Category: Research

AWID Studies the Feminist Funding Ecosystem

This week’s essential reading for feminist givers comes from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) with their report, Toward a Feminist Funding Ecosystem. The report helps to more clearly define the different types of funding that impact feminist movement-building, and makes recommendations for how to increase the most effective forms of funding.

AWID’s report, Toward a Feminist Funding Ecosystem, defines four main types of funding that impact feminist social change. (Image credit: AWID)

The report cites evidence that, “A remarkable – and disturbing – 99% of gender-related international aid fails to reach women’s rights and feminist organizations directly.” Instead, these funds end up being used by the development agencies that receive them, or get redistributed to mainstream organizations that are not associated with feminist movement builders.

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Leap of Faith: Oxfam Studies Funders for Women and Girls

Oxfam did the world another service recently by producing a report called A Leap of Faith: Conversations with Funders of Women’s Organizations. The report, which was written by I.G. Advisors, tells the story of how the funding landscape for women and girls feels close up — the ways that these funders struggle with trusting their grantees while also finding useful metrics to measure their work.

Oxfam has produced a new report studying how funders for women and girls approach their work. (PHOTO CREDIT: Nana Kofi Acquah / Oxfam)

Dr. Fenella Porter of Oxfam introduces the report by examining the profound power imbalances that exist between grantees and grantmakers across the board. She suggests that one form of power that grantees have is the power inherent in being the information collectors — the bringers of knowledge. “Knowledge is certainly power,” Porter continues, “but we must also recognize the many other power imbalances” that exist in philanthropy.

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Not Enough! Giving for Gender Equality Totals $6.3 Billion in U.S.

A giant step for gender equality research and knowledge occurred today: the Women’s Philanthropy Institute released its first ever Women and Girls Index (WGI), which measures charitable giving to women and girls’ causes in the United States. This new index helps to establish a baseline for what this giving looks like today, and will help to tally the rate of increase or, (highly unlikely) decrease in the real dollar value of this philanthropy subsector.

gender equality
Organizations focused on women and girls receive a small percentage of overall funding in charitable giving. Funding focused on women and girls represents $6.3 billion, approximately 1.6% of all charitable giving, which is estimated at $39.7 billion. (Image Credit: WPI: Women and Girls Index Report)

These statistics raise a critically important question: American philanthropy talks a good game about wanting more gender equality in our culture, but what are they actually doing about it?

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Funding Women Week in Review

Funding Women: The Good

Melinda Gates Commits $1 Billion to Gender Equity in the U.S. : It’s a good day for funding women when one of the richest women in the world declares she will invest $1 billion over ten years (still not enough!) in new efforts to address gender equality. Not surprisingly, Melinda lays awake at night worrying about many of the same things I worry about:

Bill and Melinda Gates, Co-Chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation meeting with the Union Minister of Women and Child Development, Smt. Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, in New Delhi on September 19, 2014. (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s what keeps me up at night: I imagine waking up one morning to find that the country has moved on. That the media has stopped reporting on systemic inequalities. That diversity remains something companies talk about instead of prioritizing. That all of this energy and attention has amounted to a temporary swell instead of a sea change.

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Back to School: Women Donors and Higher Education

higher education
Roberta “Bertie” Buffett Elliott, who donated $100 million to fund the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University, recently visited the campus. (Photo credit: Buffett Institute for Global Studies)

Institutions of higher learning are major recipients of philanthropic gifts, and received donations totaling nearly $47 billion in 2018 (a more than seven percent increase from the year previous). This rise is fueled in part by an increasingly wealthy, educated and philanthropically active group of women who are willing to make big ticket donations to colleges and universities.

Major female donors to higher education have included Roberta “Bertie” Buffett Elliott, who in 2015 gave her alma mater Northwestern University $100 million to fund the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Studies. The gift from Elliott, a member of Northwestern’s class of 1954, represents the single largest gift in the Evanston, Illinois school’s history.

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WomenFunded2019: Highlights from the First Day

The first day of WomenFunded2019 just wrapped up. With electrifying energy, the 400 people in attendance today engaged with a wide range of issues and topics. Here are some highlights.

MONEY: Where is the Money Going? How Philanthropists, Corporate Leaders, and Investors are Advancing Gender Equity

womenfunded2019
The first panel of the day included Kat Taylor, President and CEO of Beneficial Bank, Paulette Senior of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Pamela Shifman, Executive Director of the NoVo Foundation, Mary Chandler, Vice President of the Cummins Foundation, and Ada Williams Prince of Pivotal Ventures. The panel was moderated by Denise Dunning, Founder and Executive Director of Rise Up.

The panelists spoke from a personal perspective on how they became invested in gender equality. Many spoke of early life experiences of inequality that left a indelible mark. Pamela Shifman, Executive Director of the NoVo Foundation, shared about witnessing domestic violence experiences of friends as a child and young adult and remembered thinking, “This can’t be the reality of so many people I love.”

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Women in Philanthropy: NonProfit Pro Spotlight of Philanthropy Women

You know it’s a good day when you get an email from NonProfit Pro Editor-in-Chief Nhu Te asking you for an interview.

women in philanthropy
It’s always fun to have your face on the cover of a magazine! NonProfit Pro interviewed seven thoughtful leaders on the rise of women’s giving. (Image Credit: NonProfit Pro)

In her article, entitled The Rise of Women in Philanthropy, Te combines the voices of seven different women leaders, creating an interesting effect.

The story looks at how women approach giving differently, and how their visibility and hands-on tactics set them apart as a gender.

Allison Fine, who has authored pieces here at Philanthropy Women and is the founder and CEO of Network of Elected Women, discussed some of the ways women’s giving is becoming less shaped by men. We team up nicely here with these quotes:

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Women Give More from Less

paypal
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.

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Learning How to Shift From Domination to Partnership

Members of the feminist giving community: An upcoming webinar co-led by Helen LaKelly Hunt could be the perfect opportunity to learn some new skills for healthier relationships.

The Center for Partnership Studies and Relationships First (co-founded by Helen LaKelly Hunt and Harville Hendrix, pictured above) are hosting a webinar on September 12 to teach Safe Conversations methods of communication. (Photo Credit: Relationships First)

Relationships First and the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) are joining forces next month for Safe Conversations: Shifting from Domination to Partnership in Relationship. Held 11:00 – 12:30 PR (2:00 – 3:30 ET) on Thursday, September 12th, 2019, this FREE webinar focuses on the ways people can improve their relationships through quality communication skills.

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California Gender Justice Funders Launch $10 Mil Culture Change Fund

It’s time to change the way we think and talk about gender.

The Gender Justice Fund, developed by California Gender Justice Funders Network, will fund culture change around gender issues. (Image Credit: Gender Justice Fund)

For many of us — women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color, and others — the last few years have been difficult to digest. There are too many significant human rights issues happening in our country today to easily decide which to give priority.

In response, the voices of activists, philanthropists, and organizations in this social and political climate are louder than ever before. Together, funders and campaigners are making strides to support the causes they believe in, finding new platforms and new opportunities for growth every day. We’ve made progress in legislation, but at the same time, we’ve seen massive legal backslides — like laws barring transgender people from certain bathrooms and abortion bans in nine states — that make it difficult to celebrate our progress.

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