Placing Bold Bets Because Your Mission Demands It: How an Unwavering Sense of Purpose Builds Resiliency

Milken Institute Health continues to work with employers across sectors and industries to advance public health priorities. This interview series is part of the Employer Action Exchange, which highlights ways to accelerate turning evidence into action that impacts employees, communities, and businesses. Employers are a community and a critical contributor to advancing public health priorities that protect, support, and advance people, communities, and businesses.

In 2025, Executive Insights is focused on how employers invest in mitigating risk and building resilience for employees, communities, and their business or mission. Sabrina Spitaletta, senior director, Public Health at the Milken Institute, and Phil Schermer, founder and CEO, Project Healthy Minds, sat down to discuss ways leadership within organizations can protect, support, and advance people, communities, and businesses.

Give us an example of resiliency in the workplace (at the individual, business, and/or community level).

For entrepreneurs, resilience is the invisible fuel—our atmospheric pressure—without which no idea can blossom, let alone thrive.

In his famous April 2020 blog post “It’s Time to Build,” Marc Andreessen captured a universal impatience with the status quo—but he also highlighted an often-overlooked truth: Building is hard.

Builders wake up each morning knowing the blueprint will change by nightfall, yet they still pick up the hammer. That daily recommitment to the mission is resilience in action—the relentless optimism that tomorrow’s version will be stronger precisely because today’s plan hit the wall.

I’ve lived this firsthand while building a tech-driven mental health nonprofit in the middle of a global pandemic. Fundraising meetings that ended with a polite “no” became workshops for better storytelling; product roadmaps ripped apart by new data were redrawn overnight; a scrappy group of young people learned to prototype, fail, and iterate. Each moment demanded the triple helix of resilience: the optimism to believe a solution exists, the humility to absorb new truths, and the tenacity to convert rejection into momentum. Over time, those micro-acts compound into an organizational culture where “uncharted” feels less like a warning and more like an invitation.

That mindset matters beyond our walls and is more important than ever. For us, building isn’t just part of our identity or what we do each day—it’s also core to how we serve the community: We’re building a platform that is designed to help people build greater emotional resilience against personal and collective setbacks and traumas, enabling people to thrive.

Put simply, the resilience we model as builders becomes the resilience we enable in others. When a founder breathes patience into a frantic sprint, when a team repurposes setback into insight, and when a mission-driven startup equips millions of people with tools to navigate trauma and tragedy, we create a feedback loop that empowers people to thrive. That is what it means to build and to be resilient: converting personal setback into collective uplift.

As a leader in your industry/sector, what risks do you currently face, and which ones do you anticipate facing in the future that impact your workforce, business, and surrounding community?

One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic is that nearly every company now believes in the importance of workforce mental health. The shared experience of lockdown pushed workforce mental health from the periphery to the center of the conversation about employee wellness. Companies now understand that addressing mental health is essential, not optional.

However, this awareness has created a false sense of security. Many organizations assume that by offering an Employee Assistance Program and subscriptions to meditation apps like Headspace or Calm, they've adequately addressed the issue. This check-the-box approach to mental health misses the deeper challenge we face: There is not a large enough evidence base on which programs, policies, and benefits move the needle on workforce mental health.

The evidence base for workplace mental health interventions remains surprisingly thin. While we have solid research on clinical treatments for mental health conditions, we have far less rigorous data on preventative measures and wellness initiatives in work settings. Questions like which programs drive sustainable improvements in employee well-being, how to effectively measure outcomes, and what approaches work best for different employee segments of the workforce remain largely unanswered.

This knowledge gap creates significant risk, both for employees whose needs aren't being met and for companies investing in solutions without clear return. As we face increasing rates of burnout, anxiety, and depression in the workforce, coupled with economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, the cost of this evidence gap will only grow.

What actions can employers take to mitigate risk(s) that will protect their employees, businesses, and communities?

To address this fundamental risk, employers must move beyond surface-level solutions to evidence-based approaches that deliver meaningful results. This starts with a commitment to measurement and evaluation—treating mental health initiatives with the same analytical rigor applied to other business objectives. Companies should establish baseline metrics before implementing programs, collect outcome data beyond simple utilization rates, and continuously refine their approach based on results rather than assumptions.

We also need to broaden our definition of workplace mental health beyond clinical conditions to address the full spectrum of well-being challenges employees face - from stress management and sleep disruption to financial worries and caregiving responsibilities.

Finally, employers should recognize that mental health isn't confined to workplace boundaries. Organizations that extend support to family members, invest in community mental health resources, and advocate for better policies create protective factors that ultimately strengthen their workforce.

By taking these evidence-driven actions, we can address the fundamental risk of our limited knowledge base and create mental health approaches that truly protect employees, businesses, and communities, moving beyond the checkbox approach that gives the illusion of action without the substance of impact.

Could you share an example from your career journey where you prioritized or tapped into your resiliency? And what did that look like?

I didn’t know it at the time, but Project Healthy Minds was conceived of in a coffee shop in Soho, over a conversation with friends who are well-known music managers who were telling me a story about one of their clients—the hip hop star Logic and his Grammy-nominated, 7x platinum hit song “1-800-273-8255.” The title of the song was the phone number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the song was inspired by his own mental health journey. The song had inspired an enormous increase in the number of Americans calling the hotline to ask for help, starting with spikes when he performed the song at the MTV VMAs and the Grammys, but persisting for more than a year after the song was released.

That song inspired me to start studying the mental health crisis, trying to understand the elements of the song and how they could be replicated and scaled to help more people access life-saving mental health services.

And then COVID-19 hit.

It made us wonder if this was a terrible time to be building a new mental health nonprofit. People were dying from an infectious disease that we didn’t understand well enough, millions of Americans were losing their jobs, the equity markets were crashing, and it seemed like the world was coming to an end.

But then something funny happened. At a time when the world was grappling with crisis and uncertainty, a powerful cultural shift was beginning to unfold: As millions of Americans were brought to a standstill and became unwitting participants in the largest social experiment in social isolation, many people started to more openly acknowledge the importance of mental health in ways that they had never considered before. This shift inspired me to leave my career at BlackRock and fully dedicate myself to building Project Healthy Minds, despite having no assurance of its success.

There was no playbook for how to navigate a moment like that. But what I did have was a relentless belief—that tomorrow could be better than today, that the world needed a new kind of mental health nonprofit that harnessed the power of technology to expand access to mental health care. It was morally egregious that in America today, it was easier to book a flight or a hotel or a restaurant reservation than it was just to find life-saving mental health services. And it felt clear that if we didn’t build it, maybe no one else would.

Resiliency, in that context, wasn’t about simply enduring hard days. It was about learning to thrive in uncertainty. It was about making bold bets, not because the outcome was assured, but because the mission demanded it. And it meant showing up—every single day—with energy, optimism, and an unwavering sense of purpose, even when the world outside felt chaotic.

What I learned is that resilience isn’t a trait you either have or don’t. It’s a practice. For me, that practice meant creating and surrounding myself with a team of mission-aligned builders who shared the same belief in what was possible. It meant anchoring myself in the knowledge that our work wasn’t just about building an organization—it was about helping others find resilience in their own lives.

That mindset—that the future is worth building, even in the face of doubt—continues to drive me, and it’s what fuels the culture of resilience we’ve built at Project Healthy Minds.