Transforming Crisis Into Growth With Katherine Hay, President & Co-CEO, Kids Help Phone

Transforming crisis into growth takes bold vision and courageous leadership. Katherine Hay reveals how Kids Help Phone redefined itself as an innovation-driven, data-powered mental health organization. By shifting from a traditional phone service to a leading digital platform, KHP embraced technology to protect its mission and stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. This forward-thinking approach allowed them to scale from 1.9 million interactions to over 22.5 million, maintain quality care during explosive growth, and prepare for challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. Katherine also shares lessons from key missteps, why investing in people is critical, and how partnerships—not competition—drive impact. If you want to learn how strategic innovation can future-proof your organization, this conversation delivers powerful insights.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Transforming Crisis Into Growth With Katherine Hay, President & Co-CEO, Kids Help Phone

We’re joined by a leader whose career spans decades of transformational work at the intersection of public service, digital innovation, and youth mental health. The Honorable Katherine Hay, newly appointed to the Senate of Canada, is perhaps best known for her remarkable tenure as president and CEO of Kids Help Phone, where she and her team helped lead a bold reimagining of youth mental health support in Canada from a traditional helpline to a national multilingual 24/7 digital service supporting millions of young people.

With a background in healthcare, academia, philanthropy, and international collaboration, Senator Hay brings a future-focused perspective to everything she does, anchored in equity, innovation, and a deep care for the community she serves. In this conversation, we talk about the strength of innovation, where it came from at Kids Help Phone, how it was sustained over a number of years to fully revitalize and change the organization, and what it takes to build teams that can keep that process of change rolling. It is a deep conversation that reflects her great expertise in our sector and in leadership. Please enjoy my conversation with the Honorable Katherine Hay.

—

Welcome to The Discovery Pod, Katherine Hay.

Thank you.

I’m going to sit up extra straight for this interview as it’s a pleasure to be talking to a member of the Canadian Senate and a real innovative leader in our sector. I will do my best to behave at my best throughout the rest of our conversation.

Does that mean I have to be on my best behavior?

You’re allowed to do whatever you want. Isn’t that what being a senator means?

Yes, I guess. I don’t know. I’m relatively new. We can break a few rules at the beginning.

The Transformative Impact Of Kids Help Phone

We’ll talk a little bit about the Senate as we go. What I’m really hoping we can spend most of our time on is just the tremendous innovation and transformation that you and your colleagues have led at Kids Help Phone over the last number of years. It is a story that is told in rooms that you and your colleagues are not in about an organization that remade itself in a way that was truly for the benefit of the individuals that you serve. For those of our listeners who may not be familiar with it, could you tell us a little bit about Kids Help Phone and where that organization is?

That question is not easy to answer. Kids Help Phone, KHP, to answer that in 2 or 3 sentences is virtually impossible. We’ll take the next generation of ChatGPT to figure that out. Let me give it a stab. KHP, Kids Help Phone, has been around for young people for many years, 36 years. We’re the only game in town at 2:00 in the morning for anybody coast to coast, no matter what age. If they’re having some mental health situation. I always say Kids Help Phone is the only 24/7 e-mental health solution for young people in the country, in multiple languages.

There’s the boilerplate. I think it’s really important to note that we’re there for young people no matter what, whether they failed a test today or they don’t know how to tell their parents that they’re gay or that they’ve been bullied or are bullies or are in the middle of sex trafficking or self-harm or suicide. You see the gamut of what young people come to us on any given day. That’s happening right now as you’re listening. As we’re speaking, someone may be listening to this. A typical day for KHP is kids as young as 5 through to about 28, 29.

That is a typical day, 24/7. With that demographic that we cover, we are a nightmare for a brand agency when they say, “Who do we focus on?” Every single young person. By the way, we also have to raise money. Everybody else in the country. I think back to KHP, I think we’re going to dive into innovation and some of the work that enabled us to scale the way we scaled because it is a mindset. It isn’t shiny gadgets. We do build lots of innovative products at KHP. If you don’t have the mindset and the courage at the board table and the willingness to keep changing your way of work, we call it WoW, Way of Work, then innovation is just a shiny gadget, and it’s not going to solve much.

