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!

“Uprising” is featured in the South Asian Herald! Co-author Jane Sloane explains why the book is “A Force More Powerful”

Dec. 28, 2024, South Asian Herald — “Uprising” co-author Jane Sloane is featured in today’s issue of the South Asian Herald in an article she penned about the book. Entitled “A Force More Powerful: A New Book on The Rise of the Global Women’s Funding Movement,” Jane highlights the significance of women’s funds in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India.

Jane explains: The story of the global women’s funding movement deserves to be better known, and this book, The Uprising of Women in Philanthropy, co-authored by nine women leaders, sets out to do just that.

The Global Women’s Funding Movement is a worldwide network of women’s funds that power gender equity and social justice movements with money and resources. Today, women’s funds are typically public, nonprofit funds whose primary purpose is to mobilize funds for work led by women, girls, and gender-expansive persons to advance women’s rights and gender equality. There is also Prospera, the International Network of Women’s Funds, and the Women’s Funding Network.

One of the great catalyzers of creating women’s funds was the UN World Conferences on Women and notably the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. The conference was attended by 17,000 representatives from 189 countries and territories. The power of women’s movements was so evident that women realized they needed to mobilize funding for the causes they cared about. Global Fund for Women and Urgent Action Fund in the United States and International Women’s Development Agency in Australia were all created by founders inspired by their experience at the UN women’s conference in Beijing.

Over the years, several women’s funds have emerged in Asia, including Women’s Fund Asia based in Sri Lanka, Tewa, the Nepal Women’s Fund, South Asia Women Foundation India, Bangladesh Women’s Foundation, HER Fund in Hong Kong, and Urgent Action Fund Asia and Pacific. The stories behind the creation of some of these funds speak to the creativity and determination of the founders. This is undoubtedly true of Tewa, the Nepal Women’s Fund, a story told in The Uprising of Women’s Philanthropy. Click here to read more in the South Asian Herald!

The Great Wealth Transfer

Women’s unprecedented financial power today is, in large part, the result of feminism’s victories.

  • In 2015, women bypassed the halfway mark for controlled personal wealth in the U.S. Women now own 51 percent of all personal wealth in the nation.
  • By 2030, it is estimated that women in the U.S. will control two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, which means women’s philanthropic impact will increase substantially, given their propensity for giving.

The reason: As much as $68 trillion is expected to be passed on from U.S. baby boomers, a phenomenon that financial experts have coined the “Great Wealth Transfer.” It is considered a monumental occurrence, not because of the wealth itself, but because women who typically outlive men will inherit most of it.

Moreover, many women will inherit twice—once from their parents and once from their spouses or partners. According to the Social Security actuarial life expectancy tables, women outlive men by three to five years on average. Therefore, it can be presumed that single or married women or women with partners in the boomer generation will have custody of the Great Wealth Transfer before it is transferred to the millennial generation.

This historical occurrence is linked directly to both the victories in women’s property law reform by the first-wave feminist movement in the 1800s and due to women living longer and having better education, greater financial autonomy, and near equal participation in the workforce—all resulting from the work of the second and third waves of women’s movements. Other countries are on a similar trajectory. As a result of the successes of the first three waves of feminism, we are about to experience a female financial phenomenon that has never occurred in recorded history. Click here to read more!

Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice, part 2

Disaster is not a singular experience; it unfolds. Domestic and family violence soars in the months and years following natural disasters. It usually involves physical and psychological violence perpetrated by men against women and children, but it can also include an array of other violence, including sexual, financial, and emotional abuse.

