EA - Announcing Vida Plena: the first Latin American organization incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship by Joy Bittner

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing Vida Plena: the first Latin American organization incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship, published by Joy Bittner on December 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Vida Plena (meaning ‘a flourishing life’ in Spanish) is a new nonprofit organization based in Quito, Ecuador. Our mission is to build strong mental health in low-income and refugee communities, who otherwise would have no access to care. We provide evidence-based depression treatment which is highly cost-effective and scalable.In this post, we:Share how we got startedMake the case for why you should care about mental healthDemonstrate the evidence base for the solution we are usingHope to make you really excited about Vida Plena’s goals and upcoming plansWe are proud to highlight that Vida Plena completed the 2022 Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) Incubator program, making it the first CE-incubated organization to operate in Latin America. We (myself, Joy Bittner and my co-founder, Anita Kaslin) are exceptionally grateful for their on-going support and for the network of seed funders who are making this work possible.We are also excited to contribute to the EA community locally, as Vida Plena is one of the very first EA-aligned organizations implementing within Latin America.For the very effective altruist, a TLDR summary:The problem: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 5% of people in Latin America have depression, however, a lack of prioritization means that more than 3 out of 4 people in Latin America go untreated. Ecuador, in particular, has some of the highest rates of depression in the region: causing 8.3% of the total years lived with disability (YLD).The solution: Vida Plena’s intervention is based on an evidence-based therapy which is recommended by the WHO as a first-line treatment for depression in low-income settings (WHO, 2020). This program is highly cost-effective as it is delivered by non-specialist community members, which a systematic review of 27 studies found that non-specialists can effectively administer therapy.How you can know this will be impactful: We are replicating a proven program model. The nonprofit organization StrongMinds, operating in Uganda, has treated 150,000 people using the same model of therapy and 85% of people in their program saw significant reductions in their depression. This success has led StrongMinds to be recommended by Founders Pledge (Halstead, 2019) and is the Happier Lives Institute’s top recommendation (HLI, 2022). Despite an extensive body of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness and impact, Vida Plena is the first to introduce this model to Latin America.Current status: we have certified 10 local community facilitators and are currently running a pilot program with 10 support groups. We’re looking forward to sharing the results of the pilot early 2023, but we estimate when fully optional, it will cost $17 to improve a recipient’s wellbeing by one wellbeing-adjusted life year (WELLBY). For a comparison, this is 8 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly (see our full predictive CEA here).How you can help:Stay in touch and spread the word: generous introductions and people sharing time-sensitive information have made all this possible. sign-up to stay in touch here so we can send you news about what's happening and ways you can helpSupport us financially: we plan to treat almost 3,000 people in 2023, but have yet to secure the full funding to do so. We would be so grateful if you decide to donate or email us at [email protected] 1: How Vida Plena got startedTrue story - I started Vida Plena because I saw a Facebook post. Specifically, I saw a post about a new type of mental health program being run by local ‘grandmas’ in Africa. And the more I read through the multiple published studies demonstr...