 

Kids Help Phone’s Innovation Journey: A Mindset Shift

Let’s start on that innovation journey. The technology for many organizations in our sector has been more threat than promise, and initially, there has been a lot of defensiveness to it. Kids Help Phone suggests a time of technology, and I suspect that’s why KHP is anyone in the organization as using those three letters. Was there a moment in time when the organization said, “We have to change?”

Yeah, without a doubt, and every organization will have these moments. We call it our mindset shift. It was about seven years ago. Not in the beginning days and not yesterday. It was a good seven years ago. We understood that we’ve been doing this work for a long time. Young people trusted us. We use technology to reach young people. Think back seven years, we really had two products. We had our professional counselors on the phone or in a chat, and we had our website. That was Kids Help Phone.

What we understood seven years ago literally was an afternoon with a courageous board, courageous executive, and we went vertical through the organization shortly thereafter, meaning we touched base with various different frontline staff and otherwise. Here’s what we did that day, which I think literally changed everything. We asked ourselves, “Who are we?” You really have to know who you are to know where to go, which direction, what path to take. Know who you are, and where to go. It seems like such a silly question.

You really have to know who you are to know where to go. Share on X

Kids Help Phone, we’ve been doing it for 25 years at the time. Here’s the thing. Kids then and now are changing faster than ever. Everything we do at KHP is on technology. That’s changing faster than ever. To know who we are, what we did was take two things, and one is really odd. We took the charity piece of Kids Help Phone and just put it to the side for a minute. It’s pretty obvious that we’re a charity. We don’t have to be flogging over here, “We’re a charity.” Let’s just put it to the side. We know that about ourselves. Here’s the odd. We took the youth mental health bit. It’s so obvious with Kids Help Phone.

Let’s just put that to the side for a second and see what’s right in front of us that’s not so obvious that we need to know about who we are. Right in front of us that afternoon, we understood that we were and are an innovative data-driven technology charity that has a laser-sharp focus on youth and mental health. What we did that afternoon was our mindset shift. We reordered ourselves a little bit. Everything that we were before, we knew who we were, and that defined where we were going to go.

This bit about being an innovation data-driven tech charity changed absolutely everything for KHP. It will change that mindset shift, that nuance. Not only did it change how we organize our front lines and our virtual care, it changed how we thought about ourselves, how we organized ourselves, how we funded ourselves, how we spoke about ourselves, how we approached government, which we’d never done before, and how we approached corporate partners in a different way. When I say it changed everything, it literally did.

Anchored In Why: Protecting The Core Mission

Katherine, can I jump in here? I want to ask you, because what you’ve outlined is that, and I love the phrase, know who you are, and you’ll know where to go. Simon Sinek’s advice to start with why, why are we here, which is charitable helping, focused on youth mental health. You said, “Let’s set that to the side.” The LinkedIn advice, the YouTube advice is to start with why.

Is it because the board and the leadership team already knew the why, or was it intrinsic in the organization that you were able to set it aside? I see in our work, a number of organizations that were the, the why is mostly aligned with general general direction. The why is agreed upon. There’s a lot of strength in sharpening that focus. It really does take that strength of why to be able to set it aside and see.

We didn’t set it aside and didn’t bring it back in. We just in that moment had to set it aside to see what wasn’t so obvious about KHP that would enable us to protect our core at all costs, which is critically important. We actually say that all the time, “Protect our core while we’re innovating.” The why for us was never in debate. If this were a video, you’d see me put my thumb and my fingers together and rub them. What is it about KHP? Why?

Protect the core while innovating. Share on X

The why is really important. First of all, impact. We’re there for young people no matter what. Anybody connected to the KHP board, staff, we are deeply committed to the mission. That’s why the core. That other piece, it’s going to sound weird in this conversation, but it’s the L word. Love each other. We love the mission. We love each other. The why was never in question that day. In fact, the fear of not being able to deliver on our why was why we went down this know who you are because we technically are the only not-for-profit technology company in the country, and certainly seven years ago. In our hands, digital technology is how we get to young people.

We used to say we do not want to be the Kodak of the not-for-profit sector. We know they had digital photography, but they chose to stay on paper. We chose not to stay on just the phone because if we had stayed on the phone, we’d probably be closed now. We’d be redundant. That’s why it was not just our mission, but also a fear of being redundant. Being redundant means who’s going to be there at two in the morning if we’re not.

