Catalyst 2030’s Mental Health Collaboration creates opportunities for global collaboration between funder networks and mental health social entrepreneurs with tangible tools and resources, to create systemic impact. The collaboration seeks to educate funders, social innovators, corporates and policy makers, on the intersectionality of mental health with other social justice systems. These include gender, climate change, education, healthcare, etc., to enhance cross-sector collaborations to integrate mental health work into other social justice issues.
In a series of articles themed Global Perspectives on Mental Health and Social Change published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), leaders from the Catalyst 2030 Mental Health Collaboration reflect on the importance of integrating mental health care in social change practices to support activists addressing social issues like climate change, gender and peacebuilding.
In the article The Case for Mental Health in Our Social Change Worlds by Celina De Sola and Daisy Rosale, the authors argues that, “Integrating positive mental health practices is the only way for social change leaders to maximise the incredible potential of their organisations and the communities they serve.”
A second article, The Power of Mental Health to Break Cycles of Violence and Promote Peace by the same authors, open with the kind of trauma and violence that many community and systems change activists, experience. “Eugenia Ponce clearly recalls the tragic day in 2013 when her nephew and 12 other community members were disappeared. In the 10 years since, she has led a local collective in her native Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City to advocate for justice on their behalf. Along with thousands of other families of disappeared people, Ponce is a member of a national movement responding to violence that all too frequently goes unacknowledged and unaddressed.” In the article Celina De Sola and Daisy Rosale offer skills and tools to help social innovators manage trauma in the work they do.
