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Dear Faithful Readers of Philanthropy Women,
First, of course, thank you for reading. You are bravely joining me on the sometimes harrowing adventure of learning about gender equality philanthropy. I thank you for joining me on this journey.
Also, thank you to our sponsors, Ruth Ann Harnisch and Emily Nielsen Jones. You have provided an amazing opportunity to advance the knowledge and strategy of progressive women’s philanthropy, and for that you are wholeheartedly thanked.
Thank you, as well, to our writers — Ariel Dougherty, Jill Silos-Rooney, Tim Lehnert, Kathy LeMay, Susan Tacent, Betsy McKinney, and Emily Nielsen Jones. Your work reading, interviewing, thinking, and writing about women’s philanthropy has resulted in my receiving tons of positive correspondence about our content. The internal numbers also validate that we are making an impact.
Xiomara Corpeño is the Director of Capacity Building for theGroundswell Fund.
Editor’s Note: The following opinion piece by Xiomara Corpeño is part of a series being provided by Philanthropy Women to help identify and address growing threats to global human rights, particularly for vulnerable groups.
Several weeks ago, I woke up to the sound of my mother’s TV broadcasting the local morning news. “Breaking News! President Trump has reinstated a ban on Transgender troops this morning.” The White House later issued policy guidelines titled, A Guidance Policy for Open Transgender Service Phase Out, which would impact 15,000 trans service members.
Trump’s transgender ban is bigger than the right to serve in the U.S. military. It is part of a longer trajectory by right-wing forces aiming tofurther oppress and denigrate trans people.
Pictured is the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library at the University of Haifa, which educates students from Israel and around the world. Photo courtesy of the library’s website.
Last week in New York, over 50 female philanthropists came together to launch a new educational scholarship fund for women in Israel.
At the occasion, the American Society of University of Haifa announced the founding of its new Women’s Scholarship Fund. The scholarship seeks to engage women at all levels of philanthropy and support female students at all levels of education.
“We are very committed to education. Education is the key to everything. It is something that you can’t take away and if you give someone an education, it will enable them to help themselves for the rest of their life,” said Lady Irene Hatter, who spoke at the gathering. With their philanthropy, Hatter and her husband, Sir Maurice Hatter, support World Jewish Relief and World ORT, a worldwide Jewish educational NGO.
Ashindi Maxton is a Senior Advisor and funding strategist for the Women Donors Network (WDN) with extensive work in democratic reform, racial justice, and education.
Editor’s Note: This is an editorial by Ashindi Maxton, who is a Senior Advisor for the Women Donors Network (WDN), one of our Spotlight Organizations. The editorial tells the story of how WDN and its allies have been able to effectively bring in more partners to fund the resistance. As Ms. Maxton points out, the Threshold Fund and the Democracy Alliance joined WDN and Solidaire to expand the Emergent Fund, amplifying the ability of that fund to protect and empower marginalized communities.
From Ashindi Maxton:
Philanthropy in the U.S. has never faced a moment quite like this one. New threats loom larger over one community after another in steady sequence and core norms of equity and democracy feel suddenly unstable.
Muslim-Americans face hate crimes and travel bans. Immigrant communities face criminalization and deportations. Women face attacks on reproductive rights. Black and Latino communities face attacks on civil liberties, including voting rights and police violence. LGBTQ communities face a loss of the most basic protections in employment and public safety.
As the level of threats we are facing increases, philanthropy must also elevate our level of response. The philanthropic community cannot meet this rapid barrage of unpredictable threats using our traditional models. Instead, we must question some of our own core assumptions.
A few best practices we could begin to question include funding driven by rigid long-term planning, extensive organization vetting, and decisions made entirely by donors or foundation staff who are removed from the crises at hand. We have to ask ourselves if our funding models seize the tremendous opportunity of the historical and political moment.
The Women Donors Network (WDN) and Solidaire, two networks of individual donors committed to funding movements for racial and social justice, shared a key question, “How can our work rise to the level of these crises?”
