Learning and Innovation

Central to our success as an organization is the ability to assess impact, share our learnings, and scale up and out the most promising practices and policies to further mental health and well-being in the nation.

Three years into our mission, Well Being Trust has made great strides in discerning strategies that can best unpack complex on-the-ground learnings through our investments as well as align with other organizations looking to better assess well-being in the nation. This past year, the following has occurred, which we believe further solidifies our role as a leader in mental health and well-being, and most importantly, strengthens our stance on issues that can advance mental health and well-being.

We intend to:

  • Evaluate our investments: This past year, Well Being Trust was able to formalize relationships that will help inform our organization on the impact of key investments. Further strengthening our ability to learn from our own investments, Well Being Trust will be able to apply these evaluative strategies to future opportunities, partnerships, and investments.
    • For California, Well Being Trust has contracted with an external evaluator to help assess the impact of several of our investments
  • Set and share measures across sectors: A central problem to scaling many efforts is the lack of common language and measurement. In partnership with many others, Well Being Trust has been at the forefront of establishing and advancing measures that support vital conditions necessary for achieving intergenerational well-being. The beginning of this process was through our community work and the Well Being Legacy effort – now, Well Being Trust is building off this work to ensure that all sectors are becoming more aligned with measures that support well-being.
    • Worked with Community Commons to create infrastructure of sharing community level stories and data around well-being
    • Began working with the National Committee on Vital Statistics to create metrics on measuring well-being across communities and the nation
  • Accelerate shared learnings and advance the implementation of promising strategies: Building off a common set of core measures, Well Being Trust can start to advance what works and what doesn’t for mental health and well-being. Sharing data through stories, community profiles, policy briefs, and external written communication, Well Being Trust aims to add to the local and national dialogue on well-being, allowing for promising practices to be adopted and in some cases scaled.
    • In partnership with Providence St. Joseph Health System a menu of solutions was created, which highlighted evidence-based practices for better addressing mental health and substance use disorders
    • Partnered with Providence Ventures around innovations in tele-psychiatry and digital tools for behavioral health

Overall, Well Being Trust is working to partner in harnessing data to identify areas of opportunity, inform solutions, and measure results that can ensure investments and initiatives are ever-increasing their impact at scale. As a national organization, this is a challenging proposition, one that requires strategic partners, but one that we believe is essential in accomplishing our mission.