Deadline: 27-Jun-23
The Grand Challenges Canada is seeking applications for Learning and support provider for Being – A Youth Mental Health Initiative.
The Grand Challenges Canada is looking for consulting firms, accelerators, incubators, venture advisors or mental health organizations to facilitate a global learning community for funded organizations. This community would enable funded organizations – including innovators, researchers and others, to learn from each other’s and other learning communities’ best practices. The Provider would also support Being’s partners, track and share their collective impact with the global mental health community and support the scale and impact of funded projects in low- and middle-income countries through technical and capacity building support.
Role of the Learning and support provider
- For an initial period of two years (with the possibility for renewal), the selected Learning and Support Provider will facilitate a global learning community by:
- Enabling knowledge sharing among their network of funded organizations, innovators, researchers and other global learning communities to exchange best practices, approaches, challenges, and successes.
- Creating and managing communities of practice to inform mental health communities globally and in priority countries and support stakeholder engagements and consultations.
- Organizing and facilitating learning activities to collect and analyze data and leading annual learning meetings to help inform the global mental health community.
- Additionally, the Provider will advise and support the current roster of innovators in Grand Challenges Canada’s Global Mental Health program and future Being-funded organizations (innovators, youth-led organizations, and others), including but not limited to:
- Providing one-on-one technical support and leading workshops, facilitating coaching and peer-to-peer learning to funded projects in programming and implementation.
- Helping youth-led and youth-focused innovators improve their strategies and frameworks in monitoring and evaluation, stakeholder and meaningful youth engagement, fundraising and more.
- Supporting youth-led organizations and organizations led by people with lived experience of mental health challenges in strengthening their leadership capacity, building partnerships and securing funding.
- The Learning and Support Provider will also work in collaboration with Grand Challenges Canada to capture, interpret and share learning and impact data from Being’s network to help communicate their collective impact with the global mental health community.
What They Do?
- Being works with young people, researchers, organizations, innovators and local communities to help improve the mental wellbeing of young people aged 10 to 24 in thirteen priority countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Romania, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Vietnam — selected for their growing youth population in urban areas.
- What They Fund:
- They fund research and innovation targeting the early drivers and needs of young people’s mental health. They’re interested in youth-led and youth-focused approaches that help improve young people’s mental wellbeing, help create supportive communities and help prevent future mental health challenges.
- They will fund:
- Research to understand local mental health needs and drivers of wellbeing among young people and their long term impacts, engage in stakeholder consultations, build consensus, and identify priority research and funding needs.
- Ecosystem-level grants to address barriers to scale and sustainability, promote knowledge transfer and inform implementation.
- Seed Innovations to test and refine youth-led and youth-focused ideas that address the early drivers of young people’s mental wellbeing, focusing on approaches that help prevent mental health challenges and that leverage data and technology.
- Promising and tested innovations to help catalyze their scale and sustainability through transition-to-scale funding.
Eligibility Criteria
- Eligible bids should demonstrate the following knowledge and experience for consideration:
- Expertise or knowledge in global youth mental health.
- Proven leadership and capacity-building skills in youth engagement, monitoring and evaluation, theories of change, public sector engagement, and scaling innovations.
- Familiarity with global stakeholder engagement strategies and current developments in the global mental health field.
- Experience working in low- and middle-income countries.
- Experience working collaboratively with youth and people with lived experience of mental health challenges with appropriate safeguarding mechanisms in place.
- French competency is required. Spanish, and Arabic language competency would be an asset.
For more information, visit Grand Challenges Canada.