"We need help, mental health is turning into the Airline industry" a letter to my local member of parliament

Hi Zali.

Mitch Wallis here from Heart On My Sleeve.

I’m sure you’re incredibly busy ramping into your role. I’m so proud of your election, and I’m humbled that I, and we as HOMS, could play a small part in driving advocacy and awareness through the Gen Zali mental health event, social media posts etc as a trusted supporter of your campaign.

When we first met I said that building a relationship with you is my primary intention for our meeting, and that we may be able to support each other’s mutual goals over time… to help as many people as we can.

I am facing a massive blocker in being able to help people, and that is why I come to you now.

As a small mental health charity, it’s almost impossible to compete against the likes of BlackDog, BeyondBlue, Lifeline, SANE & Headspace due to the amount of funding they get. Hundreds of millions of dollars each, per charity. Yet, suicide and mental illness rates rise year-on-year - leading us to conclude that the current investment strategy isn’t exhaustive or as effective as it needs to be. However, being a mental health charity is like operating in the airline industry, the barrier to entry is so high, new entrants will likely fail. We at HOMS fight tooth and nail for $20 donations here and there, while the established charities thrive. There is little to incentivise innovation or new approaches to solving the problem. Coupled with that, there is a myth that as a not for profit, we aren’t allowed to have overhead costs or pay for good talent. We are supposed to save lives with next to no money, which is completely and utterly infeasible., while private enterprise thrive even at the cost our health sector in some cases.

Due to our inability to receive large grant funding from to the oligopoly nature of grant handouts, we have accepted that donation-based revenue is a very hard way to survive, so we have looked at others way to stay afloat.

As such, we have doubled down on the model of a social enterprise: we charge the people who can afford to pay for the services, and then give it away for free/cheap to people who can’t afford it.

This is why it’s so concerning to me that even this model is under threat.

I walked into a meeting with a large advertising agency earlier this week. It was our second meeting together. The intent was to finalise our activity plan and lock in our program of works (including finalise budget). They pulled out a collection of papers and put them on the desk. It was a proposal from the Black Dog Institute. The Managing Director of the company informed me that they will be working with Black Dog for their broader training initiatives, not because their programs are superior, but because it is free. The Government is subsidising/paying for Black Dog to run corporate training programs at companies in certain industries, free of charge. I understand the rationale: to incentivise companies to build mentally health workplaces.

But, this puts us in an almost impossible conundrum to solve. We are doing everything we can to have impact; fighting hard every day, dealing with people who are suicidal (it’s no small feat). On top of all this, we cannot face all of these operational barriers and competitive challenges to make our job even harder than it already is.

We cannot compete with free.

I implore you to consider that we are running out of ideas.

The way I see it, we have two options that we would like you to consider:

1. Heart On My Sleeve builds a business case for government funding so that we can also offer programs for free to corporates as a trusted partner and service delivery partner of the government.
2. The government removes it’s subsidised funding for any programs in the corporate space where there is a private economy to pay for things, and companies should invest in their own people if they believe in workplace health with their own money.

Our organisation has already proven the quality of our educational programs and interventions. In less than 2 years that we have shown strong results with the likes of KPMG, Microsoft & Suncorp (each link is a testimonial).

We aren’t asking for a handout, we are looking for foundational support & some underwriting guarantee so that we can build a sustainable business by earning our own way whilst saving lives. There is no better business model to support than that.

We need help. We will not give up, we will continue to fight, but please make this fight a little easier for us.

We are a Mosman born mental health charity (maybe the only one), and we are trying to grow to be something truly transformational.

We hope to be around for years to come.

Thank you for your consideration in this very immediate and real matter.

Kind regards

Mitch

MITCH WALLIS

Founder & CEO

[email protected]