Moving from Conversation to Action:
Funding Solutions to Empower Teens in the Digital Age 

Message from Katya Hancock: First of all, it’s hard to be a nonprofit leader and I’m cheering you on. I encourage you to: 1. Take care of yourself as much as you can. Take weekends off, take vacations/staycations, and take time to celebrate your wins. It can be so easy to stay in the day-to-day blocking and tackling of issues that pop up and move right past the moments that deserve recognition by you and your team. 2. Culture matters. Take the time to develop a culture guide, including your core values, what you stand for, who you want to emulate, and how you work. Share this openly with your team for feedback and make sure they’re bought in. 3. Borrow some best practices from the startup world. For example, funders want to hear about quarterly and annual goals as well as projections. It can be tough to make projections when you’re in a constant fundraising hustle, but this practice will ultimately help fundraising. Reassess annual and quarterly goals every 90 days with your leadership team. Lastly, if you’re an org working to help teens and preteens navigate tech, we’d love to meet you! Please reach out.

Katya Hancock is a mission-driven executive, entrepreneur, and public health champion with more than two decades of impact leadership across healthcare, technology, and philanthropic ventures. Katya is the founding Executive Director of Young Futures, a nonprofit on a mission to make it easier to grow up in the digital world. Young Futures was founded to help young people and their families to not just survive, but flourish as a team when meeting the uncertainties of this digital wilderness. Prior to Young Futures, Katya spent a decade as a founding team member and Chief Impact Officer of StartUp Health, an organization dedicated to achieving health moonshots: the world’s most pressing health challenges, including mental health, health equity, access to care, children’s health, and women’s health. During Katya’s tenure, StartUp Health’s portfolio grew to 500 companies in 30 countries. Katya has also worked as an operator across multiple startups, including helping to build two successful fintech startups from the seed stage to acquisition by Fortune 500 companies. For Katya the Young Futures mission is personal. She lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband and two young children, Oz (9) and Coco (7).

More information at https://www.youngfutures.org/ 

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The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where we help leaders create synergy around their powerful vision. I’m joined by co-host David Dunworth, who’s board chair of Center Vision Leadership Foundation. Our guest today is Katya Hancock. Katya, we’re so glad to be interviewing you today. You have a lot of good stuff to share. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you do this important work.

Katya Hancock:
Happy to, and thank you for having me. Great to be with you both. So as mentioned, I’m Katya Hancock. I’m the founding executive director of an organization called Young Futures. And we really exist for one reason, and that is to help make it easier to grow up in the digital world. So we’re concerned with the mental health and the well-being of young people in America ages 10 to 19. I’ll share a little bit about my background because I’m bringing a lot of the DNA from earlier in my career into this organization. I’m actually coming to Young Futures, although we are a nonprofit. My background is in the for-profit startup world. So I have built multiple tech companies from the earliest stages, all the way through to acquisition, and spent the last 10 years building a company called Startup Health as a founding team member, which is a for-profit mission-driven company focused on solving big health challenges we call health moonshots. And the idea is, how can we support hundreds and eventually thousands of innovators and entrepreneurs who are solving things like bringing access to care to everyone on the planet, curing brain disease, and ending cancer? And the thesis was very much, no one knows what it’s going to take to solve these big challenges. Let’s support a whole community and ecosystem, network them together, and then support them as they figure it out. So I’m a big believer in the power of ecosystems and communities to drive change and also support innovators. So at StartUp Health, we built a two-year accelerator at Young Futures. We are grantmakers, and we have an accelerator to support our grantees. In the end, when I left StartUp Health, which is still very much a thriving company, There were 500 portfolio companies in 30 countries, and there was a media company to tell their stories. That’s the other thing I’m super passionate about is storytelling, which obviously you two are big believers in. The power of storytelling. So fast forward to Young Futures, what we do is we’re here to help the helpers. We’re here to uplift a whole ecosystem of innovators that we call Young Futures Innovators that are our grantees that are solving different challenges related to youth well-being and tech. So we run two funding challenges a year, and we give out $1 million total each time. announced our first 10 grantees, uh, the young futures innovators cohort. And then we support them through a six-month program called Young Futures Academy to help them level up what they’re doing and scale their impact. So, uh, it’s super exciting because in the for-profit space, there are so many accelerators and incubators, and there’s, there’s quite a gap on the nonprofit side. And there are a lot of learnings that can be translated from the for-profit world to the nonprofit world for leaders.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Welcome to the Non-Private Exchange, if you’re just coming by on the live stream. This is our 400th interview. We’ve interviewed a few people, and we’ve never had anybody like Katya today. So you gave us a title for this, and here’s the title, Moving from Conversation to Action, Funding Solutions to Empower Teens in the Digital Age. Now it’s called, give us the name of it, and it’s called Young Futures. So you just woke up one day and decided to start this. What was the inspiration?

