The final lineup of the Women’s Funding Network conference Leadership for a Changing World felt like a fireworks finale of feminist brilliance across philanthropy, art, business, and politics. Let’s take a look at these amazing blasts of thought and strategy leadership one at a time.
Whose Story Is It?
Jeanne Bourgault, President and CEO of Internews, and Cristi Hegranes, CEO of Global Press, discuss strategies for increasing women’s representation as media creators and subjects. The conference was hosted by the Women’s Funding Network.
Cristi Hegranes, CEO of Global Press and the Publisher of Global Press Journal, and Jeanne Bourgault, President and CEO of Internews, discussed how having more women creating and distributing media can have a significant influence on how we interact with, interpret, and change the world.
New Research by PayPal helps us understand women’s giving behavior and impact. (Infographic Credit: Paypal)
New research supported by Paypal points to the fact that women give more to charity while earning 19% less than men, and as they age, women become more generous.
Since Paypal processes the payments for more than a half million charities, it has decided to release its first-ever annual insights on where, why, and how people are donating their money online. PayPal’s 2018 Global Impact Report found that in 2018, 55.1 million people from over 200 markets contributed $9.6 billion to more than 665,000 charitable organizations via PayPal.
Top Giving Trends
There is a lot to unpack in this research, but overall, an important finding of the study is that those who have less give more. The study found that “Donors in the low-income bracket ($0-$49,999K) give the highest percentage of their income to charities (0.63%) over any other income bracket.” Those with higher income levels ($125k+), only give 0.14% of their income on average.
Women report more financial difficulties while repaying student loans, with black women reporting the most difficulty. (Image Credit: AAUW Infographic)
Billionaire Robert F. Smith recently delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black college in Atlanta. Most commencement speakers impart wisdom about following dreams, giving back, working hard, and so on. But Smith brought a little something extra to his talk: a pledge to pay all of the 396-person graduating class’s student debt (about $40 million dollars).
No doubt, many members of the Morehouse class of 2019 desperately needed this help. But it turns out that women, and particularly black women, are more likely to need student debt relief than men, according to a comprehensive study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). One reason is that in 2019 women will earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. It’s a remarkable shift from just a few decades ago when women trailed men in educational attainment. Unfortunately, this achievement has come at a steep cost, literally, as women owe $929 million—or roughly two-thirds—of the $1.46 trillion in U.S. student debt.
Women, and particularly women of color, made historic gains in the 2018 elections. Much of this new political activity was driven by progressive women donors.
The election of Donald Trump has sparked a wave of political activism never seen before, particularly among progressive donors.
According to the Center for Responsive Politic’s data, the top 154 donors spent a combined total of over $700 million this election cycle, with Democrats and progressives spending an estimated total of $327 million in this election, and Republicans and conservatives spending an estimated $350 million.
While the Center for Responsive Politics is reporting that this year’s midterms were by far the most expensive in history, with a large share of that spending coming from the right, another large share of that spending involved progressive women donors opening their wallets to fund the protection of key civil liberties including reproductive rights, health care, and social inclusion.
Taking the most recent data from the Center for Responsive Politics, I’ve parsed out the top women donors to progressive causes and candidates. Most of these women gave with their partners, so their decisions to give to progressive causes likely ranged in terms of how much the giving was driven by one or the other in the partnership. The important point here is that women are getting more influential in political giving, both within couples and independently, and in no other election cycle has that been more evident. Women donated an estimated 36% of the funds that fueled the 2018 midterm elections, and yes, that is a big deal.
TOP 5 WOMEN DONORS TO DEMOCRATIC AND PROGRESSIVE CAUSES AND CANDIDATES
1. Katherine A. Taylor (Kat Steyer): Along with husband Tom Steyer, Kat Steyer contributed over $50.7 million in combined hard and soft money going to Democratic and liberal causes and candidates. Tom and Kat Steyer are the founders of the TomKat Foundation, which focuses heavily on financial inclusion (they also run one of the most progressive banks in the nation lending to those who might not otherwise be able to get capital). Kat Steyer also focuses on food and nutrition and funds FoodCorp, which goes into public schools across the nation to help them improve food quality and teach about nutrition and healthy eating habits.
2. Marilyn Simons: In partnership with her husband, James Simons, Marilyn Simons contributed $18.9 million to progressives and Democrats this election cycle. In their foundation work, Jim and Marilyn Simons focus on science and math as well as issues related to Autism (they have family members who have struggled with Autism).
3. Deborah J. Simon: Ms. Simon gave $8.9 million to Democrats and liberal causes for the midterm elections. The daughter of a real estate company magnate, Ms. Simon chairs the Simon Youth Foundation (www.syf.org), a public charity that operating in 13 states to help at-risk high school students stay in school. Ms. Simon is also the founder of The Deborah Joy Simon Foundation, a private foundation making grants for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, and educational purposes.
4. Cari Tuna: Along with partner Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook), Cari Tuna made $6.3 million in donations to Democrats and liberal causes for the midterm elections. Tuna and Moskovitz are the co-founders of Good Ventures, where Tuna oversees the Open Philanthropy Project, which seeks to improve grantmaking with more effectiveness.
5. Marsha Z. Laufer: Along with spouse Henry, Marsha Laufer contributed $5.68 million to progressive causes and candidates in the midterm elections. According to Open Secrets, the Laufers have recently made many large donations to women’s election causes, including $100,000 to Women Vote! in September of this year. According to Forbes, Marsha Laufer and her husband Henry contributed an estimated $2 million to Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign for President.
The full list is here, so you can do more research to discover who the women are behind the big bump in political giving this election cycle.
From my parsed data, here are the top Democratic/progressive givers:
And here are the top Republican/conservative givers:
David Gough, CFO and Vice President of Grameen America, spoke with Philanthropy Women about Grameen’s new impact fund, which will make $140 million in loans over the next five years to low income women across the country.
With every day in America bringing news of regressive political changes that will negatively impact women, it’s important for those who want to increase gender equality to explore different strategies for reaching women who need resources. One strategy that recently caught my eye was Grameen America’s announcement that, in celebration of its 10-year anniversary in the U.S., it would enter the fray of impact investing and disburse an added $11 million in capital in microloans to low-income women across the country. With this new fund, over a five-year period, Grameen will make $140 million in loans to low-income women who are struggling to get a foothold in the U.S. economy as entrepreneurs. This is microfinance as a feminist strategy — and it has exciting implications for the future of feminist funding.Â
Natalie Molina Nino is CEO of BRAVA Investments, which takes a value approach to investing in products and services that benefit women.
One of our goals at Philanthropy Women is to explore different ways to invest in reducing the gender gap and building a better economy — ways that operate in both philanthropy and in regular business markets. Alongside gender lens grantmaking, progressive women donors also have another important way they can deploy their capital for gender justice: gender lens investing. One new investment instrument that recently came to our attention is BRAVA Investments, headed by CEO Nathalie Molina Niño, with partners Trevor Neilson and J. Todd Morley.
BRAVA is not primarily focused on supporting women owned start-ups or getting more women into the c-suite of corporations (though this is something they look at), but on investing in industries that economically benefit employees or consumers that are disproportionately women.
“I don’t think investing in women will become mainstream and be taken seriously until we prove that it is lucrative,” said Molina Niño, in a recent phone interview with Philanthropy Women.
Founded in August of 2016, BRAVA brings together Molina Niño’s expertise in large-scale business development and operational growth, with a value-based approach to investing that contrasts sharply with what many other gender lens investors are doing today.
Where did Molina Niño get the idea for her unique approach? To introduce her reasons for developing BRAVA’s approach, she referenced a recent study by Project Sage, which rounded up 58 gender lens investing instruments for a detailed analysis. Molina Niño said she did similar research in preparing for the launch of BRAVA.
“I did a mini-version of Project Sage a couple of years ago,” said Molina Niño. “What I saw was that a lot of my friends and colleagues were starting funds for women and they were struggling to raise cash, so they were these little micro funds worth like $2 million to $15 or $20 million tops. And they were all focused on early stage, very early stage, and higher risk. And they were doing it in the traditional venture capital way, where you invest in 100 companies and you hope that 10 of them will at least provide some return and one or two will really take off.” But Molina Niño didn’t want to take that approach.
