How We Work
We Work in Three Ways:
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LEGISLATIVE ADVOCACY
Elegant, effective efforts to educate local, state, and federal lawmakers have led to great advances in keeping young people safe. The Jake Collective will seek to support efforts such as these, particularly where they serve the subset of young people whose complex brains place them at elevated risk.
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JAKE FOUNDATION
Through the Jake Foundation, we make grants to nonprofit organizations serving young people across a range of settings, as well as to those scientists and researchers working to better understand them. In a shifting funding landscape for life science and brain science especially, we seek to identify and support promising research and interventional strategies, as well as to support practitioners.
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IMPACT INVESTING
Jake Collective will help address underinvestment in mental health startups. For a range of reasons, drug and device development is extremely difficult in this space, and often, for clarity in clinical trials, so-called “complex kids” are excluded. Where entrepreneurs are working to bring promising IP out of the lab, we want to help incubate and develop solutions all the way to the clinic or public. Any investment returns will be deployed in further impact investing or donated to the Jake Foundation for grantmaking.
The Jake Collective seeks to address underinvestment in mental health outcomes for a specific group of young people whose lived experience is characterized by a set of symptoms and thought patterns that together most often lead to a diagnosis of ADHD.
ADHD alone, however, rarely describes the complex experience of the kids we support, and often corollary diagnoses and observations are made. The developing language and understanding of these traits, and how they might be understood as diagnoses, suggests enormous opportunity for research and development of treatment modalities.
This set of traits usually appears in elementary school, and poses increasing challenges as a young person begins to experience the stresses of early adolescent social expectations. A middle schooler might be exhausted by the work of fitting in with their peers. They might begin to struggle with sleep or executive functioning. The enormous changes of puberty bring additional escalation and challenge with particular regard to emotional regulation.
Even young people with excellent, qualified mental health support might not recognize how complex their growing brains truly are. Often this applies to young people who are academically gifted, which can further complicate adults’ efforts to see their struggle. They, their families, and their clinicians might have no idea that their risk for suicidality is in fact quite high. The better a young person is at masking these differences, the greater the danger they are in. Parents and clinicians may have false assurances that all is well, while the young person’s ability to thrive quickly erodes.
There isn’t yet an accurate, inclusive term for such complex young people. As a group, they have been misdiagnosed or unseen. The risk to them is too high to miss their specific needs any longer.
The language, diagnostic work, and clinical approaches to understanding such young people are rapidly evolving. The Jake Collective seeks to identify those organizations and individuals already working effectively in this space so we can fund, amplify, and support their efforts.