A Force More Powerful

While women’s funds around the globe were organizing and developing, so were women’s funds in the U.S.
Sarah Gould, former President of the Ms. Foundation, recalls her experience:
I came to the foundation in 1986. That was a time, then moving into the 1990s, when philanthropy was actually growing by leaps and bounds. When I got to the foundation, it was extremely small. I was the fifth employee. When I arrived at Ms., we were probably giving $200,000 a year. There was only one way to go, and that was up. Then, Marie Wilson (former president of the Ms. Foundation) came. Literally, I think of it as her taking the foundation world by storm. What was unique about it was it was making grants at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Astraea was doing that. The Women’s Foundation of California also had that analysis; we were leading that analysis that it’s not just gender; it’s race, class, and gender at an intersection. It’s at that intersection that you can make a real impact, and it’s at that intersection that you can attract people into the women’s movement.
What was also unique is we began experimenting with different ways to grant money. I arrived in 1986, and by 1989 or 1990, Marie and I were trying to develop a collaborative fund for women’s economic development, which was, believe it or not, one of the first, if not the first, collaborative funds in philanthropy bringing institutions and individuals around the table to learn to make grant decisions together and to be able to make multiyear grants.
That first collaborative fund made its first grants in 1991. We had 13 funders. They were all institutions, including Ford, Levi Strauss, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Hitachi. There were 13 of them. We had about $2.3 million that we gave away over three years. For the first time, the Ms. Foundation could make multiyear grants of $50,000 a year. And this was in 1991. That was a lot of money. That was revolutionary for the foundation. We had a whole piece of the collaborative fund that was about learning, so we were trying to learn in the field, and certainly, we were trying to influence the funders around the table. We specifically, Ally said if you come to this table of the collaborative fund, it doesn’t mean you don’t fund in this area alone. It means you’ll learn more if you come to this table. We’ll learn together. Click here to read more!