Expanding the Funder Playbook: Where Climate and Mental Health Converge

ACTIVE PHILANTHROPY & FORWARD GLOBAL MEMBER

This story is part of the Architects of Impact series, highlighting stories of innovation that demonstrate how our Community is mobilizing to ensure a world that works for all people and the planet.

You can watch climate change with your own eyes in Greenland. Glaciers calve right before you in an awe-inspiring, yet harrowing boom, shifting tons of water… and your worldview.

It doesn’t take a life-changing moment like that to feel the effects of climate change physically and mentally. Forward Global partner Active Philanthropy, a social business based in Germany, supports changemakers in exploring how climate change intersects with their work of interest. For a recent study, that intersection was with mental health.

Many people think about mental health as a yes-or-no question: you’re struggling, or you’re not. But the research tells a different story. Mental health exists on a spectrum, from strong well-being—resilience, hope, a sense of agency—all the way to clinical conditions like anxiety, depression, and trauma. Climate stressors push people along that spectrum in ways we don’t always recognize: a farmer losing crops to drought, a child growing up with rising anxiety about the future, a community displaced by flooding or fire. The further people are pushed toward distress, the less capacity they have to cope, collaborate, and recover.

“The state of people’s mental health can therefore be both an outcome of climate change and a key determinant of climate resilience.” – Mental Health Primer, Active Philanthropy

“Mental health continuum.” Credit: Active Philanthropy

That gap between what we know and what gets funded is exactly what drew Forward Global and Active Philanthropy to Greenland. Some problems are easier to act on when you’ve experienced them firsthand.
In 2024 and 2025, we brought members to Greenland to learn directly about climate change from local communities, organizations, and scientists. These “Journeys” were so popular that Forward Global and Active Philanthropy launched an online climate and philanthropy learning program. The three-month program invited 15 members to consider how they could apply a climate lens to their work.
Both the online program and the Journeys aimed to help members understand the climate funding landscape, get informed and connected, and turn knowledge into action. 

Because Forward Global convenes funders of all backgrounds, this climate-oriented group was diverse. It included seasoned climate funders, impact investors, and some new to climate—and that mix mattered. Everyone brought a unique perspective, including Forward Global Member Cristina*, an impact investor focused on mental health.

For Cristina, Greenland reinforced that climate change cannot be understood solely through an environmental lens. Coming from a mental health background, she was struck by how little attention was being paid to the emotional well-being of the people living through these changes. That led her to commission Active Philanthropy to analyze how mental health and climate change intersect and research who, if anyone, was already working at the intersection between climate change and mental health. She hoped the findings would deepen understanding of an overlooked dimension of climate change and make that knowledge available to others, while also informing her own philanthropic thinking. So Active Philanthropy condensed the analysis into a primer, designed to introduce this underfunded intersection to a wider audience and encourage funders to explore it.

The mental health primer, launched in April and freely accessible on the Active Philanthropy website, involved contacting 100+ people across philanthropic organisations and networks, including Philea and EDGE Funders. The point was to get these findings in front of people who could act. And the case for urgency is clear: funding at this intersection is extremely limited, and the need is growing faster than the dollars. Anneke Kirsch (Active Philanthropy) and Lauren Mills (Wellcome Trust) go deeper in this article on Alliance.

The primer offers two perspectives. First, an argument for mental health funders to apply a climate lens to their work. Second, an argument for climate funders to take mental health seriously. Either way, the core finding is the same. These aren’t separate crises—they compound each other, and funders who understand that connection are better positioned to create lasting change.

Crucially, the primer also maps who bears the heaviest burden of this overlap. The mental health consequences of climate change are everywhere, but they are not distributed equally. Children and young people face long-term exposure and often carry high levels of climate anxiety. Indigenous communities, whose identities and livelihoods are often deeply tied to the land, experience grief and distress as landscapes change around them. Low-income households have fewer financial buffers and less access to mental health support. Farmers and rural workers face climate-driven economic uncertainty, and in some regions, drought has been directly linked to increased suicide risk. The people already facing the greatest disadvantages are, by and large, the ones most affected.

“Who Is Most Affected?” Credit: Active Philanthropy

This study doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It lays out what funders can actually do, “from immediate support after climate-related shocks to longer-term efforts that strengthen resilience and address underlying vulnerabilities.” 

For funders, this is good news. There are entry points at myriad levels from funding local volunteers trained in psychological first aid after disasters to supporting youth-led storytelling projects that build hope and agency around climate.

Within our Community, this work aims to bring more Forward Global members into the fold. A win looks like a few more members deciding to fund at the intersection of mental health and climate.

This is exactly why Forward Global exists. The Journey inspired. The program deepened it. And a member turned what she learned into something the whole field can use. This example is a reminder that you don’t need a massive grant to make a difference—just the right question, and the right people around you to help answer it.

*Full name withheld for privacy.