Fears of Authoritarianism Destroying Your Mental Health? A Community-Minded Solution Could Help

These days, emails from everyone from close friends to professional associates often start with some version of “I hope you’re doing OK”— a kind of wellness check that speaks volumes while leaving much more unsaid. How can we find the words to express what we’re feeling amid the continuous stream of bad news and political chaos?

I got a few answers on a month-long trip this past April to Africa, where new approaches to collective mental health care are among the many innovations being tested by the continent’s social changemakers and philanthropists. I was there as part of the production team for the podcast Dreaming in Color. The new season is highlighting Africa’s role as a driver of global innovation and leadership.

The continent has the youngest and fastest-growing population on earth. By 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African. This seismic demographic shift prompted the New York Times to declare that the future is African, noting that “as the world grays, Africa blooms.” But that blooming is as much about new ideas as it is about demographics. Africa’s fresh thinking about old problems should provide the inspiration and lessons that American philanthropy needs more of now.

Impact investor Tijan Watt, co-founder of Wuri Ventures, who we interviewed in Senegal, calls this “frog-leaping,” or the transplantation of innovations from the Global South to the Global North.

Lyft is a good example. It started as ZimRide, a carpooling service for U.S. college students that pre-dated Uber and created the American ride-sharing market. The idea for ZimRide, along with its name, came from a Lyft co-founder’s trip to Zimbabwe, where he discovered a vibrant ride-sharing industry that made transportation more affordable.

A New Mental-Health Model

An African approach to mental health and healing could be another one of those innovative frog-leaping ideas. In Nairobi I met Tom Osborn, the CEO of the Shamiri Institute, Africa’s largest youth mental-health provider, who despite what he jokingly calls his “white name,” grew up in rural Kenya as the son of sugarcane farmers before going on to study psychology at Harvard. He credits much of his success to the investment and support that his entire village poured into him. At just 19 years old, he led an organization that developed clean energy from recycled sugarcane waste material, becoming the youngest ever Echoing Green fellow.

His latest venture — Shamiri means “thrive” in Swahili — challenges the Western approach to mental health care, which emphasizes formal diagnosis and private therapy. Instead, Osborn’s initiative examines what it would look like if such care was anchored in African values that put community first.

“The way we think about mental health today — rooted in Western diagnostics — isn’t always valid for our context,” says Osborn. “Communities already have their own language and practices around healing, often grounded in religion, storytelling, or relationships. What we’re doing is building something from scratch — something for Africa, by Africans — that starts from our lived realities and focuses on care.”

In Shamiri’s model, mental health becomes a community endeavor where trained community members offer peer care delivered in group settings more consistent with communal cultural norms. By tying individual mental health to collective well-being, Shamiri is helping to make mental health care a priority in communities where it was once stigmatized.

A similar mindset might be needed in this country to help many of us in the nonprofit world and beyond navigate today’s seemingly unending barrage of challenges. I’m not sure what that might look like stateside, but I believe collective healing could be a welcome alternative to American individualism, which hasn’t served many of us so well.

If collective well-being was the norm, emails in my inbox might instead ask: “Is your block, neighborhood, town, city, OK?” In fact, there is a growing community of social justice psychologists who argue that if mental health issues like anxiety are rising, that is not a result of a change in individual human biology, but rather a sign that society is ill. Therefore, they argue, care that rests on helping people cope under current conditions is teaching them to accept injustice. It’s a framing that gives me comfort these days as I am increasingly convinced that authoritarianism is destroying my mental health.

Stifling Innovation

What does any of this mean for philanthropy? My talks with Osborn and other African change makers serve as a reminder that if philanthropy truly cherishes innovation, it must fund ideas from a diverse and racially inclusive pool of fresh voices. The attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion — and the caution it’s creating among donors about funding race and identity work — will rob the nation of creative thinking.

Funders’ obsession with risk in this moment has real life repercussions for organizations still trying to ensure all communities can flourish. Just last week, I got word that two Black-led nonprofits, whose work is anchored in Black communities, will close their doors because funding for such efforts is disappearing. They are far from the only ones.

What the world needs now are grant makers who embrace equity with dollars. The real risk comes from not giving.

In Tunisia, we met philanthropist Farah Mami, who funds gender-equity efforts and women-led enterprises in North Africa. Her giving is guided by principles that are particularly salient now. “We often forget that we create our own hell through fear, through guilt, through repression,” she says.

But she also notes that choosing another path is always an option. “Heaven, for me, is a world where people feel safe to be who they truly are and where love is present not [just] as a sentiment, but as a force — strong, protective, and transformative. We can be each other’s hell, or we can be each other’s heaven. I choose to build spaces where heaven is possible.”

Sounds like a frog-leaping idea to me.