MacKenzie Scott gave Active Minds a $20 million unrestricted gift, the largest donation in the nonprofit’s history. Alison Malmon said the money gives Active Minds room to direct resources where its work has the biggest need and opportunity.
Malmon, the founder and executive director at Active Minds, said the gift is “transformative not just in its scale, but in its validation of young people as the primary drivers of change in mental health,” and added that the unrestricted support lets the organization build long-term capacity. Active Minds also said it plans a multi-year use of the gift to scale national infrastructure, build community, energize young leadership, fund youth-led solutions, and translate youth voices into system change.
Active Minds and the gift
The donation follows a $4 million gift Scott gave Active Minds in 2021. This new check is larger and comes without donor restrictions, which gives the organization flexibility in how it deploys the funds across its planned programs.
Active Minds said part of the money will go to its Mental Health Advocacy Academy for high schoolers and its Mental Health Advocacy Institute for college students. Those programs sit inside a broader effort to move youth mental health work beyond one-time grants and into a longer runway for training, organizing, and advocacy.
CDC data in 2023
The gift lands as the organization points to severe needs among young people in America. CDC data from 2023 showed around a fifth of American high schoolers had seriously considered attempting suicide, 16% had created a plan to attempt suicide, about 20% of U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 reported anxiety in the prior two weeks, and 18% reported symptoms of depression.
Active Minds also cited a 2025 study by mental health researchers that found severe anxiety had increased by 86% in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, while severe depression had increased by 145%. Researchers at Harvard University and Baylor University found that young adults ages 18 to 29 are deeply unhappy on average.
Alison Malmon on philanthropy
Malmon said, “While this gift secures a strong foundation and helps us navigate an uncertain philanthropic landscape, philanthropy alone cannot solve this crisis,” drawing a line between a large grant and the larger scale of the problem. The immediate task for Active Minds is to turn a single unrestricted donation into a multi-year plan, with the amount flowing to infrastructure, youth leadership, advocacy, and program expansion rather than a fixed list of line items.
For readers watching how youth mental health groups use major gifts, the practical question is the split inside that multi-year rollout. Active Minds has named the programs and the work it wants to grow; the remaining step is how it parcels out the $20 million across them.
