Nonprofit Leadership Podcast · Dr. Rob Harter

This Leader is Changing the Landscape for Digital Wellness

·46 min·4 clips

Lars May shares how social media almost killed her, sparking a digital wellness movement to save teens.

Dr. Rob Harder hosts this episode of the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast, featuring guest Lars May, the founder of the digital wellness nonprofit Half the Story. Lars May discusses her organization's growth and her new social enterprise, Ginkgo, which aims to fund her nonprofit work. The conversation centers on scaling a mission-driven organization and the evolving landscape of nonprofit strategy. Half the Story was founded from Lars May's personal experience, where she states social media and technology contributed to a mental health crisis during her youth. Her nonprofit's mission is to empower young people as digital wellness activists and make digital wellness accessible globally. She cites partnerships with organizations like Girls Inc. and Discovery Education as key to expanding her reach. Lars May secured support from figures like Oprah Winfrey, Melinda French Gates, and the Clinton Foundation, and her work includes a phone-free schools initiative with New York State. She emphasizes that nonprofits must think like businesses, generating revenue to avoid dependency on donations. Lars May advocates for maintaining a "competitive edge" through innovation and strategic collaborations that appeal to funders. She shares that early investment in research, through a partnership with a Vanderbilt PhD student, built Half the Story's evidence base for digital flourishing. A significant insight is her view that digital wellness is a rare bipartisan issue capable of uniting diverse stakeholders. Lars May dedicates every Saturday to mentoring other founders, offering connections and support based on her own early struggles. She reveals her new venture, Ginkgo, is a HIPAA-compliant tool designed as a 24/7 guide for parents navigating children's digital lives. Ginkgo analyzes thousands of digital scenarios with the long-term goal of predicting youth comorbidities based on device engagement. Her ultimate vision is for Ginkgo to generate enough revenue to permanently fund Half the Story and eventually support other nonprofits. The tone is conversational and motivational, blending personal storytelling with practical leadership advice. Lars May speaks candidly about the sacrifices and persistence required in social impact work. Nonprofit founders, leaders interested in scaling, and parents concerned about digital wellness would find this episode highly valuable. Listeners seeking a highly technical discussion on AI or a critical debate on nonprofit models might find the content less aligned with their interests.

As heard by us

Phone-free policy becomes a question of leadership, youth buy-in, and systems change.

Rob Harder's conversation treats phone-free policy as a leadership problem, not a slogan. It moves from an AI conference and broader social impact questions into a concrete case for bringing young people into the room, including a push to adapt a civics academy model at the…

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You want a conversational take on nonprofit leadership, AI, and phone-free policy that stays close to real-world systems change.

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