We are delighted to announce the very first recipient of the $10,000 Hey Helen Grant award: CeCe Cheng from ShareWell, a mental health company that creates free and low-cost ways to access peer-led and expert support. The Hey Helen Grant funds are going to be used with a specific initiative: to help ShareWell launch Spanish-language groups within six months while maintaining the trust, safety and quality that define ShareWell while also creating a repeatable model for expanding peer support to additional languages and communities in the future.
Want to hear the behind-the-scenes of choosing a winner and more insight into how applications were evaluated? I recorded a podcast episode on that!
LISTEN ON APPLE | LISTEN ON SPOTIFY
(If you feel a little imposter syndrome, or like you’d never be competitive after hearing ShareWell’s story, I highly recommend listening to this podcast I recorded that breaks down how the winner was chosen as well as insight into the other applicants’ businesses who made it the furthest in the evaluation process – because trust me, most of them were nothing like CeCe’s business, and it was a TOUGH decision!)
Cece told us that “ShareWell’s mission is to solve the loneliness epidemic by helping people find real human connection and belonging. We offer safe, peer-led spaces where people can show up as they are and support one another—so no one has to go through life alone.”
This comes at a time where access to mental health care resources are crucial yet limited.
While traditional therapy is finally becoming more mainstream and socially accepted, it is also predominantly based on a one-to-one provider model that can often be cost prohibitive. Beyond that, the demand for therapy is outpacing the number of providers in practice.
But the idea for ShareWell came from personal experience.
When you scan through the “about” page on ShareWell’s website, you’ll see CeCe’s founder story, in which she shares her own history with mental health. Several years ago, CeCe found herself in a “severely emotionally abusive relationship” where she experienced “daily gaslighting, pathological lying, severe manipulation and a final discard that left me stranded in a foreign country during a pandemic.”
Throughout this experience, she leaned on her support network – from friends and family to the medical community. But while having this support was integral for CeCe, when she went looking for structured peer support groups, she was, by her own definition, “shocked” at how difficult it was to find one that was high quality and reliable.
Funding the evolution of mental health
Enter: ShareWell.
CeCe says the thing she is most proud of is “building a company that people rely on for daily connection. We hear everyday from our members that we’ve changed their lives, helped them recover their joy, or finally feel understood.”
In her grant application, CeCe noted that as of today, “[ShareWell runs] more than 70 live support groups every day, making [them] the largest platform dedicated to group support…[serving] over 175,000 members, [and] are growing quickly.”
CeCe attributes ShareWell’s growth and their ability to move quickly to the caliber of the team she’s assembled, which is the very definition of small-but-mighty.
A graduate of Princeton, CeCe spent the majority of her career in venture capital, and ShareWell’s Chief Product Officer is a Dartmouth graduate with four previous startups under his belt. ShareWell has also kept their engineering team entirely in-house, which CeCe credits as the reason they’ve been able to purposefully build their platform “with safety, trust, and moderation at the core.”
Despite having a powerhouse team and clear early traction around product market fit and user adoption, CeCe sees her biggest challenge as funding as capital is “largely flowing toward AI-first companies, even as human-centered infrastructure businesses like [ShareWell] show strong fundamentals and real impact.”
She’s not wrong. Institutional Investor reports that of the $367 billion in venture capital deals that happened in 2025, a staggering 53% of that funding went to AI companies.
CeCe isn’t letting that stop her though. She notes that “while that has made [ShareWell] less attractive to traditional venture capital in the short term, we are committed to building a sustainable company that prioritizes helping people over hype.”
ShareWell’s vision for the future
CeCe remains committed to her vision because she know that the need for the work she’s doing with ShareWell is “both massive and urgent.”
Data and peer-reviewed academic research back her claim that peer support is an extremely effective tool in combating the current mental health crisis. Mental Health America cites a number of journals and publications to summarize that “quantitative and qualitative evidence indicates that peer support:
- “lowers the overall cost of mental health services by reducing re-hospitalization rates and the days spent in inpatient services;
- “increases the use of outpatient services;
- “improves a person’s quality of life;
- “increases and improves engagement with services; and
- “increases whole health and self-management.”
While CeCe continues to grow the primary user base of ShareWell, she also understands the need for offering services to non-English- or non-native English-speaking communities. “Launching ShareWell in multiple languages is one of our main goals in 2026. This grant will help us kickoff our Spanish support groups and we could not be more excited to offer this addition service!” CeCe told us.
She went on to note that “Latino and Spanish-speaking communities face some of the largest mental health access gaps in the U.S. While more than 62 million people identify as Hispanic or Latino, they are significantly less likely to receive mental health care due to language barriers, cost, provider shortages, and stigma. Fewer than 6% of psychologists are Latino, and even fewer offer services in Spanish. As a result, many people delay seeking support until they reach crisis.”
At Visionaries, we are proud to help offer this small layer of added support through the Hey Helen Grant as ShareWell scales operations thoughtfully and sustainably.
When she looks down the road, CeCe hopes that ShareWell will become “the go-to site for daily connection where everyone in the world can find their people and feel seen and heard. Right now, most people still only think of therapy when they hear mental health. ShareWell will help bring a centuries old solution – community support – back to the forefront.
“This grant [will] help us bring meaningful human connection to communities that have been historically underserved.”
Interested in applying for the Hey Helen Grant?
We’re funding impact-driven businesses multiple times per year through our grant program, offering support in the amount of $10,000 each round!
The Hey Helen Grant is open to any 100% woman-owned, US-based, for-profit business doing less than $1M annually. Learn more about the Hey Helen Grant and start your application here.