Katya Hancock:
Yeah, so the origin story is super interesting. One, let’s just talk about where we are as a country. And of course, this problem exists globally as well. But we’re really focused on supporting nonprofits in the US for the time being. Each family and teen and caregiver and educator is really left to their own devices, literally and figuratively, when figuring out how to navigate technology and coming of age in this digital space. And we know that that’s really not working. We know that folks need guidance, they need solutions. I’m a mom myself, by the way. I have a seven and a nine-year-old. And in my family, with my husband, we’re just figuring it out. Even though I work in this space, we’re trying to create a community within our school to come up with shared practices and learnings. There’s a real lack of resources. And at the same time, there are amazing nonprofits doing work in communities. that are already showing that they’re helping young people and they need support and they need funding. So the need is clear. We also know that we’re in a loneliness and youth mental health crisis. We know that chronic loneliness, for example, can be as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And yet we live in a country where one out of 14 say they feel lonely every single day. And so those, two stats together lead to a super untenable situation. So the need is very, very clear. I’m really fortunate, and my team’s really fortunate, that we have amazing funders. We’re funded by Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company, Susan Crown Exchange, Susan Crown being another amazing female philanthropist, and a consortium of funders called The Goodness Web. And what happened was our main contacts at Pivotal and Susan Crown. Kelsey Noonan and Kevin Connors, have been co-funding work in this space since 2018, when they first realized, okay, we know that mental health outcomes for teens are going in the wrong direction, and we know that technology is playing a role here. It’s by no means the only cause of negative outcomes, but we know that there needs to be more support here and we need to figure out what’s going on. So they started funding research, funded a lot of other nonprofits and programmatic work, and then they realized, we need an ecosystem approach. We need to lift up a platform that can support many, many more nonprofits that are doing great work and that need help scaling. And then when we all three came together and I started talking about my history with StartUp Health and building ecosystems of innovators to drive change and kind of shared my vision for what this could look like, We just were, you know, talk about synergy, like your company, we were totally on the same page. And that led to, you know, I just started building this organization in November of last year. We just launched this year at South by Southwest. And we’ve already done our first funding challenge, giving out grants to our first 10 grantees. And we’re in the third, almost the third month of the Young Futures Academy cycle with them. And it’s just been amazing.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s amazing, isn’t it?

David Dunworth:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s terrific. Now, you had mentioned, you know, when we were actually even before we went on the air, but at the beginning, you were mentioning that you spent a lot of time in the tech space and you opened many companies yourself and spun them off and that kind of stuff. But what How did it happen that it caused you to dedicate this chapter in your life to this particular cause? Was it casual? Did you have an epiphany? What was the deal?

Katya Hancock:
You know, because I had spent 10 years building StartUp Health, I got so much amazing experience through that process. And StartUp Health is working on 14 challenges called Health Moonshots. And so those are, like I mentioned, you know, ending cancer, curing brain disease. Children’s health is one of them, and mental health is one of them, so I already had experience in those spaces. But across digital health, I was sort of a generalist because we were building communities around all these different themes. And I really felt like if I could find a mission that I really truly believe is just critical and I have endless energy for, I’d love to go deep on one mission. And so, as I mentioned, being a parent myself, this is an issue I was already tracking. It was definitely on my radar. And so when I came across Kelsey and Kevin, who I mentioned, my partners, and funders, and also felt so aligned with them in our core values and our missions that it seemed like all the right ingredients came together to leverage my experience to tackle this mission.

David Dunworth:
Wow. OK.

Hugh Ballou:
You, uh, before I ask my next question, I want to tell the listeners or viewers, there’s a transcript of this. We’re going to supercharge all the content here and you want to go back and pick up the sound bites. So don’t worry about trying to take notes. You’ve got it. You can go to the nonprofit exchange, T H E nonprofit exchange.org, O R G. And you can find this transcript and look for the title that I gave you. Um, moving from conversation to action. So, Katya, you’ve talked a little bit about the challenges. Dig a little deeper into the unique challenges young people and their caregivers are facing today. It’s a big deal, isn’t it?