Very strongly anchored in why you know who you are. You’re going to be a digital technology company. That’s a memo or two you write on Monday, and when you get back to the office after that weekend, and it happens?

Yeah. I remember back then, AI hadn’t actually, or ChatGPT hadn’t been, what is your question?

It’s a brave, bold decision. There’s a lot of work that went into it to get there, but you made the decision, now what?

Bold Vision And Organizational Mojo

I wish I could say that, and then we had these great boards of brilliance going on. It’s not as complicated as one might think. I say that to many people. You just have to step forward, make the decision. We made the decision. We knew who we were. Now we just had to figure out how to get there. I often say, “If you know your strategy is right, as you can see your vision and it is right, and you don’t quite know how to get there, then your vision is bold enough.

If how to get there, it’s not that it isn’t a good next step, but it’s your next step. It’s not your next vision.” That’s how we did it. Here’s what’s so interesting is because we went vertical through the organization, meaning we engaged everybody, we were building something that we didn’t know how it was going to evolve. I do want to say one other thing that happened to us in there. I was just speaking in another country about this, and I used the word mojo, and I had to ask, “Do you folks know what this means?”

 

I was in Sri Lanka, and I didn’t want to say anything untoward, but it changed our mojo. For not-for-profit charities, when you have to squeeze into that table and say, “Can I have a little piece of the table over here? Here’s the not-for-profit charity.” What that did, that moment also did for us is we understood not only who we were, but what our place was in the whole continuum of the mental health landscape. We literally took our seats at the table. We started getting invited to the table, and then we started hosting the table.

That mojo again changed everything. I’m going to be braggadocious. We grew 250%. That’s the growth that we did. Little did we know, now not in like a two-year period, but in about a six-year period. Still pretty good. If I were like our great corporate partner, BMO, they’d love it, 250% return over 10%. Anyway, here’s the thing. What we didn’t know in all our gumption and living it throughout the organization, and our conversations changed with our frontline.

We were bringing in and building new technologies, new access points. What we didn’t know was that we were building for COVID. When COVID hit in March of 2020 and the world shut down, and Canada shut down. Kids Help Phone didn’t. That’s when we started to scale, and we were ready, and we just scaled and scaled and kept scaling. I give this perspective is if you’re afraid to take that next step, you will not be ready when a crisis happens.

You will not be ready when you need to pivot or whatever the word is. In 2019, we were already showing incredible numbers, 30% increase from the year before 2019, 1.9 million interactions coast to coast in Canada. That was 2019. Since March 2020, we’re north of 22.5 million interactions coast to coast. That’s what innovation data-driven decision-making does, anchored against technology and never losing sight of your core. Your point is really important. Never losing sight of the why you’re doing this.

Sustaining Growth: Investing in People and Infrastructure

In any organization that is transforming itself, as you just described, and growing at the rate that you described, there are going to be mistakes. I’m not going to ask you who made the worst mistake.

Stop being mean.

There are going to be mistakes happening, and good people trying to get it right, changing systems, and there are going to be challenges. It’s not going to be smooth. As a leader, did you create or reinforce the value of experimentation to keep people taking those risks? If you’ve got to innovate and you cannot get it wrong, it’s not going to go very far.

It’s such a great question. If the quest is to innovate to perfection, I’m going to say that your first failure is your quest. We made tons of mistakes. There were certain things that we did not give on, though. Our board would say to us, “You cannot keep growing like this. You have to give in on something.” We huddled back. How are we going to respond to the board on this? They were coming from a very good place of care and concern for their people, and the right thing of a board has to worry about is the organization not cracking to pieces.

If the quest is to innovate to perfection, that is your first failure. Share on X

There were a few things we said, “What we cannot do is give up on our promise to young people. We promised them that we’re going to be there for them 24/7. We cannot promise them that. They come to us and have to wait five hours or never get anybody. Wait times were non-negotiable. The other thing that we said was non-negotiable was the fact that we also had to give a quality service. We have clinicians. We have over 300 clinicians on staff. Our efficacy had to be the best in the country on e-mental health solutions.

