Category: Women Leaders

Connecting Gender Equality and the Environment

In order to make real progress, the connections between gender equality and the environment have to become clearer to everyone. The newest issue of Gender & Development is taking a close look at the connections between gender equality and environmental work in today’s world, a world where President Trump has the power to reduce the size of  public monuments in Utah by millions of acres, a potentially illegal move that has huge implications for gender justice.  Certainly, now is the time for feminist and environmentalists to come together and strategize about how to fight back.

gender equality and the environment
The latest issue of Gender & Development looks closely at connecting up feminism with environmentalism.

In a post introducing the new issue of Gender & Development, Editor Caroline Sweetman reminds us that 2017 has been the deadliest on record for environmental activists.  Further, in many countries around the world, women are on the losing end of deals made to extract natural resources from developing nations.

Read More

Announcing a New Fiscal Sponsor for Philanthropy Women

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.

Read More

Giving Tuesday: Join WDN and Philanthropy Women

giving tuesday

Soon, the shopping rampage will be over, and we can get on with a much more interesting event of the season: #GivingTuesday. This year on Giving Tuesday, we will be hosting a Twitter chat along with the Women Donors Network, where we will talk about the diverse and powerful ways philanthropy can #fundwomen and make a lasting impact for gender equality.

Please join us on Tuesday, November 28 at 1 pm EDT (10 am PDT) for a one-hour conversation on the importance of funding women in today’s philanthropy landscape.

Topic: Why #FundWomen on #GivingTuesday?

Host: @philanthrowomen

Discussant: @womendonors

Hashtags: #FundWomen #GivingTuesday

Questions for Women Donors Network:

Read More

Gender Lens Investing Explodes in 2017

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.

Read More

Women: Embrace Your Power for Funding Social Change

Allison Fine, author and nonprofit leader, is Vice Chair of NARAL: ProChoice America Foundation.

Editor’s Note: It gives me great pleasure to welcome Allison Fine to Philanthropy Women as a guest contributor. Allison is the author of multiple books including Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age and The Networked Nonprofit. A former Senior Fellow at Demos, Allison specializes in the intersections of online activism and democracy-building, and encourages women to embrace their power in funding social change. 

Exactly a year ago, millions of women across the country created the Resistance. We have marched and protested, shared our outrage using hashtags such as #metoo, #yessallwomen #nastywomen and called (and called and called) Congress. Now it’s time to shift from powering the Resistance to creating the Renaissance. However, there is one huge barrier, the “final frontier” as philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnisch calls it: our discomfort with money and power.

Read More

Leah Hunt-Hendrix: Forming Strong Progressive Alliances with Solidaire

“How do you get movements to scale, while at the same time keeping them based on relationships?” asks Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Solidaire. It’s a question central to many progressive movements that want to help communities grow from within.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix
Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Solidaire.

Solidaire formed in 2013, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Arab Spring, and anti-austerity protests in Europe. These disparate movements did not seek narrow policy change; instead, they sought to question—and remake—their societies, disrupting systemic inequality and injustice.

Like these movements, Solidaire seeks to support non-traditional social transformation, says Hunt-Hendrix. By empowering grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter and their allies, it directs funding at the crosshairs of political struggle and progressive change.

Read More

Need a Lyft? Take the Lead Partners to Press Gender Equality

lyft
November 14th is Take the Lead Day. Get discounts on Lyft rides on November 14 with the codes on this coupon.

In case you haven’t noticed, nowadays people get around by Ubering or Lyfting instead of taking a cab or taxi. As these web-based transportation services grow, an exciting collaborations appears to be growing as well, specifically between Take the Lead, the women’s leadership organization steered by longtime feminist leader Gloria Feldt, and the company Lyft. To demonstrate its support of Take the Lead, the growing multi-billion dollar rideshare business is offering discounts on rides in honor of Take the Lead Day on November 14th. 