Katya Hancock:
It is. It’s super tough to navigate technology. And currently, a lot of the conversations in our country in terms of how to navigate technology really come down to limiting screen time, which is sort of a blanket, monolithic approach that treats everybody the same way. There is absolutely a place for moderation and delaying access to technology. We’re certainly in favor of that. And we have to acknowledge that young people today live in a state of what we call digital tension. What I mean by that is You ask a teenager, and they will almost always tell you they wish they were on their phone less. They know they should spend less time on their phone, and they want to have a healthy relationship with technology. And at the same time, it’s literally the scaffolding of their lives. So you want to ask a teen to be on their phone less or be on their computer less, and all of their schoolwork often needs to be done on the computer. SAT preps on the computer, ordering at a restaurant on their phone. Oftentimes, they’re in clubs in high school, and all of the information for those clubs is delivered through Instagram. So there are so many examples of the ways that tech is just really ingrained in their lives. Also, with the youth mental health crisis that we’re currently living in, they are always feeling pressure to be there for their friends. Um, and so they might say, Hey, it’s 11 o’clock. I should definitely put my phone on. Do not disturb. I have a midterm tomorrow, but my best friend is having a mental health crisis. If I am not there for her in the middle of the night, you know, I’m going to feel terrible. I’m going to let her down. So that’s what I mean about digital tension. It’s just very complicated. And so coming at it with a very empathy-based approach and asking your teen you know, hey, what do you like about social media rather than what don’t you like? And, and, you know, what’s going on with your friend, et cetera, and not just making technology the bad guy, because that’ll shut down the lines of communication. Um, so it’s, it’s hard to be a teen and it’s hard to know how to support teens. And those are some of the things that we’re working on. Um, I, I mentioned also already, we’re, we’re in a loneliness crisis and the theme for our first funding challenge, it was called the Lonely Hearts Club challenge. We supported 10 nonprofits that are helping teens and preteens find meaningful social connections and belonging, and combat loneliness as they grow up in the digital world. And so that’s been really amazing because I talk about it a little bit like functional medicine. So rather than just saying limit screen time, we know that if young people have meaningful relationships with their family, community, and friends, they’re better equipped to handle challenges, including ones that come up online. and through tech behavior. So if we can start with a strong foundation of social connection and community, then those young people are going to be better equipped as they move through their adolescence.

David Dunworth:
That’s interesting stuff. Um, thank goodness I’m past the teen thing. My kids are in their forties and they’re having kids that are, well, I have a grandchild that’s going to be 12 this year. So there you go.

Katya Hancock:
You’re still in it. Yeah. Yeah. 12 is really, yes. That’s a that’s a really significant agent. We actually just conducted a youth listening tour where we interviewed dozens of young people, aged 13 to 18, and on the earlier end of the spectrum, very different than the older end of the spectrum. And all of them, including the 17, and 18-year-olds, talked about how hard it is to be in middle school and how that is an age that needs a lot of support when they get access to technology at that age especially.

David Dunworth:
Yeah, you know, one of you was talking about statistics, too. And one of the sad statistics that we’re pretty familiar with is that there’s a lot of nonprofits that start every year. And then we’re not going to be here next year, because the failure rate is for whatever reason, they have good hearts, but maybe not enough funding or what have you. In terms of early-stage nonprofits, how do you support them? How do you work with those early-stage nonprofits?

