May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and we wanted to highlight the importance of recognizing and supporting mental health as a critical and necessary element of a robust and sustainable collective impact effort.

We frequently receive questions from a wide variety of collaboratives that are experiencing challenges related to the mental health of their team and partners, and the impact that this has on the collaborative’s work. For this episode, we invited the national nonprofit Mind Share Partners to address some of those questions. Mind Share Partners focuses on changing the culture of workplace mental health so that both employees and organizations can thrive.

In this discussion, we discuss four key topics that we often hear from collaboratives:

• How to deal with burnout
• How to manage conflict within the collaborative
• What to do if the collaborative doesn’t have a culture that supports the mental health of its participants
• How mental health can affect a collaborative’s sustainability and ability to make progress on its long-term goals

In this discussion, we dive into these four topics with Mind Share Partners’ Bernie Wong and Carrie Grogan. They provide guidance and examples of what a collective impact effort can consider if its goal is to build a strong and sustainable culture that prioritizes the mental health of participants in the work.

Resources and Footnotes

• Mind Share Partners and their Resource Hub
• Creating Mentally Healthy Cultures: How To Get Started
• Imani Barbarin: Creating Accessible Spaces for Belonging

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/