Consider this: 

  • In 1991, during the cyclone disasters in Bangladesh, of the 140,000 people who died, 90 percent were women.
  • After the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, in the villages in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and India surveyed by Oxfam, surviving men outnumbered women by almost 3:1.
  • During the emergency caused by Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2007, 80 percent of the victims trapped in New Orleans were women, and most were Afro-American mothers with their children—the poorest demographic group in that part of the country.
  • Because of droughts, women in some parts of Kenya burn up to 85 percent of their daily calorie intake just by fetching water.
  • On average, women and girls in developing countries walk approximately 3.5 miles daily and carry over 40 pounds of water during these trips.
  • In Guatemala, drought conditions have dramatically increased the distance some women and girls, traditionally the water carriers for their families, needed to travel to get enough supply. This added exposure has made the girls more vulnerable and doubled their risk of kidnapping—an increasingly common and brutal way for men in rural regions to secure “wives.”
  • Another study of 4,605 natural disasters occurring in 141 countries discovered that the effects on women were most severe in countries with very low social and economic rights for women. Where patriarchy is most potent, the impact of climate disaster is most devastating on women.
  • Studies in the U.S. documented a devastating 98 percent increase in physical violence against women after Hurricane Katrina, which remained elevated for two years.
  • Following the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, more than half of women in one study reported experiencing domestic violence. Many had never experienced it before.
  • Another study of the same disaster found that the closer they lived to the worst affected areas of the bushfires, the more domestic violence the women experienced.

Disaster perpetuates patriarchy, and patriarchy perpetuates disaster. While natural disasters have become drastically more common, autocracy has, too, and this is no coincidence. Women’s funds have contributed a gendered analysis to the climate justice discussions, which have taken a front seat in sustainable development platforms.

Women’s funds have resourced activists and their movements to be heard at critical tables and to craft solutions around food production and natural resource management in their communities. This flexibility is an example of how the global women’s movement has evolved as the lived realities of our global population evolve. This work will only grow and remain on the agenda as a critical human rights and development concern. Thankfully, the predictions around rising women’s wealth and propensity to give are encouraging and give hope for mobilizing more funds for women’s organizing and gender justice in the time ahead.

Next, we learn about: The Great Wealth Transfer

Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice, part 1

Gender equity and gender equality are increasingly crucial to humanity’s survival. They are one of the only fast tracks and most critical steps needed to address climate collapse. Women’s funds paid attention to the impact of climate change on women’s gendered roles long before climate change became a major concern on the global stage. They funded women to create solutions to drought, flooding, and innovations in climate adaptation. More recently, in 2013, environmental activist and author Paul Hawken recruited a large team to assess and model practical solutions to climate change based on available data and research from numerous sources.

The results are summarized in Drawdown, a book edited by Hawken that identifies 100 substantive ways for people, governments, and companies to reduce the pace of global warming over the next 30 years. “Drawdown” refers to the desired point at which the current buildup of atmospheric carbon is halted.

Hawken’s team ranked solutions by their estimated capacity to stanch the carbon buildup through 2050. And here’s the big news: increasing girls’ education and access to family planning ranked sixth and seventh on the list (number one is most impactful). The authors noted that these two solutions are so closely linked in a practical sense that they should be considered together, yielding a combined impact that would top the Drawdown climate solution rankings by a wide margin.

Also making a strong case that gender equity is necessary to address climate change successfully are the six authors of the 2022 book Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. In the book, these illustrious authors—all leading climatologists and economists—contend that climate collapse is still avoidable and that it is possible to stabilize temperatures below 2°C, but reaching gender equity by 2050 is vital. Their model shows that to achieve what they termed “The Giant Leap,” we must achieve full gender equity in the next 30 years. The authors posit that without full gender equity, rising gender, racial, and economic inequity in the next three decades will “lead to increasingly dysfunctional societies, making cooperation to deal with existential threats like climate change more difficult.”

The climate field is an example of where the women’s movement has contributed an intersectional analysis that elevates new learning for the wider public and for decision-makers.

Tomorrow we learn more about: Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice in Part 2 of our blog series. We will discuss ways to apply a gender lens to climate change analysis, which allows us to appreciate that women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men. Including this fact: The girls and women who don’t die are at far greater risk than men of suffering ill-health effects, facing unemployment, losing assets, slipping into poverty, and experiencing forced marriage or sexual violence following a disaster. Eighty percent of people displaced by climate change are women and children.