Katya Hancock:
Yeah. So we have criteria around the types of nonprofits that we support. We are comfortable supporting early-stage nonprofits. They do have to be an established 501c3 or a fiscally-sponsored org. So that’s a filter in terms of stage right there, because we all know those things are challenging to get done. And so what we do is, yes, we write them a check for $100,000, which is fantastic. We’re so privileged to be able to do that. But we also provide them with support in the six-month program, Young Futures Academy, across four key areas. So one is leadership and organizational scaling. Another is fundraising. Another is storytelling and communications. And another is subject matter expertise around, in this case, social connection and youth engagement for this cohort. And so we roll that out by bringing in amazing experts to lead master classes and office hours. We bring them together in a peer community. So every month they have a two-hour session called a peer circle, which is credible. It’s modeled after YPO forums if you’ve ever heard of those, where they bring together CEOs in networks. And so we’re helping them feel and understand that they’re not alone, that they’re part of a community. In fact, we convened them in June for a retreat in Washington, D.C., and so many of them said, I feel like I’m part of a movement now. I’m not alone. I’m not just doing my work in New Orleans or Louisville and where, you know, some of them are. They’re part of this cohort that has their back. And then, you know, we’re really just here to try to help them learn some of those skills. On the leadership side, it’s super interesting because one of the things I really believe in is the power of long-term goal setting, medium, and short-term, and that there should be a thread connecting all of them. And then you structure your quarter and your year that way and set goals in a way where you have tons of accountability. So there isn’t a single goal that isn’t mapped to a person who’s accountable for that goal. And so some of those learnings from the entrepreneurial operating systems that I’ve implemented in the past and bringing in experts to help with, those have been super interesting as well for some of our leaders.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow, David, that sounds familiar. In my for-profit company, Center Vision International, I do startups, and all of that stuff is spot on with what we do, and there’s a lot of need for that. So, that’s so, so important. David, I’m going to group several questions together, and then you pick up, the eighth one. So, you’re your background in startups is in business. So you’re transferring some of that to the nonprofit, which is really a business. You know, it’s it’s they’re both really difficult. And I guess I find that people make it more difficult than it should be. But, you know, it’s already hard enough. But on top of that the the business and I probably have all these regulations that make it difficult when people are not aware of how to navigate that. So talk about your experience there. How does it relate to the startups in this realm with what we call nonprofits? And what lessons do nonprofits need to learn from the business world? There are some good ones and some bad ones, right?

Katya Hancock:
That’s true. It doesn’t all translate. There’s certainly a cultural difference, as I’ve learned since I came into this space. But yes, there are a lot of lessons. I mentioned goal setting. One of the things that we walked our innovators through, many of them had some of this work in place, but taking a fresh look is super important, and having a methodology is super important, which is starting with your 10-year goals, having a three-year plan, having a one-year plan, and then, okay, the next quarter is 25% of that one-year plan. And what are the four to seven goals we want to accomplish in this quarter that can get us to that one year, which gets you to the three-year and the 10-year? And so those types of exercises and tools that we’ve developed to help our young future innovators think through those things have been super helpful. And then I mentioned accountability. When it comes to people and culture, being as transparent as possible about goals and who’s accountable for getting them done. That doesn’t mean that person does all the work. It means they’re accountable for making sure it happens. And so some of those types of learnings around structure, accountability, and communication on goals and deadlines and checking in regularly are huge. The reason that I think the 90-day cycle is so important is that if you don’t have a 90-day cycle and check in at the end of each quarter, OK, what did we accomplish? What didn’t we? What are our goals for next quarter? you know how it is when you’re building something, you can have your head down for nine months and then realize we’re actually kind of off track of our year one goals. And so the 90-day checking-in and iterating is just so important. And those are really core startup principles that nonprofits can definitely leverage. Another, and this has come up recently within our cohort, is just around setting culture and how important that is for leaders. You know, most organizations have core values, but do you have a culture guide that expands on those in terms of how you work, what your operating principles are, what you stand for, and then do you share that with potential hires, you know, and make sure that you’re on the same page. So a lot of it is about communicating. So, you know, the accountability is about communicating, the culture guide is about communicating, and that can really you know, minimize disappointment when you’ve communicated those expectations.

David Dunworth:
Sure, sure, sure. That’s really powerful stuff you’re talking about. I can see how that transfers from the startup world to certainly nonprofits. Those are valuable tools you’re talking about. You mentioned how your funding is collaborative. Tell me, tell us all a little bit about how that works and why it’s so powerful. And if I could ask you for the interaction or how it translates into young futures, how does that whole work thing work specifically for your organization?