Those are the two simple things not to give up on. We just didn’t give up on them. We kept our wait times at about 3.5 minutes, 24/7, and our quality scores over 90%. You get back to mistakes. I think the beginnings of mistakes where I, as the leader, could see our foundation, I could see some cracks, and I could see gravel getting on top of this foundation. When we go to leap, we’re going to start slipping and skin our knees or fall off this foundation. What are we going to do? I remember speaking to the board chair at the time, Brian Ross, I call him the great Brian Ross Philosopher.

I probably quoted him seventeen times. Therefore, I have to put his name in. I remember going to him two years into COVID and saying, “We’ve grown. We have 450 staff members. We are just exhausted.” I think our mantra always used to be steady states’s not an option. That’s what we still say to this day. I said to him, “I think it’s time to steady state for a while.” He’s just such a brilliant board chair. That’s where courage comes in. That’s where trust comes in. He just simply said, “Then you won’t be who you are if you steady state. Know who you are, you’ll know where to go.”

Strategic Investments For Organizational Health

We spent a ton of time from that simple conversation investing in our own people because that was our mistake, as we didn’t invest in our people, and our people were exhausted, and they weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from their leaders. We had all this great technology for young people. We had substandard technology for HR and donor gifting receipts, and all were substandard. We made another courageous mindset shift, and we spent a lot of money investing in ourselves, and then we took off again because we had our people with us. If you don’t have your people with you, no shiny gadget will be worth anything.

 

In building a private enterprise, it’s understood that there are stages of development that you go through where you need to solidify gains and invest in the infrastructure of the business. It is not commonplace for boards to be saying, “We’re spending enough on people, are we spending it on our internal systems?” The way that shows up in a lot of organizations that I see is every organization in high rev. The needles in the red and one of the hallmarks of those cultures that I see that I perceive that it is about to break is when people say, “We have an all-hands-on-deck culture.”

This gives you goosebumps, like everybody’s willing to pitch in and do whatever it takes to get it done. That’s a great human value and part of the commitment that people in our sector demonstrate through their professional lives. It means that the organization doesn’t have the specialization, and you’re going to wear those people out really fast. What you’re describing there is how really effective organizations do not move to a steady state, but invest in that next level to be able to grow again. Downshift so you’re not in high rev.

We spent the whole next year just investing in ourselves. I think all hands are on deck. I think a country did that in March 2020. We all did that. We just didn’t know it was going to last as long as it did. I think that love word is different. I think we use that a lot. That’s not an all-hands-on-deck. That gives us permission to get off the deck when you need to get off the deck, maybe.

I’m curious. Again, a lot of CEOs go to their boards and say, “We’re getting ready to present the annual business plan.” They’re like, “I’m worried about it’s going to cost more to invest in our people, to invest in these systems. How’s the board going to receive that?” There is a courageous act when it says that we’re going to present this to the board, and lots of conversations with the board presumably beforehand. How did you, as a leader and with your leadership team, approach that we’re going to spend this next year investing in ourselves?

Boards are an interesting and important part of the business. If you have great boards, it’s probably because you work with them in a great way. You’ve got great people. Just a side note, there’s nothing I would ever take at a board meeting that I hadn’t already socialized across the board. We’re not going to take it.

Surprises are never appreciated.

Especially something like this. It also has to anchor deeply to strategy. Strategy is so important. This isn’t just, “We’re exhausted and so we need to invest in ourselves, maybe have more massage therapy in our benefit plan or whatever.” No, it literally was a new strategy we were developing that’ll enable us to get to our next vision. It’s not rocket science. I cannot stress enough. If you go for rocket science, you should go to rocket science.

If you go for rocket science, go for rocket science. Run your organizations with solid strategy, common sense, and humanity. Share on X

You should run your businesses, your organizations, with solid strategy and common sense, and also humanity. We used McKinsey. We stole the horizons model from McKinsey and basically said, “What’s our core business? What’s the current state? That is what we’re going to protect, and that’s what we need to invest in.” Sixty-five percent of our business is current state, our front lines, our fundraising, our partnerships, our government work. Let’s understand with the first horizon. We’ve got to strengthen our foundation.

