By Danielle LeCourt, Partnership Communications and Narrative Director

Over the next several months, a lot of very good organizations are likely to make very good arguments for what they could accomplish with a portion of Utah’s $212 million settlement with Meta over harms to young people’s mental health. These organizations know their communities, understand unmet needs, and in many cases have spent years doing the work they will be asking the state to support. 

And for organizations across Promise Partnership Utah (PPU), the arrival of such a large, finite pool of resources also presents a particularly interesting question: When there is suddenly something so valuable to compete for, can a partnership still behave like a partnership? 

The question has roots in PPU’s beginnings. In the early 2000s, United Way of Salt Lake was funding organizations that could point to strong programs and meaningful results for the young people they served. But when leaders looked across the community, they saw that the success individual organizations were achieving wasn’t necessarily adding up to better outcomes for young people across the population as a whole. 

That paradox helped inspire a different approach. Instead of expecting individual organizations to solve community-wide problems facing young people, partners would organize around shared youth outcomes and consider how each of their contributions could add up to something larger. More than two decades later, the Meta settlement presents a version of the same challenge. Many organizations can make a compelling case for investment, but none can address the problems alone. 

Before the ask is written

The settlement should remain connected to the young people at the center of Utah’s case against Meta, with transparent allocation guidelines and accountability for results. But deciding that young people should benefit from the money is considerably easier than deciding what, exactly, would make the greatest difference in their lives. 

There is still time to wrestle with that question. The settlement remains subject to court approval, and Utah has not yet decided how its share will ultimately be used. That $212 million is Utah’s share of a $12.2 billion, 47-state settlement resolving claims that Meta designed Instagram and Facebook with addictive features that harmed young people’s mental health, and the settlement is meant to support youth-focused purposes like crisis intervention services, after-school programming, outdoor activities, and mental health programming.  

Meanwhile, people across Utah are already looking at the challenges facing young people from very different vantage points. Mental health providers know what they’re seeing among the young people who come through their doors. Schools see what happens during the school day. After-school providers see what happens in the hours after it. Families and young people experience parts of the problem that institutions may never see at all. 

Put those perspectives alongside one another, and the question begins to change. Instead of starting with what any one organization could do with additional funding, there is room to start further upstream: What would we need to understand about young people’s lives before we could know where $212 million might make the greatest difference? 

What are young people missing when they go online?

Ben Trentelman, Executive Director of the Utah Afterschool Network (UAN), brings one piece of that picture. UAN estimates that close to 300,000 Utah children would participate in after-school programming if it were available to them, while only about 25,000 were served last year. Even among existing programs, the organization estimates a funding gap of at least $10 million simply to retain staff and maintain quality. Those numbers make a compelling case for after-school investment, but Ben’s larger observation points to something more interesting than a funding gap. When young people don’t have accessible places to go, things to do, or people to connect with after school, something else fills those hours. 

Increasingly, Ben argues, that something else is social media. He describes it as a kind of “de facto after-school program”—one available almost everywhere, requiring no transportation and offering an endless stream of stimulation and connection. That makes the question of social-media harm partly a question about the environments surrounding young people offline. Good after-school programs, Ben said, can help young people recognize when it’s time to put down the phone and “go touch some grass.” His point isn’t that after-school programming is the answer to a problem as complex as youth mental health or social-media harm. It’s that what happens on a screen cannot be completely separated from what is, or isn’t, available when a young person looks up from it. 

Ben’s observation raises a larger question about what surrounds a young person when the screen goes dark. Amy Ahrens Terpstra, PPU’s Managing Director, points to the IRL (In Real Life) Coalition made up of people already creating opportunities for young people to experience relationships, belonging, purpose, challenge, and support in real life. “Nothing replaces that in-real-life connection with students and with young people,” she said.  

These aren’t ideas Utah would need to invent. They’re already at work, in schools, community organizations, and mentoring relationships across the state. “If the money can be used to support IRL stuff, that’s really powerful,” Amy said. The strongest case for funding them, she argues, won’t come from any one organization’s pitch, but from a partnership that can show funders how these efforts already reinforce each other. 

Could Utah be #1 at this, too?

None of this is an especially novel idea in Utah. Last month, the PPU editorial team wrote about Utah being named the nation’s best state by U.S. News & World Report for the fourth consecutive year. And one explanation for that success is the state’s social cohesion, or the dense networks of relationships that allow people and institutions to solve problems together. The central idea of that story was that social cohesion isn’t simply something Utah has, it is something people repeatedly do—by building relationships, organizing around shared problems, and creating structures that make collaboration possible. 

For Amy, the Meta settlement presents another chance to put that capacity to work. Utah has already taken a leading role in confronting concerns about the effects of social media on young people. Now comes the less visible work of deciding what should fill that space for young people and how to steward the resources created by that effort. “Let’s be number one on this,” Amy said. 

Getting there won’t require everyone at the table to agree, or even to see the problem in the same way. In fact, the differences may be the point. Before lawmakers decide and individual requests harden into competing proposals, there is still time to put what we each know on the same table, listen for what we’re missing, and see whether we can build one shared picture of what it would take for Utah’s young people to thrive. 

Photo by Sanket Mishra on Unsplash