Building transparency through community 

Kinney has no plans to formally hire staff. Instead, he sees the AMH as a community-driven and volunteer-led initiative, which could lead to location-based chapters and in-person meetups.

“Maybe there’s a New York chapter, a Los Angeles chapter, etcetera. So, I can see people volunteering to help spread the word and spread the message, which I think is the most important thing,” he said. 

Kinney’s advisory board, consisting of industry leaders across the ecosystem includes Walter T. Geer, chief experience design officer at VMLY&R, Amber Justis, evp and head of creative at Wunderman Thompson California and Nancy Luong, digital program manager at Salesforce.

“That pressure cooker environment really bonded us, because we saw in each other that we could, if we partnered up, share some of that burden together and be that conduit of support for the people that weren’t getting it,” Justis said, who met Kinney in a previous role.

The board will advise Kinney on how to advance the platform, which courses to launch next, how to best consider representation when working with mental health coaches and how to ensure the platform maintains an intersectional approach to mental health.

The community-focused forum will help fill a gap for creatives with mental health concerns. Often, companies encourage employees to contact employee assistance programs (EAPs) to get help with those concerns. The trouble, according to Kinney, is that those programs are meant to help employees after they’ve already recognized a problem, instead of providing them support and mental health tools on a regular basis. He hopes that his service can be a continuous resource in an industry of employers who offer “quick fixes”—like additional time off or short-term counseling—that fail to soothe discontent in organization with deep-seeded cultural strains. 

“How do we have meetings? How are our organizations designed? Is toxicity in our DNA or is it not? Is creativity really celebrated, or our deadlines really celebrated? These are the questions that we really have to ask ourselves,” Kinney said. 

By introducing a library of external resources and creating an open forum, Kinney hopes to spark internal conversations that span beyond the boilerplate EAP registration sheet from HR. 

“My hope it’s a paradigm shift for how we see our industry. I want other people to see CFOs and CEOs also talk about their mental health and be a part of the platform,” said Kinney.