Launching a company can be stressful for anyone, but diverse founders often face unique impacts on their mental well-being. Here’s how some prior participants in our Multicultural Innovation Lab have coped.

“这就像飞行时建造飞机一样，”一位企业家是如何参加我们的企业家多元文化创新实验室（MCIL）描述了启动创业公司。寻找投资者，雇用团队和收购客户的挑战足以令人生畏，但随之而来的是压力。对于常规面对系统性偏见的妇女和创始人，对心理健康和福祉的挑战可能会更加艰难。

提供幸福的工具

The leadership of the MCIL, Morgan Stanley’s in-house accelerator that supports early-stage tech and tech-enabled startups led by multicultural and women entrepreneurs, realized that mental health training should be part of the suite of resources it offers participants, and so it has partnered with明亮的冒险, which invests in diverse and inclusively-led startups and provides leadership coaching for their founders. Since 2020, Bright Ventures founder and Managing Partner, Lenore Champagne Beirne and her team have met regularly with Lab participants to address issues of mental health and tailor personalized solutions.

“We know from our experience that well-being is a big part of how leadership is both experienced and expressed,” she says. “Many founders deal with anxiety, depression, ADHD, even suicidal ideation. Given that women and founders of color, especially Black founders, are routinely misheard, misunderstood and discriminated against, is that they would endure those things in even greater numbers."

优先考虑心理健康问题，个人和专业

前MCIL参与者Kevin Dedner对这种经历非常了解，在他在公共卫生职业生涯中的某一时刻与抑郁和疲惫斗争。这是他找到公司的原因Hurdle，为个人和雇主提供具有文化响应式远程疗法服务，尤其是黑人社区和其他通常服务不足的少数群体。188bet网址怎么打不开188bet上不了

他说：“我在找到一个我真正理解为非裔美国人的人之前就看到了三位治疗师，他可以与我的叙事和生活经历联系在一起。”“一旦我开始公开谈论我的抑郁症，我发现我的许多朋友也有类似的经历。”他的公司旨在通过培训和装备治疗师来理解和应对种族主义的影响来填补这一空白。

Dedner practices what he preaches, making mental wellness a priority at his company as well as with his clients. He schedules no internal team meetings on Wednesdays, starts extended meetings with a meditation or reflective exercise and offers unlimited vacation to employees within reason. And while he himself works six to seven days a week, “I’ve built protective measures into my work life and figured out a cadence for it,” he says, including scheduling 30-minute buffers between meetings.

“Black and brown founders have been told that they have to be twice as good as everyone else. And it means they are working at a pace that is unreasonable to prove they are worthy,” he says, a pace that can lead to depression and burnout. “It’s a dangerous idea.”

The Value of the Lab

在达纳周，创始人兼首席执行官Medtransgo，它为医疗保健提供者提供技术，可为患者有效，方便地预订运输，解释和其他护理协调服务，大流行的压力迫使她解决了自己的福祉和作为创始人的目的。188bet上不了作为一名黑人和亚裔美国人，她受到艾哈迈德·阿贝里（Ahmaud Arbery），布雷娜·泰勒（Brena Taylor）和乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）的杀害，以及水疗枪击事件，并增加了针对亚裔美国人社区的暴力行为。188bet网址怎么打不开

"I live in Georgia, and the social awakening that happened as a result of those events brought up some powerful emotions, and it gave me license to really feel and talk about the fear and the sadness and just the emotional depletion we had all experienced," she says. "And on the other side, it made me more resolute. My business is aimed at solving a healthcare problem, but it is also solving for community health disparities. When you feel the world's problems are so big, being able to lead a diverse and dedicated team and channel your despair into something that has meaning and purpose and that gives you the ability to innovate is helpful mentally."

在那里的人中找到支持

MCIL参与者Isabel Koo，创始人nuodie, a company that sells healthy, flavorful, authentic alternatives to instant ramen, also came to rely on others to help her through periods of anxiety and exhaustion. She’d always felt she had the self-resilience to handle just about anything, having forged her way to CEO of a successful retail company as a woman of color. “When the world doesn’t necessarily have faith in your ability to succeed because you are not in the standard visual majority, you have to dig deep and build your own skills and your own confidence in yourself,” she says.

But when she found herself dealing with complex supply chains and a pivot from a business-to-consumer model to one that also incorporated a business-to-business platform—during a pandemic, no less—she suddenly didn’t know where to turn to for support. Self-doubt as she worked to scale the business only added to the pressures.

Her solution was to build a staff she could count on, one able to not only navigate the many different cultures she deals with to do business but also lend critical perspectives. “Our whole team is multicultural. And what I’ve found is that people from diverse backgrounds inherently think about risk, and mitigating risk, very differently. It’s been a huge upside for me personally.”

但是，相信自己和他人，也是至关重要的，这一价值对分享经验的几位MCIL参与者产生了共鸣。Dedner说，重要的是，对于他们自己的健康和公司的健康状况，多元文化创始人都告诉自己：“‘我应该在这里。我正在解决一个需要解决的问题，’”他说。“如果您没有那个，那么其他任何东西都没有奏效。”