The dominant conversation in youth mental health starts with what’s wrong. But when the conversation is organized around crisis, risk, and pathology, the solutions that follow are built to reduce symptoms — and young people end up as subjects of those solutions rather than architects of them. Jaspal Sandhu argues that sharing power with young people expands which problems we focus on, and what’s possible when we solve them.
Jaspal is President and CEO of Hopelab, a research and grantmaking organization focused on mental health and well-being for Black, Brown, and Queer young people. Since 2010, he has also taught interdisciplinary courses on public health innovation at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. And before joining Hopelab he co-founded Gobee, a global social impact design firm. Designer, researcher, grantmaker: it’s a combination that helps him see the structural gap between youth voice and youth power. In this Q&A, Jaspal describes what we can do to close it.
Question: What’s the critical issue?
Jaspal Sandhu: It’s nearly impossible to open your phone and not see a headline about the “youth mental health crisis.” But when conversations focus solely on harms, young people are cast as passive consumers or “at risk.” Online spaces are treated as something to restrict or design around, rather than environments to study and understand. When the narrative of crisis and risk is dominant, young people lose control over their own mental health narrative.
Young people must be partners in shaping their futures. It’s important to equip young people with resources to shape public narratives about their own well-being, while prioritizing their care and safety. Young people have the vision and imagination to shape the world they want to see.
Young people are already doing the work – building solutions, programs, and initiatives rooted in hope and joy. It is undeniably important to listen to young people, but the work cannot stop there. Shifting power is an all-in approach. It requires more than connection and belief. It requires funding, mindset shifts, and decision-making. This includes financial support in the form of funding youth-led initiatives, connecting young leaders with policymakers, compensation for content contributions, and investing in youth-led policy organizations. Together, we can empower young people to shape their own thriving futures.
Q: What evidence supports your perspective?
Jaspal: Achieving a future where Brown, Black, and Queer young people are thriving and empowered will require believing in an incredibly different future than the one we live in right now. In my past three-plus years at Hopelab, I’ve worked with co-funders to build programs like the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund (RTYPF), which was founded with the acknowledgment that traditional philanthropic organizations too rarely center the communities they serve — especially young people. The creation of this fund required not only financial investment from organizations willing to support AI, climate activism, and mental health initiatives, but also their willingness to engage in a grantmaking process that deliberately and purposefully shares power with young people at the decision-making stage.
In its second year, the RTYPF steering committee added four seats to include young leaders from previous grantee cohorts. Each young leader is compensated for their time serving on the steering committee, providing them with the resources to remain focused on their organizational goals. This step helped refine the Fund’s focus for the third cohort by expanding the definition of tech accountability and supporting the responsible technology movement. Including young people in leadership positions required an intentional shift – financial, institutional, power, and mindset. It’s exciting to see it take shape in RTYPF, and hopefully, this model can serve as inspiration for others to follow suit.
We also look to inspiring work at peer organizations. The Rithm Project helps young people find their agency as leaders by building community and fostering connections, especially as the world increasingly relies on AI and other technologies. Their latest research counters many dominant perceptions held by older adults about how AI intersects with young people’s social lives and emotional well-being. Young Futures is a funder that backs organizations building solutions that strengthen youth well-being. What makes their model particularly powerful is its emphasis on cultivating youth agency. Rather than designing solutions for young people, they invest in young leaders and organizations working alongside them, building infrastructure for youth power.
Q: What are people getting wrong?
Jaspal: Youth mental health and well-being is complex, and the dominant “at risk” and “crisis” framing limits what solutions can be developed. Creating effective clinical solutions is absolutely necessary, but that’s just a piece of a much bigger puzzle. Well-being is affected by many diverse factors – financial strain, food insecurity, student debt, employment opportunities, family pressure, climate, racism, and homophobia. If we continue to take deficit-based approaches, rather than looking at the larger picture, we’ll stay on the path of creating narrowly defined interventions. Older adults don’t have all the answers. Not listening to young people, undervaluing their experiences, and discrediting their expertise puts blinders on us. But taking a partnership-based approach makes it impossible for us to focus only on deficits. Power shifting forces us to set our ambitions higher. Young people help us see a future filled with imagination and hope, enabling us to build, together, pathways to improving health, well-being, and thriving.
Q: What should people be doing?
Jaspal: If we truly want a world where young people live joyful, purposeful lives, we need to give them greater agency to shape their own futures, rather than believing we have all the answers. If this seems overwhelming, it isn’t. It’s ok to start where you are and start small. Invite a young person to contribute their expertise to your blog, or try something I did – start a co-mentorship with a young person. A co-mentorship is like a traditional mentorship, except there is reciprocity in the relationship. My co-mentor, Maddie Freeman, founder of NoSo, and I support each other in different ways, leaning into our differences in age or experience.
If you’ve already taken steps and are working with young people, push further. I’ll keep saying this: listening to young people is only the first step. Empowering young people is essential if we want to create wider pathways to improve their mental health and well-being. Recently, this has shown up in a few ways. I was asked to speak on a panel about youth mental health and responsible technology. I noticed that the panel had diverse perspectives; however, it didn’t include a young person. I worked with the organizers to secure this opportunity for a young leader working at the intersection of tech accountability and AI, so he could share his expertise and experience alongside other experts (in place of my voice). They were a bit resistant at first, but pushing that this perspective would strengthen the panel proved to be a worthwhile investment. It’s important to consider when a situation calls for our voice to uplift young people and when we should step back and yield that power directly to young people. When we work together to share power with young people, I think we can start to achieve a future that young people deserve.
This Q&A was originally published in Kaleidoscope, the monthly Q&A series powered by the Connected Learning Alliance. Subscribe to Kaleidoscope on LinkedIn or sign up for the CLA’s newsletter to get the next conversation in your inbox.
