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Designed With, Not For: When Youth Shape Their Digital Future
- SecondMuse Capital
- Jun 19
- 3 min read
In 2023, 40% of high school students in the U.S. reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. These aren’t abstract statistics. They’re a call to action for anyone investing in the future. While digital technologies are often cited as part of the problem, they’re also a critical part of the solution. But only if we stop designing from the top down.
At SecondMuse Capital, we look closely at how systems—financial, technological, educational—either reinforce exclusion or create pathways to belonging. Through our sister organization’s Headstream initiative, we’ve seen that youth mental health tools are most effective when young people are not passive users, but co-creators. This blog explores how co-creation with youth is not just a design principle—it’s a systemic intervention. One that funders, investors, and ecosystem builders should be paying close attention to.
🟩 The Tension
We’re facing a national youth mental health crisis. The U.S. Surgeon General warns that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media are at double the risk of anxiety and depression. Yet the average teen exceeds this daily. At the same time, our existing mental health systems are underfunded, siloed, and often inaccessible to the youth who need them most.
This creates a false binary: technology either harms or helps. But what’s really missing is a different design approach. One that centres young people not just as beneficiaries, but as architects of the systems meant to support them. This is where capital design must catch up with youth innovation.
🟦 A Case in Point: Co-Creation in Practice
Before joining the Headstream Accelerator, Psyche Care focused primarily on supporting caregivers of youth recently discharged from crisis care. It was through their partnership with the Headstream Youth Collective—a national network of teen co-creators—that they realized something pivotal: their product was missing the very voices it aimed to serve.
“Youth co-creation wasn’t just valuable. It was essential,” said Co-Founder Mallika Pajuri. With feedback from teens themselves, they restructured their platform into a 6-step virtual coaching experience that better meets the needs of both youth and caregivers. This shift wasn’t cosmetic. It was structural, and it redefined their theory of impact.
🟪 Insight + Analysis: Youth Co-Creation as System Design
This model of equitable co-creation isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a competitive and ethical advantage. Through the Headstream program, more than 80 innovators have collaborated with 90+ youth co-creators. Collectively, these efforts have helped raise $75M+ in capital and reached 8.4 million young people and caring adults.
Here’s what’s emerging:
Lived experience drives design that sticks. Youth insights result in products with stronger adoption and retention.
Co-creation builds trust and credibility upstream. When youth are treated as equals, not afterthoughts, solutions are more culturally relevant and widely embraced.
Funders are starting to pay attention. The model holds promise for more equitable capital flows, with impact metrics rooted in human agency—not just clinical outcomes or app downloads.
For capital allocators, this is more than a youth engagement strategy. It’s a new due diligence lens.
🟥 Provocations for Funders & Capital Designers
If you’re funding mental health innovation, ask yourself:
Who’s at the table? Are youth compensated contributors, or just subjects of user research?
What defines success? Is it engagement, or is it belonging, agency, and cultural fit?
How is power being redistributed? Are co-designers setting priorities, or reacting to them?
3 Practices Worth Adopting:
Invest in relational infrastructure. It takes time to build trust with youth communities, but it pays dividends in insight and innovation.
Support intermediaries like Headstream. Not every innovator has the expertise or capacity to centre co-creation from day one.
Redefine your metrics. Human-centred success is harder to measure, but far more transformative.
🟨 Closing the Loop
At SecondMuse Capital, we believe mental health equity is a capital design challenge. It requires more than scaling apps or funding new diagnostics. It requires investing in the conditions under which young people can shape, test, and lead the development of tools they’ll actually use.
Headstream’s model reminds us: when young people are treated as creative equals, the systems we build—technological, financial, and social—become more ethical, more effective, and more enduring. And in a world that urgently needs both innovation and inclusion, that’s a future worth co-creating.