Two driving principles for our response: responding at the speed of the threats and placing radical trust in the threatened communities to develop their own solutions.
With these principles as the foundation, we built a funding partnership for rapid response called “The Emergent Fund.” The name refers to “emergent strategy,” solutions that fluidly adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Our shared vision was for the Emergent Fund to support the work of threatened communities to build their own new reality — one that emerges on the other side of crisis and supports organizing that uses the energy of the moment to build powerful new thinking as envisioned by community leaders.
Foundation staff and wealthy donors often do not reflect the communities most at risk in this moment. Mainstream philanthropy is anchored in a conviction that people with advanced degrees and sophisticated titles are best positioned to solve social problems although they are the furthest removed from impacted communities. Knowledge of those communities is too often considered irrelevant in hiring or decisionmaking.
The Emergent Fund, on the contrary, was based on the premise that expertise lives in the communities we want to support.
The process we used to ensure that the expertise of community members drives and informs our funding decisions was steeped in networking with community leaders.
We started by calling the organizers and community leaders, most affected by today’s political moment, that we knew and asked about needs and approaches to this work and criteria we could use to allocate funding.
Next, we formed a brilliant decision-making advisory council of eleven well-respected and networked community leaders and funder representatives with community organizing backgrounds. This group of mostly women included Latinx, Black, Asian, Arab-American, Muslim, Native, White, and LGBTQ members.
We designed an easy application form, available on our website for anyone to apply, based on our mutually agreed on criteria.
Finally, we asked a second set of diverse activist leaders from across many communities to serve as a Nominations Network, to let others know about the Emergent Fund, to vet strong proposals, and to provide feedback to inform funding decisions.
This model, adapted from other models like the North Star fund and Marguerite Casey Foundation, which have been doing activist advised funding for many years, was based on curating thoughtful decision-makers with expertise in the communities we wanted to support. In every conversation, we learned about critical dynamics previously overlooked or ignored by other philanthropy colleagues.
Two additional networks of progressive donors, the Threshold Fund and the Democracy Alliance, joined our effort. In the first few months of 2017, their individual donors helped to raise over one million dollars allocated directly to communities most in need.
As we reflect on the lessons learned from the initial launch of the Emergent Fund, one thing is clear: any funder concerned with social change should be grappling to answer this question, “Who is best equipped to solve the challenges facing the most threatened communities?”
Philanthropy cannot presume expertise over the people whose lives are most directly impacted in this moment. Rising to historical moments should mean letting go of practices that have not served us or these communities well. Now is the time to experiment with and adopt new funding and leadership models led by people forming responses and vision from their own lived experience.
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Ashindi Maxton is a senior advisor and funding strategist for the Women Donors Network (WDN) with extensive work in democratic reform, racial justice, and education. The Women Donors Network, a community of more than 200 progressive women donors who invest their energy, strategic savvy, and philanthropic dollars to build a just and fair world.
Editor’s Note: To learn more about becoming a Philanthropy Women Spotlight Organization, please contact us.Read More
Women’s Funding Network LEAD awards went to eight women’s fund leaders participating in the Young Women’s Initiative.
Leaders from eight women’s funds across the country that spearheaded the Young Women’s Initiative received the 2018 Leadership and Diversity Award (LEAD), given by the The Women’s Funding Network at their annual summit, taking place this week in San Francisco.
The New York Women’s Foundation is a 2017 recipient of The Women’s Funding Network’s Leadership and Diversity (LEAD) Award, for launching the first Young Women’s Initiative in partnership with the New York City Council and inspiring similar efforts by women’s foundations across the country.
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy led the effort to preserve the White House as a national historic treasure.
Visit any historic property in the United States, and more than likely you’ll discover that women were responsible for its preservation. Though Americans often argue over what to preserve from our nation’s history, one thing remains clear: historic preservation is vital to understanding our nation’s past and forming our national identity. American women have played the main role in securing valuable historic properties to tell the story of the American past, and used political activism, philanthropy, and social networking to do so.