We have to increase our efficiencies and organizational health, and we have to stop flying the plane and build at the same time. We have to build for the future. Those were the three things underneath our first horizon. Therefore, we said to do this, “We need X amount of dollars to do this. We need a CHRO. We need a chief technology officer. I’m not any of those, so you don’t want me doing that. Also, we’re big enough now.

We had to justify our strength, but also get back to the foundation. If the cracks are there, the gravel’s on top, it’s going to break. Therefore, you didn’t protect your core at any cost. You didn’t pay anything for it. You broke it.” That was based on strategy. The next horizon beside that, which is adjacent to the core, was how we started building our innovation imperative, our accelerator, new ways of fundraising, the ways of work, and things that were in that. We really identified that strategy and put dollars behind it and its impact.

I’m super proud as I’m leaving KHP that many of the things that were affectionately called H2 are actually now part of our core business. We built them and they’re now part of the core. That’s how you protect your core as you continually innovate. We got our eye on the prize of our next vision in our H3, which is maybe 15% of Kids Help Phone works on that next vision, me and whatnot. It is a bigger mindset shift than what we did seven years ago.

That’s how you get a board to go, “I get it because it’s anchored on strategy for today. What does a board need to do most of the time? They should be thinking about the future.” I’m trying to remember my ICD program. I want to say 70% of what a board should do should be about the future. We’ll give them the strategy so they can think about the future, and then tell them what they have to spend today so we can get to the future. Have great fundraisers like the teams at KHP and great partners that never let us down.

Can we call out Aaron Sanderson here on this podcast?

Aaron Sanderson, the group head, philanthropy and chief development officer, though we don’t use the word chief at KHP anymore in our response to truth and reconciliation. His group had an EVP advancement.

Beyond Competition: Partnerships And Shared Technology

As you were saying, getting going, from my perspective, he’s one of those individuals who has the perfect job for him. It’s just so satisfying to see him and how successful he and his team are. I want to go back because you touched on something that is one of my favorite things to poke at with CEOs. That phrase, we’re building the plane while it’s flying. I think that’s dangerous. It’s not safe to do that. It’s not safe for the people who are on the plane with you as a leader. It’s asking over time, and maybe not over much time. It’s reckless. It often reflects a failure to plan or to make space for planning.

I agree 100%.

I can say that in a board retreat as part of my work. I can tell that I lost about two-thirds of the table for a while. Like, “You’ve got to just go.” The work that you and your colleagues at KHP do is profoundly urgent for the individuals who are calling in. It is intensely human. There is a crisis that I cannot even imagine that I’m sure is happening every day in connecting with your organization. There is this urgency of the work. A lot of what you’ve talked about over the course of this conversation is if you use phrases like set aside, step back, and look to the horizon. Look down. That discipline not to let the crisis drive, what is most important about the organization. Is that a lesson that you learned as CEO, or is that just, it was innate in you, and that’s why you became the CEO?

I don’t know the answer to that. My therapist may have to give you that. I’ll call.

This isn’t that podcast.

Here’s the fallacy about going slow to get there faster, or take a pause, or know who you are, so you need to know where to go. None of it is slow. It is fast. It’s what enables you to be nimble. It enables you to live in the gray when you call all of that out. If you go slow, like really slow, then you might as well pack it in. None of this is about going slow. This is about going fast with strategy, so you know exactly what you’re supposed to do. If you fail, guarantee your failure in there will open up to another great opportunity because you’re comfortable in the gray.

 

CEOs should be comfortable in the gray, meaning not all the answers are there. I’d love to say I was this calm, cool, collected, softly spoken CEO. I am loud and busy, and you put people around you who thrive like you do. That thing I’m doing with my hands. You put people around you who love the mission, cannot imagine not working hard to get that mission done, but love each other enough to take care of each other. It’s a beautiful equation. I sound a little fluffy there, but it is a real thing, that L word. You’d better have a good strategy, and you’d better move faster.

Don’t think in the not-for-profit sector that there is competition. There’s a lot of competition. I used to say that there’s no competition for Kids Help Phone in the work we do, but there’s a gazillion competitors for the funding that we need to do the work we do. Now I would say that still stands gazillion, but now we have competition on the work we do, and some of it isn’t good competition, meaning it’s not so hard to stand up a mental health chatbot. It’s pretty easy. You just write some code and get it standing.

