applied through a country office that has signed more than a dozen MOUs with major municipalities nationwide, been featured in the country’s largest newspaper, and demonstrated significant effectiveness in independent, peer-reviewed evaluations over the past three years. In short, we meet the spirit of the eligibility criteria — but not the technicalities. Those specific requirements are drawn just far enough away to keep us endlessly pushing, like Sisyphus, toward a goal always slightly out of reach.
The same people whose lived experience most aligns with the communities we impact tend to be people who have already historically faced marginalization. I worked three jobs to support my family, which was living below the poverty line, while maintaining my grades to hold onto my merit scholarship in college. At the same time, I redirected every dollar fundraised for Letters to Strangers directly to our programs and our student team, taking not a single cent for myself until just less than a year ago. That is not sustainable.
While we’ve grown accustomed to CEOs of private companies reaping substantial rewards, paying people — especially young individuals who do not come from wealth — to undertake demanding, exhausting, and trust-based grassroots work is viewed as unsavory. We barely blink when a multinational quietly pays under the table to skirt regulations and rush products to market, but we expect those earning far below the average in the charity sector to operate with perfect efficiency and absolute transparency, without a hint of ethical compromise. Of course, ethics should never be negotiable. However, the double standard we impose on those closest to the work is staggering.
We are not the ones whose trust needs to be earned. The people whose trust matters most are those we work for, work with, and work toward.
I hope the rising wave of investment in mental health, AI, and the Global South doesn’t forget this truth.
