As many of you know, along with founding and editing Philanthropy Women, I am also a psychotherapist. So today I am offering something new here for readers: a chance to explore your inner wellness through hypnosis.
Scene for hypnosis: Sunset at Oakland Beach in Warwick, Rhode Island on Sunday, November 14, 2021. (Image credit: Kiersten Marek)
One of my specialties as a therapist is identity development. I have spent many years studying and writing about the archetypes — the different dimensions of human identity that come into play across the lifespan. In 2018, I also trained and became certified as a hypnotherapist. This is a hypnosis session to help you get a deep night’s sleep, and to give you a chance to experience your inner Innocent.
In February 2021, 18-year-old Úrsula Bahillo was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, an officer in the Buenos Aires police force. The femicide led a group of Argentine women to create the organization Mujeres en Acción, an entirely volunteer brigade of women providing support to survivors of gender-based violence in the Latin American region.
Volunteers spanning from six countries in Latin America are coming together to support domestic abuse survivors, using a platform called GetBEE. (Image credit: Mujeres in Accion)
Úrsula’s untimely death was the 44th femicide registered in Argentina in the first two months of 2021, and its occurrence prompted immediate outrage in the country. After all, the 18-year-old victim had followed all the recommended steps: she reported her attacker to the police stations and the courthouse. She got a restraining order that made it illegal for him to come near her, but he broke the restraining order numerous times. One major way the system fell apart for her: Úrsula requested a “panic button” from the police, but she never got one. Her last message to her friends read: If I don’t come back, tear everything down.
It’s finally happening: America is charting its course as a nation to remedy our problems with gender equity and equality. What is contained in the momentous document, and how will it affect funding for gender issues?
The Biden-Harris administration’s Gender Policy Council recently released the country’s first National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality. (Image credit: White House Report)
The President and Vice President begin the document by locating the issue in our current context of heightened stakes for women and girls in the US and across the globe:
This document, the first-ever United States government strategy on gender equity and equality, is a part of that noble American tradition [of valuing equality]. It comes at an inflection point for the economic security, safety, health, and well-being of women and girls in our nation and around the globe. COVID-19 has exacerbated preexisting economic, health, and caregiving crises that disproportionately impacted women and girls long before the pandemic struck. Following the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, women’s participation in the American labor force plummeted to its lowest level in over 30 years. Rates of gender-based violence have risen significantly, and racial and ethnic inequity has deepened.
Editor’s Note: The following essay is by By Dr. Susan M. Blaustein, Founder and Executive Director, WomenStrong International.
As someone who has funded and worked with women’s organizations to advance gender justice, human rights, and global development, I learned long ago that women always know what they and their families and communities need, in order to thrive; they simply lack the financial and technical resources needed to put their solutions into practice.
Partners working together at WomenStrong International’s Girls’ Education and Empowerment Retreat. (Image credit: WomenStrong International)
That’s why I celebrate the recent high-profile donor efforts to invest in women’s priorities. Yet, even with these bold commitments, the total philanthropic support for women’s organizations remains a paltry fraction – 1.6 percent — of U.S. grantmaking, according to the Women’s Philanthropy Institute’s latest Women and Girls Index, published by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. If we hope to improve the lives of and opportunities for women and girls worldwide, those percentages must rise dramatically.
The Women’s Funding Network (WFN) is back this year with another exciting convening on the many forms of feminist changemaking happening in today’s world. This year’s Women Funded 2021 virtual conference, The Feminist Factor, focused on a wide range of philanthropic and social justice topics as we continue to fight the tide of inequality in a post-COVID world.
Carmen Perez spoke at The Feminist Factor about Latinx feminist giving. (Image Credit: WFN)
The conference’s mainstage plenary introduced some of the superstars of the feminist philanthropy world.
Monica Ramirez and Carmen Perez on Latinx in Feminist Giving
The mainstage event began with a conversation between Mónica Ramírez (Justice for Migrant Women) and Carmen Perez-Jordan (The Gathering for Justice) on the importance of Latinx feminism. Perez described her journey as a Chicana feminist, starting with her realization that her own mother was a feminist and had passed those ideals on to her.
