Category: Foundation Leaders

Giving Circles Get New Attention from The Rhode Island Foundation

How great to see The Rhode Island Foundation embracing giving circles and offering to provide matching funds to six giving circles that meet their criteria. From the Foundation’s website:

The Rhode Island Foundation seeks up to six informed and engaged community leaders who are interested in forming, leading, and facilitating small groups of peer networks organized around charitable giving. Giving circles are groups of people who pool their donations and decide together how to distribute them. Groups typically have a shared interest or connection, but it’s not required. Individual giving circles will have the ability to set their own member requirements and giving levels.

Each circle will identify its own needs and design the appropriate goals and structure. This initiative is meant to inspire philanthropy throughout the community and to provide an opportunity for groups of people that might not otherwise come together around a fundraising effort – to do just that. It is not about giving to the Rhode Island Foundation. Likewise, the Rhode Island Foundation will not solicit gifts for your giving circle.

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Pivoting Toward Power: How Melinda Does Gates Giving Differently

By World Economic Forum [CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

Many experts have argued that nothing is more important for global development than empowering women to play an equal role in all societies. Lately, that view has growing sway at the world’s biggest foundation.

Signs have been emerging for a while now that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving more attention to women’s empowerment, with Melinda leading this shift—while also becoming more independent in her philanthropy. This could be a very big deal over the long term.

Here are some of the tea leaves we’ve been reading.

First, Melinda Gates has recently raised her profile as a leader on women’s issues. In the past 18 months, she’s given interviews to several national media outlets, including Fortune and Elle, about her increasing focus on women’s empowerment, and authored an opinion piece for CNN about the need for more data on women.  She even recently said she would like to see a woman become president. No clear endorsement here, but that’s a pretty big hint about how this powerful female leader sees the world. She is making more videos in which we hear her voice and see her face. She’s making it crystal clear that one of the richest women in the world is also a huge believer in women’s empowerment.

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Star-Studded Event “Women in Philanthropy” Happening in Southport, CT Soon!

Wow, impressive lineup for this event on January 12 in Southport, CT. Carolyn Miles, President and CEO of Save the Children, will be speaking, among other luminaries. Miles also spoke at the last Clinton Global Initiative winter meeting in February of 2016, which I attended to report on the No Ceilings project of The Clinton Foundation.

Many of these presenters will doubtlessly have interesting things to say about how women are influencing philanthropy — making it more collaborative, inclusive, and organically integrated into the economy, to name just a few of the changes that women bring to the field.

Public events and discussions like this will help women in philanthropy shift the conversation and shed light on this fast-growing movement. From the Fairfield Hamlet Hub:

Save the Children and Pequot Library present local philanthropic leaders discussing how women are changing the face of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, on Thursday, January, 12, 2017 at 7:00pm in Pequot Library’s Auditorium.

Learn about ways you and your family can get involved and make a positive impact in our community and around the world. There will be an Introduction by Stephanie Coakley, Executive Director, Pequot Library, and Mike Tetreau, First Selectman, Town of Fairfield; the program is moderated by Bianna Golodryga, News & Finance Anchor, Yahoo!

The panelists include: Carolyn Miles, President and CEO, Save the Children; Susan Friedlaner Calzone, President and CEO, Foundation Source; Fiona Hodgson, VP for Development and Philanthropic Services, Fairfield County’s Communication Foundation; Emily Tow Jackson, Executive Director and President, Tow Foundation. There will be a wine and cheese reception to follow. For questions and additional information, please contact Amy Sinclair, asinclair@savethechildren.org , (475) 999-3077.

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Launching Today: Knight Fdn Funding New Nonprofit Journalism

We live in a world where the first thought about a piece of news needs to be: what is the source? With so much fake news and misinformation out there, the Knight Foundation is amping up its support of high quality community-driven media with new funding.

Jennifer Preston, VP, Journalism, The Knight Foundation

Jennifer Preston, Vice President of Journalism at the Knight Foundation spoke to Philanthropy Women this morning, the day of the launching of this new funding initiative.

She said most of those organizations receiving matching funds from this new initiative are Knight Foundation grantees from over the past three years. “Amid all of the concerns about fake news, supporting nonprofit journalism is a great way to address those concerns. Battle Fake news with smart news,” said Preston.

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Jacki Zehner: “The Case Has Been Made” for Gender Equity in Business

Jacki Zehner, chief engagement officer for Women Moving Millions, with board member Susan Morrison.

Jacki Zehner, chief engagement officer of Women Moving Millions, wants to see corporations—particularly financial services firms—put their money where the research is when it comes to gender equity, and more specifically, women’s empowerment, inclusion, and leadership. Why? It is not only in their best interest, but key to economic stability and growth.

Zehner is one of a new breed of philanthropic leaders who transitioned from a successful career in business, bringing that knowledge and experience with her. She knows the gap between talk and action on gender equity in corporations well. Though Zehner’s career was made in fixed-income trading, rising at Goldman Sachs to make partner in 1996, her passion was women’s issues, and that passion led her to a position in the firm’s executive office where her role was, in part, to champion diversity and inclusion.

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Philanthropy Vs. Patriarchy: Emily Nielsen Jones and the Fight on Faith

Here’s the story of how Emily Nielsen Jones and her husband, Ross Jones, discovered their niche of integrating a gender focus into their faith-inspired philanthropy. The Boston-based couple once funded Christian Union, an Ivy League campus ministry, to launch a new branch at their alma mater, Dartmouth College. They were impressed with the organization at first because of its interest in mobilizing students to engage in combating human trafficking.

emily nielsen jones
Emily Nielsen Jones

But as Jones got closer to the organization and started asking gender-related questions, she uncovered that within its own organization, the Christian Union promotes what it calls a “complementarian” leadership structure, which excludes women from top leadership positions. Once the couple gained more awareness about this policy, which creates gender ceilings for both staff and students, they engaged in a dialogue to encourage Christian Union to reconsider its practices of limiting women in the organization.

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Ruth Ann Harnisch: Modesty Does Not Serve Women’s Leadership

You can’t get much closer to the epicenter of creativity, social justice, and women’s empowerment than the Harnisch Foundation (theHF). Through its focus on empowering women and girls of all backgrounds, its innovative grantmaking toward women and media, and its latest Funny Girls grant initiative that teaches resilience and leadership through improv, theHF’s work spans some of the most relevant and important missions in philanthropy today. And at the epicenter of the HF is Ruth Ann Harnisch.

Ruth Ann Harnisch
Ruth Ann Harnisch

How did Ruth Ann Harnisch rise to her current position, with an amazing career in journalism and media under her belt, as well as 17 years at the helm of a foundation carrying out many unique and creative initiatives for women and girls?

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Some Words of Advice for the Next President from Jacki Zehner  

Editor’s Note: The following post is from Jacki Zehner.

On January 29th, 2009, a mere nine days after being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was his first piece of legislation as President, and it set the stage for a presidency that has been visibly committed to equal rights for men and women.

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Since that historic day over seven years ago, Obama has reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law the Affordable Care Act, created the Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the White House Council on Women and Girls, issued an executive order that mandated federal contractors to publish pay data according to gender and race in order to combat the wage gap, and this May, the White House will host The United State of Women, a three day summit in Washington DC that will tackle gender inequality across a range of issues, including education, health, leadership, and economic empowerment.

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Emily Nielsen Jones on Patriarchy, Faith and Fighting Male Dominance

Here’s the story of how Emily Nielsen Jones and her husband, Ross Jones, discovered their niche of integrating a gender focus into their faith-inspired philanthropy. The Boston-based couple once funded Christian Union, an Ivy League campus ministry, to launch a new branch at their alma mater, Dartmouth College. They were impressed with the organization at first because of its interest in mobilizing students to engage in combating human trafficking.

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Emily Nielsen Jones (Image Credit: ENJ)

But as Jones got closer to the organization and started asking gender-related questions, she uncovered that within its own organization, the Christian Union promotes what it calls a “complementarian” leadership structure, which excludes women from top leadership positions. Once the couple gained more awareness about this policy, which creates gender ceilings for both staff and students, they engaged in a dialogue to encourage Christian Union to reconsider its practices of limiting women in the organization.

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