Bold Ideas for Brighter Futures

Ms. Grace Gatera is a lived experience mental health advocate, living in Kigali, Rwanda. She serves as a Wellcome Lived Experience Consultant, a commissioner with the Lancet Commission on Gender-Based Violence and the Maltreatment of Young People, and is also a member of My Mind Our Humanity, a collective born out of the Youth campaign for the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development.  Grace is passionate about lived experience’s key role to creating a more knowledgeable and equitable mental health science worldwide. 

Professor Robert W. Blum is the emeritus William H. Gates, Sr. Professor at Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is the former Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. He has edited two books, and has written over 325 journal articles, book chapters and special reports. He is Past-President of the Society for Adolescent Medicine and Health and served on the American Board of Pediatrics. Prof Blum led a 10-country study of gender norms and their consequences among young adolescents—the Global Early Adolescent Study; and from 2018-2023 he co-lead a three-country adolescent mental health study in Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam.