Toronto, Canada – May 7, 2025 – A major, often overlooked gap in global mental health decisions is limited meaningful youth engagement. To mark Mental Health Week, Grand Challenges Canada’s Being Initiative is releasing a new report, Youth Voices: A Guide to Meaningful Engagement in Mental Health Funding, co-written by young people, that reveals how excluding youth from mental health funding decisions is not only harmful but also a missed opportunity to create impactful, sustainable change.
Despite making up nearly half the global population, young people continue to be sidelined in mental health policymaking and funding decisions. As a result, many programs fail to prevent youth mental health challenges and promote youth well-being, deepening a gap that is already at a tipping point.
“When young people are given the space to contribute meaningfully, they bring lived wisdom, fresh perspectives, and deep-rooted care for the communities they belong to. We are not just beneficiaries of mental health initiatives; we are co-creators and experts in our own right,” says Muskan Lamba, Being Youth Advisor, India.
In low- and middle-income countries, where most of the world’s youth live, one in seven adolescents faces mental health challenges that threaten their education, inclusion, and economic futures. Yet the systems intended to support them are rarely shaped by the youth themselves.
Over the past two years, the Being Initiative has collaborated with a global Youth Advisory Group. The resulting guide highlights our lessons of partnering with young people, both successes and challenges, including limited capacity, operational constraints, and competing institutional priorities. A central insight from the report is that, while structural barriers persist, it is both possible and necessary to find practical ways to integrate young people’s voices into complex initiatives.
Research consistently shows that those closest to the challenges are best positioned to identify barriers and design effective solutions. Authentic youth engagement must go beyond one-off consultations or advisory roles. It requires a co-creation approach that integrates youth perspectives from design through to implementation and evaluation.
“Current mental health systems are not designed with youth in mind,” says Melani O’Leary, Director of Partnerships at Grand Challenges Canada. “For too long, young people have been sidelined in conversations about their own well-being. If we truly want to address the youth mental health crisis, we must empower them to lead and co-create solutions with us.”
The Being Initiative is committed to reversing this trend by embedding youth leadership across every stage of its work. This new guide provides a practical roadmap for mental health funders seeking to do the same.
For more information or to arrange interviews, please contact:
Aziz Froutan, Bilingual Manager, Media Relations and Communications
aziz.froutan@grandchallenges.ca, +1(437)-228-3166
About the Being Initiative: Being is hosted by Grand Challenges Canada, one of the world’s largest impact-first investors, and is funded in partnership with Fondation Botnar, the Government of Canada, and the United Kingdom’s Department of Health and Social Care using U.K. aid through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Learn more at www.beinginitiative.org
Read the full report: https://being-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Youth-Voices.pdf