“I wanted to do later stage investing, and I noticed nobody in the gender space was doing that,” she said. She liked later stage investing because it meant lower risk, and she also liked being more attractive to large scale institutional investors.
“For me it has always been about scale.,” said Molina Niño. “Even if you’re doing amazing work, but you’re doing it with $10 million a year, that’s pretty small potatoes. It’s never going be part of a big endowment or a big pension fund, it’s never going to be something that moves the needle in a big way. So for me, scale was important, as well as investing in companies that I think we can grow, and not expecting 90% of my companies to go bust.”
Another thing Molina Niño noticed, when she looked around at colleagues in gender lens investing, was that nearly all of the gender lens investing instruments created over the past 10 years are dominated by white women. “Even though I know many of the people who started these funds, and so I believe it’s in no way intentional, but it’s as though somebody wrote a memo and said, ‘Okay people, we’re only investing in white women.'”
So that was another challenge for Molina Niño. “Women of color get .1 % of venture capital,” she said. “You don’t hear many people talking about that.”
Molina Niño wanted to change that, but she also saw some problems in taking an approach of primarily funding women-led start-ups, since that also had limitations in terms of impact. “At BRAVA what we do is, we consider investing in women not to mean necessarily investing only in women entrepreneurs,” she said.
By way of example of the kind of business BRAVA is tracking, Molina Niño described a company called Honor in San Francisco that is a platform for matching people with elder care professionals. “They do a great job of building trust, because the site helps you find people who are vetted, and they have a great reputation for that. Part of how they got that reputation is by attracting and retaining their talent. ”
The way they do that, said Molina Niño, is by paying their workers $20 an hour, in a industry where workers generally receive no more than $12 an hour. “That’s huge. That’s life changing, the difference between $12 and $20 an hour.” Molina Niño also sees the writing on the wall for the need for elder care services in the US. “You have 10,000 people who are turning 60 every day in this country. This is a massive growth play.”
For Molina Niño, the litmus test for deploying capital is that the investment be measurably improving the economic lives of women, at scale, as part of their core business model. “It makes zero difference to me whether the founders are women. It makes zero difference if the board is made up of women. I would love for that to be the case, and maybe after I invest in them, I can influence that to be the case. But it doesn’t make all the difference to me, because they clearly have a model that takes large numbers of women and substantively changes their lives.”
BRAVA Investments hones in on opportunities for making the most impact in gender equality by investing in mid-level growth companies in health care, education, and consumer products, that are economically benefiting women. “If I think about how am I going to make the most impact, by making one woman entrepreneur successful, or by focusing on a company like Honor that is going to help thousands of women rise out of poverty, I’m always going to choose that latter model,” said Molina Niño.
BRAVA’s investment’s focus is on high growth business models that economically benefit women. “I don’t believe that making the one woman a billionaire is going to translate into thousands of women being better off,” said BRAVA’s co-founder and CEO, Nathalie Molina Niño.”I think if you believe that, you’re basically talking trickle down economics. And I don’t believe it.”
This graphic, courtesy of Brava Investments, shows where Brava’s focus differs from traditional investing, with its higher impact on women.
The good news about BRAVA’s approach is that it attracts serious investors with deep pockets, who hear that BRAVA is working at a larger scale and also using a strategy economically benefiting large populations of women. “We’re focusing on domains where women are the majority — either they have a majority of women in their workforce, or a majority of women in their consumer base.”
BRAVA is taking a much different lens than other gender lens investing instruments, capturing the value of investing in economic sectors that influence women’s lives instead of in corporate structures that value women’s leadership.
“I worry that gender lens investing has been too focused on women in the corner office,” said Molina Niño. “So if you look at Sheryl Sandberg and her book, she is focused on the fact that there’s a lack of women in the C-Suite. I step back and think, what percentage of the total women in the world are going to be worried about getting into the C-Suite?”
