Billion Minds Institute Projects

Billion Minds Institute accelerates and assists efforts that take seriously the social, psychological, and emotional i) impacts and damage of climate and environmental challenges, ii) building blocks of transformative responses to those challenges.  Social and emotional thriving and well-being are essential foundations for humanely navigating the Anthropocene.

Billion Minds Institute  helps others:

1. design and fill in needed capabilities to build the social climates and collective efficacy and impact needed to tackle the earth's climate.  
2. scale those capabilities in ways that advance climate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. 
3. connect helping, or “anchor,” institutions (eg universities, health systems, government, corporate sector, philanthropy, NGOs) to equip and super-size that work, and 
4. develop the policies that grow all the above.  

Recent efforts include:

Conceiving, funding, and sponsoring a US National Academy of Sciences Workshop to explore prospects and opportunities to bend the Human Sciences towards the purpose of empowering community led action.   

Initiating and resourcing the Care of People x Planet (COP²) global network through the Billion Minds Project (BMP). BMP is our umbrella of global-scale aimed efforts to accelerate psychological resilience as a pillar of climate resilience, sustainability, and planetary health. COP² recently completed and launched at COP28 the Roadmap for Care and Change.  The Roadmap lays out a strategy and path for integrating psychological resilience within global efforts such as the Race to Resilience to make 4 billion people more climate resilient by 2030; It includes an ambitious set of Early Adopter initiatives that begin to put that strategy to work.

Supporting project management for Friendship Bench-Brooklyn (FB-BK).  This will be a collaboration between BMI, Friendship Bench, and Maimonides Health's Population Health Department to plan and then implement Brooklyn-wide adoption of the Friendship Bench model of community-led mental health care and promotion across this health system's primary care network and its partner Brooklyn Communities Collaborative.  This is intended to be part of a larger effort to show the feasibility and value of steering New York State health care funding to impact social determinants of health, thus having the potential to re-think health care reimbursement as part of social climate building in similar ways across the US.