Stop Giving With One Hand and Taking With The Other
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?
Why am I so fed up?
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:
Fund A requires applicant organizations to be registered in a developing country for at least two years
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.
Fund B's flagship grants require annual budgets exceeding $2mi
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.
But this is about far more than us. If it was just us, fine, that’s a me issue. But here’s what I’ve also seen in the past year:
- A fund requiring an essay on “disrupting the system” that rejected our peer organizations and us for being too disruptive. Their feedback? The issue was that we were entirely run by young people.
- Over 100 visas were denied — all to applicants from the Global South — for a ‘global’ climate negotiation, ensuring the stage appeared inclusive while filtering whose voices were heard.
- A friend’s organization in rural Ghana was forced to spend months proving children’s ages in communities without birth records in order to satisfy a Western funder’s requirements, wasting so much time, money, and trust for zero actual impact.
We tell young people they can change the world. Then we make it so that only those who already come from security, stability, and wealth can change the world. Who are we trying to change the world for?
If funders truly want to support systemic change, many funding practices should be adjusted.
- Replace rigid criteria with impact-based verification.
- Scale funding proportionally so smaller organizations can access it (not least because requiring audited finances sounds great until you realize the cost to pay for an auditor is enough to run an entire program for grassroots organizations).
- Design with — not just “for” — the people they aim to serve and pay us, just like you would any other consultant!
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.
Equity is not something you tack on at the end of your decision process to convince yourself of good.
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.