Editor’s Note: This interview in our Feminist Giving IRL series features Favianna Rodriguez, President of The Center for Cultural Power, a national organization investing in artists and storytellers as agents of positive social change.
Favianna Rodriguez, courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez
What do you wish you had known when you started out in your profession?
I wish I’d known more about the racial and gender barriers that exist for women of color leaders in the non-profit sector, particularly the arts and culture space. I knew how to pitch my ideas and raise money, but I lacked information on how to navigate situations in which I was experiencing unequal treatment due to my gender and racial identity. I was in many spaces where the safety of women was not prioritized. Unfortunately, over the last 20 years of being an institutional leader, I’ve experienced numerous uncomfortable situations including sexual harassment, the theft of my ideas by male leaders, being bullied by men when I challenged sexist assumptions, and being trained to lead in a boy’s club type of approach. Before, I didn’t have the language or tools to navigate these situations. But that has since changed, and I’m incredibly thankful for that because it gives me the opportunity to create safe spaces for other female and gender non-confirming leaders to thrive.
Philanthropy Women May be Winding Down Due to Lack of Supportfor Feminist Media about Donor Leadership, Strategies and Practices.
With nearly 1,100 posts published, an unusually high and rising domain authority, and hundreds of feminist leaders and strategies highlighted, Philanthropy Women is simultaneously a feminist media powerhouse and running out of resources. And it’s not for lack of trying to find those resources, or generate them on our own.
What happened to us? It’s a case of what I can only describe as our strategy anticipating a time when philanthropy is ready to fully invest in equality for women and other marginalized groups. We’re not there yet.
Data reveals how women suffer disparities in health funding, especially related to brain disorders. As a result, funding for women’s brain health is alarmingly insufficient and contributing to expensive long-term treatment costs.
Women have been coming out and speaking against the inequities they face in health care. For years, women have been saying that the healthcare field has not had their best interests at heart. They frequently have expressed that the medical community has treated them with dismissal and misdiagnosis.
WHAM’s research shows a deep disparity in funding for women’s brain health. (Image credit: WHAM)
New data reveals this to be especially poignant in terms of women dealing with brain health disorders. An organization by the name of WHAM (Women’s Health Access Matters), released a report about this data.
Teneral Cellars’ new “Healthy Women, Healthy World Collection” has launched to raise awareness of and money for women’s health.
Teneral Cellars, a purpose-driven all digital winery, announced the launch of its Healthy Women, Healthy World Collectionfeaturing a trio of wines that bring attention to reproductive, heart and breast health issues that affect millions of women globally. With every three-pack sold, $10 will be donated to the Endometriosis Foundation of America (EndoFound).
Teneral Cellars Launches Healthy Women, Healthy World Wine Collection is supporting the Endometriosis Foundation of America (Image credit: Teneral Cellars)
Women’s health is the cornerstone of all healthy communities. The collection speaks to the brand’s core mission to elevate women and inspire change, encouraging women to focus on their own health and take care of each other so that no one is neglected. Unfortunately, due to gender and racial bias in medicine, women are less likely to have pain treated, symptoms taken seriously, or be given a diagnosis, all of which can have serious implications.
As someone who has spent the past five years of her life studying the way we fund gender equality movements, this is the question I am often left with at the end of the day: Is the world fundamentally unserious about gender equality?
Because the more you look at the data, the more it seems that funding for gender equality is so sidelined and misdirected and poorly tracked and evaluated, that it’s really no wonder that progress is as slow as it is.
A new report entitled Tracking Philanthropic and Gender Equality Financing aggregated data from SDGFunders to come up with the following totals of funding from the top 10 private foundations doing this work in Kenya. (Image credit: Publish What You Fund)
Now, a new report by Publish What You Fund and partners helps to elucidate just what funding for gender equality looks like in different nations around the world, and shows us just how little we know about what is going on with this sector of social change funding.
