CEO Corner with Dr. Celine Coggins 

Dear trusted friends and supporters of The Goodness Web,

A few weeks ago, The Goodness Web held its first national retreat. It was an opportunity for our donors and grantees to come together and help us build toward our next stage. It was incredibly gratifying to have nearly 60 donors from 13 states say yes to joining us. Based on the positive response, we now plan to do it again next year for an even larger crowd. Stay tuned!

I wanted to highlight a few important takeaways from the retreat: 

1. Everyone has different reasons for becoming a part of The Web, but the community we’re building matters. 

Board member Jane Saccaro led a session that prompted people to reflect on the values they bring to their giving. Some of us are most interested in the quantifiable impact our grants are making. Others want to hear more stories from beneficiaries. Some are most interested in meeting immediate needs while others emphasize policy and systems change. There is a place for all of that in our portfolio-based approach, and there were many good conversations about the relative emphasis of each of these. People had different approaches, but a key common denominator was the shared desire in the room to be a part of a community of givers who care about youth mental health. There is value in sharing our personal stories in a supportive space and in learning about a rapidly evolving field together.

2. The real value of pooled giving is clearest when viewed from the nonprofit perspective. 

We heard from grantees about the work they are doing directly serving young people or driving policy change. Each was clear on their aspiration to grow their impact. But with the average size of a philanthropic grant in the US sitting at $27,200, it is hard to marshal the resources to get to scale. That is where collaborative funds like The Goodness Web play an instrumental role. We build the donor community that allows us to make grants that average above $1M, a whopping 50X that average. What that means for nonprofits is that they don’t have to use scarce resources to hire development staff; they can focus on hiring experts to serve young people.

3. In a turbulent world where many foundations only give the IRS-minimum of 5% annually and hundreds of billions are sitting in Donor Advised Funds, TGW deploys every dollar we raise. 

I had a few conversations with people who asked if we were setting aside donations for an endowment to use in the future. It reminded me that we should spend more time making clear how different we are from most in the philanthropic space. While we award multi-year gifts and incorporate the full gift into our financial planning, we exist to maximize giving to youth mental health now. We believe in urgency. We believe that this is an important moment in which public attention is fixed on youth mental health and transformative progress is possible. We believe that making bold bets now will drive progress and help us to build a larger donor base in the future. We believe that too many folks are on the sidelines in this critical moment and we want to be a visible enough to invite them in to being a part of the solution. We seek to maximize the impact of every dollar invested in our fund. The time is now!