Bring Change 2 Mind II
Organization
Founded in 2010, Bring Change to Mind’s (BC2M) mission is to end the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness. Its role is to start the conversations and share stories to bring awareness, understanding, and empathy necessary to inspire action and structural change, transforming feelings of isolation and despair into feelings of community and hope. In collaboration with leading mental health professionals, and utilizing the latest academic research, BC2M launched a series of Public Service Announcement campaigns. The first was directed by Ron Howard in New York’s Grand Central Station and to date the four campaigns have been seen by more than three billion people through cinema, television, radio, digital, print, and out-of-home placement. The College Toolkit Pilot Project, UBC2M, is developing a methodology for tracking how student attitudes around mental illness and stigma change over time, and LETSBringChange2Mind (LETS BC2M) is a youth-directed high school program utilizing active-participation clubs as a means of fighting stigma.
Situation
The LETS BC2M high school program was launched in September 2015 with twenty-five Bay Area high schools. LETS BC2M clubs are student-led and supported by a designated club advisor from the school. BC2M headquarters acts as an advisor and source of support for the clubs and provides a range of LETS BC2M educational materials with a club starter kit and guidebook and a $500 grant to fund club activities. In just eighteen months, this student-led mental health initiative has grown to fifty-six Bay Area high schools with a test pilot of four schools in Los Angeles. Because half of mental health disorders begin before the age of fourteen, BC2M wants to scale this program nationally.
Project Objectives
BC2M asked an ACT team to develop a financial model to support expansion of the LETS BC2M program from a regional “pilot” to a sustainable national program.
Project Overview
In the process of this project, the ACT team analyzed BC2M’s current financial model to determine the leading success factors, which the team found to be staffing, club grants, student summit, and marketing and promotions.
The team then conducted an online survey of participating schools. Forty-two schools completed the survey, on which they were asked to rate the importance of: personality and drive of clubs’ leaders, funding provided by BC2M, access to mental health training, and ideas and support from LETS BC2M.
Key Recommendations
The ACT team created a financial model, which included the following six tabs:
- Scenario – use when developing and testing different scenarios it may be considering as part of its planning
- Assumptions – describes the underlying assumptions regarding average growth rates for every major component of the budget
- Operating model – presents the core program budget
- Regional summary – presents summary of budget for individual region; use this when preparing regional budget presentations
- Total – presents a summary of the entire budget for all regions; use this for planning and preparing organizational budget presentations
- Historical Information – the initial budget supplied to the ACT team