Katya Hancock:
Sure. Collaborative funding is, you know, it’s a fantastic model if you can find the right funders who want to be true partners with you and with each other. And so in our case, we’ve got three different funders who bring different skill sets, different networks, different communication platforms to amplify our initiatives, and a lot of learnings, especially with Pivotal and Susan Crown, they’ve actually co-funded a lot of projects together in the past. They’ve learned a lot of lessons. And so, for example, when we launched the Lonely Hearts Club Challenge, our first funding challenge, we partnered quite closely with our funders on designing that initial RFP because they said, you know what, we tried this, we’ve tried that, we’ve had these experiences, and we really felt like some of those conversations just helped us You know, skip a lot of cycles of learning. We had about 200 applications to that funding challenge, which was amazing. And then we we put together an external review committee so we are getting those. 200 applications down to the 21 that we interviewed was a process. We also partnered with a great organization called the Foundation for Social Connection. They helped us. They’ve done a lot of amazing research on social connection, and they helped us build criteria that was evidence-based as we selected these nonprofits. And then there was a portion of the review where our team completely stepped out. Several of our funders participated in the external review committee. And they narrowed down a swath of the applications so that if we had any biases, we were out of it for part of it. And we had half of that external review committee made up of young people, which was amazing because, you know, we only find nonprofits that are either led by young people or closely co-developed with young people. And so we also wanted young people in the review process. So that was super cool. They were just so tough in the best way. They had the most critical insights. That’s something that is a really important part of our process. But back to your question is the funders have been just bringing their diverse backgrounds at every step and then leaning on each other to share resources and also sometimes divide and conquer. It’s really a multiplier when you have multiple funders that have that kind of thought partner mindset.

David Dunworth:
Well, you know, Hugh, I’m in love with this concept, with this entire organization. It’s terrific. Thank you so much. What you’re working on is critical to the future of the world. Getting mental health and digital awareness in young people so that they are thriving rather than being lonely and depressed or what have you, confused by the world that’s throwing stuff at them all the time. You’re really doing a blessed job. Thank you so much for that.

Katya Hancock:
Thank you so much. And I, I just want to say, you know, this is an incredible generation, Gen Z and Gen Alpha coming up behind them. They’re so smart. They’re so aware of their work, the world and their place in it, and how they can make a difference. Um, you know, I’m, I’m of course generalizing, but I’ve just met so many incredible young people and they deserve to have optimism and excitement about their future. And the stories they’re hearing about young people and tech are not that. And so we’re just really excited to bring this ecosystem of solutions out there to young people and their families.

Hugh Ballou:
And we’re happy to be here highlighting that work. We didn’t know this existed, but David, I guess you’ve picked up everything you’re talking about. There’s synergy, pardon me. There’s synergy with what we do with more mature nonprofits and older people. I taught middle school at Portland in my life, and they are brilliant. And I like to say, yes, the youth are the future of our country, but they are today’s country as well. They’re today’s culture. So we forget that. And you’re putting them to work. And we’re learning things from them. How great is that? So your website for people to find you is Young Futures. It’s youngfutures.org. When people go there, what will they find?

Katya Hancock:
So they’ll find information about our inaugural cohort of grantees. If you scroll down, they can read our manifesto, who we’re about, and watch our intro video to help you understand the spirit of Young Futures. And right below that, you can join our community. We have a biweekly newsletter that is, if I will say so myself, it’s awesome. It highlights the latest in this space. If you have a teen in your life, you should subscribe to that. we will share solutions and research and news and events. And we’ll also announce here shortly our next funding challenge, which will launch right after Labor Day. Subscribe to our newsletter and you can learn about that as well. And we’ll have a new timeline up that relates to that. So yeah, super, super exciting. Would love to welcome any of your listeners to sign up for our newsletter, as well as at the bottom of that page, they can see our LinkedIn, our Instagram, our X, and follow us wherever they like to spend their time.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s what social media is. It’s social. Let’s connect. Katya, we are so impressed. You are a powerhouse, and I’m sure your team is too. So it’s so comforting and refreshing and exciting to hear about the work you’re doing. This is powerful. So what do you want to leave people with? What do you want people to do next besides join your list?

Katya Hancock:
Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, I do have a powerhouse team, I will say. It’s three of us right now, and they’re absolutely phenomenal, so super lucky to have them. What I want people to leave with is this understanding that youth are not a monolith. They are all different. And so solutions cannot be blanket solutions. I hope that people will have a little bit of inspiration to come into conversations with young people as listeners and with empathy so that they can be partners. With young people, I know it’s hard. It’s easier said than done. But I’ll plug one book that I really recommend. It’s called Behind Their Screens from a partner organization called the Center for Digital Thriving out of Harvard. Dr. Emily Weinstein and Dr. Kerry James interviewed over 3,000 young people. And it’s just full of practical advice on how to have those hard conversations with teens and understand what they’re going through. So Behind Their Screens is a book that I think every parent should read. who has kids who are going to be using tech?

Hugh Ballou:
There you have it. A call to action. Do it now. Katja Hancock, thank you so much for being our guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Katya Hancock:
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. It was.