It’s not that Molina Niño does not want to see more women in leadership across all sectors, but there are different ways to create prosperity for women. “As a woman entrepreneur, I’m personally very impacted by issues around women’s leadership in business, and I co-founded a center for women entrepreneurs at Barnard College at Columbia University, so nobody can say I don’t care about women entrepreneurs, but I have a hard time making the entire story be about that tiny sliver of the population. What about the other 99% of women who will never start a business and who will never make it to the c-suite? They deserve to be invested in, too.” And she believes the evidence shows this broader lens also makes for better investment returns.
A final key point for Molina Niño is the essential role of strong alliances with men in the financial sector and beyond. “Men need to be a big part of this equation,” said Molina Niño. So while the end game is about benefiting women, Molina Niño sees plenty of room for men to be involved, especially when it comes to raising capital. “It’s silly to exclude the people who have all the power, influence, and capital, and so my business partners and co-founders are men. I did that on purpose.”
The women’s march: It’s not just about women. It’s about everyone.
The Las Vegas, Nevada Women’s March will launch Power to the Polls, a national voter registration drive.
And it’s not just one day. It’s the entire weekend.
And it’s not just about marching. It’s about participating in democracy.
The Women’s March for 2018 is about what it means to be part of a society that values equality and freedom, and it’s about getting more people to the polls to elect the defenders of those values.
After the overwhelming success of last years’s Women’s March, the creators of the event developed a nonprofit organization called Women’s March Alliance in order to facilitate movement activity. This year, over 200 events for the Women’s March will happen on both the 20th and the 21st. On the 20th, New York City will start its rally at 11 AM at 72nd street, marching past Columbus Circle by 12:30. In Washington, DC on the 20th, the march will start at the Reflecting Pool and go to the White House, with speakers to present on the steps of Lincoln Memorial.
The Emergent Fund, a collaboration of Women Donors Network, Solidaire, Threshold Fund, and Democracy Alliance, has published a report detailing their strategy in deploying funds rapidly to address human rights and social justice.
“The Emergent Fund started as a plane built in mid-air. We moved faster than comfort allowed in developing a funding response to the new threats posed by the 2016 election because the scale of the crisis that loomed was so large, multidimensional, and immediate. Resources were urgently needed in many places and without much time for deliberation.”
So begins Visionary Resistance, a new report reviewing how several donor networks came together to invest $ 1 million rapidly for efforts to protect those most marginalized and targeted by a Trump presidency. Aptly named the Emergent Fund, this new resource is funded through a partnership between the Women Donors Network, Solidaire, Threshold Foundation, and the Democracy Alliance.
I am pleased to announce that the Women’s Funding Network has agreed to serve as Philanthropy Women’s fiscal sponsor for our not-for-profit publishing work. This partnership will help us to raise funds to make Philanthropy Women a more potent force for educating the community about how women in philanthropy are driving social change.
The Women’s Funding Network (WFN) grew out of a 1984 joint meeting of the National Black United Fund and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, where participants discussed creating an organization exclusively for women’s funds. By 2000, WFN had grown into a network of 94 member funds and foundations with over $200 million in assets, deploying $30 million a year in grants. In 2003, WFN received a $5 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which enabled significant growth. Today, WFN continues to expand, with over 100 women’s funds and foundations spanning 30 countries, and continues to collaborate with other philanthropic powerhouses like Kellogg, the Gates Foundation, and the Clinton Foundation, to address gender equality globally.
This graph from Veris Wealth Partners shows the remarkable growth in Gender Lens Investing over the past three years.
Great news for the gender lens investing sector — 2017 brought a massive 41% increase in public market securities that use gender lens strategies.
A report entitled Gender Lens Investing: Investment Options in the Public Markets produced by Veris Wealth Partners has the details. Suzanne Biegel, Founder of Catalyst At Large, is credited with collaborating and gathering the information used in the analysis, this being her second year working in partnership with Veris Wealth Partners to create the public market scan. The study pulls together information from over 23 gender lens investment instruments produced by a wide range of financial companies including Barclay’s, Pax Ellevate, State Street Global Investors, ThirtyNorth Investments, Morgan Stanley, and others.
I am pleased to announce that the Women’s Funding Network has agreed to serve as Philanthropy Women’s fiscal sponsor for our not-for-profit publishing work. This partnership will help us to raise funds to make Philanthropy Women a more potent force for educating the community about how women in philanthropy are driving social change.