Let’s take a brief survey of just a few of the women’s groups and individual women involved in historic preservation.
Ann Pamela Cunningham: Historian Jill Teehan wrote that “historic preservationists universally credit Ann Pamela Cunningham, the woman who saved George Washington’s Mount Vernon home, as the chief architect of the historic preservation movement in the United States.” Cunningham heard about the dismal state of Mount Vernon in an 1853 letter from her mother, who wrote, “If the men of America have seen fit to allow the home of its most respected hero to go to ruin, why can’t the women of America band together to save it?” Cunningham then raised funds for its purchase and preservation through fairly new techniques such as newspaper appeals. She founded the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the first national women’s group, and the association that still manages Mount Vernon. Today, it is today the oldest private preservation organization in the United States.
Twenty Boston Women: The Old South Meeting House was the largest building in colonial Boston and was slated for demolition in 1876, until a now-anonymous group of women rallied to save it. Once a center of protest meetings during the Revolutionary era, the Meeting House had survived the Great Boston Fire of 1872 that destroyed 40 acres of the city’s downtown. It had fallen out of use as a church, but Boston women, convinced of the building’s historical value, rallied to preserve the building. The women enlisted such venerable Americans as abolitionist Wendell Phillips, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and beloved author Louisa May Alcott. They raised $400,000 to preserve the building and opened it as one of the first history museums in the United States. According to the Old South Meeting House website, the efforts of these women resulted in “the first successful preservation effort in New England.”
Daughters of the American Revolution: Founded in 1890, the D.A.R. has had its share of controversy in the past, but is significant for its commitment to historic preservation. In fact, the D.A.R. is so famous for this work it’s even mentioned in the 1957 Broadway hit (and later film) The Music Man. This organization raises money for the preservation of important historical sites in the United States, including the U.S. Capitol Building, the World War II Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. It has also provided funding for monuments and statues across the country, and members often volunteer at historic sites. The organization promotes and encourages historic preservation by awarding the Historic Preservation Medal and Historic Preservation Recognition Award, which both recognize individuals engaged in significant preservation projects.
National Society of the Colonial Dames: For 125 years, the Colonial Dames have worked to preserve and restore artifacts from the colonial era, including historic homes, paintings, portraits, and rare examples of women’s needlework from the colonial era. One of its most famous contributions to historic preservation is the granite canopy that protects Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which is visited by thousands of tourists every year.
Helen Pitts Douglass: A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, longtime abolitionist Douglass was the second wife of Frederick Douglass, an advocate for women’s rights, and one of the first to recognize the importance of African American history. Their interracial marriage caused controversy across the United States and this resulted in her multi-year struggle with his children to gain control of Cedar Hill, the Washington, D.C. home they lived in. In 1900 she established the home as a memorial to Douglass’s life and work as a former slave and prominent abolitionist. She founded and supported the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association with lecture fees, and when she died the National Association of Colored Women raised funds to buy Cedar Hill. Today, the re-named Frederick Douglass National Historic Site is managed by the National Park Service.
Caroline Emmerton: Born into the richest family in Salem, Massachusetts, Emmerton learned the value of community service from her mother and was a lifelong philanthropist. In addition to the creation of the Seaman’s Association for Widows and Orphans, Emmerton was committed to historic preservation, and was almost solely responsible for the preservation of many properties in Salem, Massachusetts in the early 20th century, including the House of the Seven Gables. She was also a founding member for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), which later became Historic New England. Like many philanthropists, she not only raised money to fund these efforts but also donated large amounts of her own fortune to further public interest in America’s past.
Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy: The cultured and sophisticated wife of President John F. Kennedy overcame her natural shyness in order to take the White House from being a dowdy old government building to the impressive and historic home to presidents that we know today. With Winterthur Museum’s founder Henry Francis du Pont, she formed the White House Fine Arts Committee and raised awareness of the need for the White House’s renovation and preservation through carefully-designed media efforts, including a spread in Life Magazine and a televised tour of the White House. She relied heavily on historical scholarship and told Life reporter Hugh Sidey, “Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to redecorate it—a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”
Hillary Clinton: The former First Lady, Senator, and first female presidential candidate from a major party has led successful efforts to preserve parts of America’s past. In 1998, while she was first lady, Clinton founded Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt, the first project of Save America’s Treasures and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in order to secure Val-Kill Cottage, the home of Eleanor Roosevelt, as a National Historic Site. She also secured a $10 million dollar donation from designer Ralph Lauren to pay for the preservation of the original Star-Spangled Banner, the nearly three-story flag that survived the attack on Fort Henry and inspired Francis Scott Key to write what is now our national anthem. At the time, it was the largest single corporate donation the Smithsonian had ever received. But Clinton also had a long-term vision for public collaboration in preserving American history. She stated, “We are not talking about just generous gifts, but also encouraging kindergartners to collect pennies to clean up the monument in the town square.”
This brief survey of the individual women and women’s groups that created the framework of historic preservation in the United States, including their efforts to raise necessary funds, demonstrates how vital the philanthropic work of American women has been to shaping our understanding of our nation’s history. This work continues, led by women such as Stephanie Meeks, the first woman president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As the current President and CEO of the National Trust, Meeks is especially committed to preserving sites important to the history of American women.
Today, women still participate in and lead preservation efforts in their own communities. Fundraising for such efforts is a great opportunity for girls and women’s groups, and helps increase society’s awareness of the role of women in our historical development.
Women in philanthropy: Check out Hala Ayala in Virginia, as part of an inspiring wave of women running for office in the state, which is having its elections this year. Hala Ayala is doing the very important work of standing up for what is right in an environment increasingly hostile to women and immigrants.
Hala Ayala, Candidate for 51st House District in Virginia and President of the Prince William Chapter of the National Organization for Women.
In Prince William County, Hala Ayala is hoping to bring her values of empowerment for women and equality for all to Richmond, and at the same time, send home one of Virginia’s leading anti-choice, anti-immigrant delegates.
Christena Reinhard is Co-Founder of Union & Fifth, which makes it easy to sell designer clothes for a cause, and has a specialty campaign around gender equality with Eileen Fisher Foundation.
One thing that repeatedly intrigues me in philanthropy is the way that women leaders put together the components of giving and social progress in new and creative ways, in order to maximize deployment of funds to important causes. Nearly every week, I come across a new combination of philanthropy and social action that a woman is pioneering.
This week’s amazing tale of women doing good in the world comes from the online retail sector and a new hub for online shopping called Union & Fifth. This nonprofit online store makes it easy for you to donate women’s designer clothing, shoes, and handbags, and choose a cause for where the money will be donated.
Florence Reed, Founder and President, Sustainable Harvest International
Sustainable Harvest International Founder and President Florence Reed did not encounter many other women leaders in philanthropy when she started the organization in 1997. “I was flying by the seat of my pants. I literally went to a library and checked out a book on how to start a non-profit, and went through it chapter by chapter,” she recalled in a recent interview with Philanthropy Women. Who knew then how successful her initiative would be: Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) was recently named by Charity Navigator as one of the “six highest-ranking charities in the sector making major strides to increase sustainable food production.”
Jennifer and Peter Buffett, Co-Founders, Novo Foundation (Photo Credit: Taylor Crothers)
If a foundation’s mission is to build more healthy partnerships in the world, what better place to start than with their own internal partnerships? In fact, for Peter and Jennifer Buffett of the NoVo Foundation, developing their own partnership as a couple coincided with developing the mission of their foundation, which is to transform relationships across the globe from “domination and exploitation” to “collaboration and partnership.”
I had approached NoVo wanting to talk to either Jennifer or Peter individually, but, apropos of their partnership approach to philanthropy, I got them both. They spoke to me by phone from their home in the Hudson Valley, about two hours north of New York City.