We worry about competition in a different way than a for-profit would. We worry about “Is that being built in a basement with no efficacy and no clinical oversight? Who’s building it? It could be a predator, for that matter.” How we look to solve that competition problem is through partnership. Who can we partner with in the sector? The other pet peeve I have in the not-for-profit charitable sector is that we’re all trying to build the same thing. Let’s not do that anymore. Let’s partner. There are great people in our sector.

Canada couldn’t survive without the more than two million employees that are fueling so many parts of the country through the not-for-profit charitable sector. My charge is we’ve got to work together. We at KHP don’t always get it right. For sure, we don’t, but we do build technology that we share. We built it, and we call it a widget. I love using the widget. That word is just cool. We built two widgets. One has all our resources around me.

We’ve mapped every youth mental health, every youth service possible in the country with technology, with library scientists. We have over 40,000 of these vetted services from food banks to 2SLGBTQ+ plus groups to shelters, and mental health. You name it, we’ve mapped it everywhere in the country. It’s not Google. They’re vetted. They’re all on this widget. We’re sharing that on people’s websites. We don’t care if you put KHP up as a brand, our promises to the young people of Canada.

You take that widget and that enables a young person to go, “I’m in Sulaco, Ontario. I’m on the street. It’s November, so I won’t survive the night if I don’t have a place to stay, and I cannot go home.” That widget will map where a shelter is, where they can call, they can call us, and we can get them a warm handover. There’s how you get at bad competition is you just fill some of the gaps together.

From CEO To Senator: A New Chapter Of Advocacy

As you are making your transition into the Senate and as a strategic advisor and winding down your time as a strategic advisor to Kids Help Phone, to KHB, what are you looking forward to?

It has probably been the greatest privilege of my life, outside of truly being a mom to my two wonderful kids and a grandmother. It has been the greatest privilege of my life to work with the folks at Kids Help Phone and to have the trust of young people that I can express their voices through what they share with us, the data, and help the organization to keep expanding and growing, and the global footprint it now has.

That is the greatest privilege I’ve ever had. The satisfaction I have is to see, I don’t know, can I use kick-ass? Let me use Mojo. How much Mojo those folks have at KHP. They are just getting started. There is satisfaction knowing that as I leave, they’re just getting started on their next journey. That is beautiful to me. As I turn to the Senate, it is pretty humbling to get a phone call from the prime minister.

I think of myself as that skinny Tomboy from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and then the journey all over the place that I’ve had, that I’m sitting in the red chamber, the upper chamber, the upper house in Canada, and I literally pinched myself and go, “I was asked to do this.” When I was asked to do this, I was also reminded that I needed to be independent. I really believe in the evolution of what’s happened in the Senate. This is not a partisan. I am nonpartisan. I’ve never joined a political party. I am not a liberal.

I’m not a conservative. I have leanings, we all do, but I am not a political appointment. I was then asked by the prime minister to be as fierce in the Senate as I have been for youth and mental health in Canada. I don’t know what that means, but that feels right. If I could maybe say something controversial, the Senate’s been around for a long time, and it works in a certain way. I think it’s time for a little bit of innovation shakeup at the Senate. Maybe some digitization. I’m up for that challenge too, but at the end of the day, the boss that I have is the people of Canada. I got to figure that out. I’m going to work hard. I’ll be fierce. I’ll make mistakes, but I’ll trust the people that I work with.

Senator Katherine Hay, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to share the story of Kids Help Phone and the inspiration that you and your colleagues have been for the rest of our sector. I wish you all the best in your new role. Good luck with that disruption. Thank you so much for being on The Discovery Pod.

Thank you so much. I love the work that you do, and I love the work that we all do to ensure a great country that is Canada. You’ve made me very emotional. I’m probably going to have to go, and not that I am wearing makeup for this show, but if I were, I’d have to fix it. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Katherine Hay
• Kids Help Phone
• Kids Help Phone on LinkedIn
• Kids Help Phone on YouTube
• Kids Help Phone on Facebook
• Kids Help Phone on Instagram
• Kids Help Phone on X