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 $2M USD,
Despite claiming to break down the financial barriers of communities that have historically lacked access (their 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.
Of course, part of this irony and fury is felt on behalf of my org, Letters to Strangers. Every single team member is Gen Z – we’re not just a once-a-year advisory group that meets to check off a list. We’re a majority Global South and BIPOC organization, with over a decade of impact validated by international media, multiple government honors, and peer-reviewed research. In fact, the country office we applied to Fund A on behalf of has literally signed over a dozen MOUs with the largest municipalities across the entire country, been featured by the largest national newspaper, and been evaluated to be significantly effective by peer-reviewed research over the last three years. So, we met the spirit of these criteria, but not the technicalities: technicalities designed just enough out of our reach that we’re forever Sisyphus-ing our way to ‘eligibility’.
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 us and friends’ orgs I knew for being too disruptive. Their feedback? The issue was that we were entirely run by young people.
- Over 100 visas denied – all to Global South applicants – for a ‘global’ climate negotiation, ensuring the stage looked inclusive while filtering whose voices were heard.
- A friend’s org in rural Ghana 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, please:
- Replace rigid criteria with impact-based verification.
- Scale funding proportionally so smaller orgs 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 orgs).
- 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 – meanwhile, redirecting every dollar fundraised for Letters to Strangers directly to the programs and our student team, taking not a single cent for myself until just less than a year ago. That is not sustainable. However, 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. Grifting. We don’t bat an eye when a multinational company pays under the table to get their products rolled out in defiance of regulations, but we expect the people who already earn far below the average in the charity sector to do everything with even greater efficiency, transparency, and without one ounce of compromise on ethics. Of course, we shouldn’t compromise on ethics. But the unrealistic double standard 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 we need to convince and earn the trust of. The people we work for, work with, and work toward are.
I hope the rising wave of investment in mental health, AI, and the Global South doesn’t forget that.