While Uber and Lyft are reportedly in stiff competition for riders, some reviews of the two services reveal that Lyft is known for being a friendlier and more customer-service-oriented ride. Another big factor that may give Lyft and long-term edge: according to a detailed review on Ridester, Lyft reportedly does not jack the rates up 7 to 8 times the normal rate during high volume travel times. While Lyft does increase rates during high volume travel times, the increases are reportedly closer to 1 or 2 times the price.

Read More

Time Magazine Spotlights Female Legislators Partnering for #MeToo

Just as I was remarking on Teresa Tanzi’s courage and how it led to an important victory for women and girls, comes news that the episode is bearing more fruit in terms of raising awareness and taking action.

Adding to the momentum of Teresa Tanzi and other state legislators, Time Magazine is spotlighting 7 female legislators from across the country who are collectively voicing their concerns about sexual harassment, and calling for states to lead the way with creating safer, harassment-free environments for all people.

The piece was cowritten by Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, South Carolina; Rep. Daneya Esgar, Colorado; Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, California; Sen. Sara Gelser, Oregon; Rep. Renitta Shannon, Georgia; Rep. Teresa Tanzi, Rhode Island; and Rep. Litesa Wallace, Illinois.

From Time:

The #MeToo movement on social media has awakened many Americans to the reality that sexual violence and harassment are prevalent in all corners of the country and take many different forms. Sometimes, harassment looks like an unwanted grope on a street corner. Sometimes, it looks like a boss making uncomfortable demands, or a friend who doesn’t listen when you say “no.” It looks like the fear, anger and shame felt for years afterward by those who are targeted. While millions of women responded #MeToo, we know sexual violence and harassment happens in all communities. We know that transgender individuals suffer at alarming rates, and that men and boys are victimized, too. 

[…] We see it. We live it. We power through it. Every day. And we are saying enough. That’s why we have spoken out, sponsored legislation and demanded change. We need change in our state houses, in our schools and on our campuses, on our streets, and in our workplaces. And big change starts with the states.

This collective action is a great example of how women at every level can collaborate and leverage their political power, encouraging more citizen activism. It would be great to see this coalition grow into the hundreds — all legislators working to end gender-based violence.

Related:Funders Take Note: #MeToo is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year(Opens in a new browser tab)

Percentage of Female State Legislators is Highest It Has Ever Been(Opens in a new browser tab)

This is How We Do It: Celebrating Some Feminist Victories

#MeToo, and Who is Funding Sexual Assault Prevention?

Read More

This is How We Do It: Celebrating Some Feminist Victories

The news is definitely not all good. But here and there, feminist victories are being won for women and girls. This past week in my home state of Li’l Rhody, we saw a sexual harassment scandal in the state capital blossom into a resignation of an offensive ranking Democratic party official, Joe DeLorenzo. As representative Teresa Tanzi said on Facebook regarding DeLorenzo’s resignation: “This is how we do it. Stand up, speak up and do so relentlessly. And unapologetically.”

Some feminist victories: Teresa Tanzi,  a state legislator in Rhode Island, recently disclosed about fellow lawmakers’ sexual harassment of her. This led  party Vice Chair Joe DeLorenzo to  make sexist and offensive comments. As the Democratic Women’s Caucus hustled to call an emergency meeting to oust DeLorenzo, he resigned

Another feminist victories: And then there is the matter of The New Republic’s thirty-year veteran Literary Editor, Leon Weiseltier, who we now know delighted in sexually humiliating women on a daily basis. Thanks to Laurene Powell Jobs, Mr. Weiseltier will no longer be pioneering a new publication called Ideas, since it appears his sexist and misogynist ideas and behavior are part of the problem.

Read More

Funding Feminism: Unearthing the History of Women’s Philanthropy

When I became interested in women’s philanthropy, one of the first questions I wanted to answer was about who started the funding of feminist-strategy giving. It was surprising and disheartening to learn that there were very few accounts of the history of women’s funding for women. So imagine my delight when I heard about the publication of Joan Marie Johnson’s book, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967. Her work in creating this history performs the desperately-needed public service of raising the profile of historical women who paved the way for gender equality, and a world where feminist leadership would set higher standards for civil society.

Read More