Ep3: Uprising of Women in Philanthropy — Meet 2 more authors of this international social justice playbook

listen

Dec. 15, 2024 — Hello and welcome to the third episode of a new podcast and video show The Uprising of Women in Philanthropy, which is based on the 2024 book and is certain to be a bestseller.

On today’s podcast you’ll meet: Stephanie Clohesy, Former Board Chairman, Women’s Funding Network • Ruby Bright, Past President and Chief Executive Officer, Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis

Stephanie leads today’s episode.

Listen to the podcast on UpriseRadio and check out the video interview on UpriseTV.

Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 4

Women’s funds are philanthropic vehicles to help sustain movements for transformative change. They are critical in rapidly identifying the nature of attacks against national feminist infrastructure and activists and helping to convene the emergency response required.

Challenging patriarchal forces effectively, as women’s movements do, can be extremely dangerous. It takes very little for patriarchal operatives to resort to violence. Indeed, it appears to be the preferred tactic. Research indicates that violence against women in politics is soaring.

“Women in politics” refers to women directly or indirectly engaging in political processes: women candidates for office, politicians, political party supporters, voters, government officials, and activists/human rights defenders/social leaders.

Worldwide, women are facing unprecedented levels of targeted political violence, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)—in partnership with the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. The Project began compiling data on political violence targeting women in 2018 and detected an immediate spike in political violence targeting women across the world.

According to a 2019 article by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian entitled “Political violence against women tracked for the first time as attacks soar,” analysis suggests “a recent spike in violence, with twice as many cases reported during the first quarter of 2019 (261 events) as during the first quarter of 2018 (125 events)” based on reports collected across Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Click here to read more!

Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 3

The Global Women’s Funding Movement is a strong pipeline for sharing information, trends, strategies, and resources.

It is also the vehicle for women’s funds to collaborate with each other to support, strengthen, and help defend women’s movements and the women human rights defenders that lead them. In 2009, a decade before it would hit researchers’ radars two women leaders, Marusia López Cruz and Lydia Alpizar Durán, began detecting a pattern of violence against women leaders, in particular Indigenous women, in their networks across Mesoamerica—the historical region and cultural area in the southern part of North America and Central America. Women leaders throughout the region were being targeted for violence, and, ultimately, a number were murdered. They were being arrested and exiled systematically as they resisted threats to their freedom and their community’s wellbeing.

This detection work was compiled through a mapping process supported by JASS (formerly Just Associates) led by Lisa VeneKlasen, their founding Executive Director. Two women’s funds funded these women leaders at the time: Global Fund for Women and Fondo Semillas. Mama Cash later provided additional funding through the Dutch Lottery and managed through the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres (Central American Women’s Fund). This mapping also unearthed the continuing discrimination by human rights movements against women leaders in this region. Indeed, there was also a lack of knowledge regarding this dire situation in the women’s movement. Click here to read more!

Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 2

Yesterday we told you the story of legendary Dame Carol Kidu, who was the only woman in the Papua New Guinean parliament for most of her time in office, tried to introduce a law banning marital rape. She bided her time until the last session of parliament in 2002 and bundled it in with a series of amendments to a Child Sex Exploitation and Rape Bill. So, the law banning marital rape finally did pass, and it was months later before all her all-male parliamentary colleagues found out they’d been asleep at the wheel.

Today we hear from Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of the international feminist fund MADRE (founded in 1983). She explains how women’s movements are essential for democracy in a Los Angeles Times op-ed:

“Women are behind the most successful uprisings of 2019. In over a dozen countries on five continents, people have risen up to confront economic inequity and even the most repressive governments. These mobilizations are answering the question of how to tackle ascendant right-wing authoritarianism—and women have been at the heart of it all. In part, that’s because women know well the consequences of living under these draconian governments. Right-wing forces promote a toxic brand of masculinity that defines manhood through violence and aggression, promising men a slice of patriarchal power in exchange for backing authoritarian rule. They relegate women to silence and submission and force LGBTIQ people into hiding. They have targeted female human rights activists who defy patriarchal norms with harassment, criminalization, and even murder.”

One of the reasons women-led, feminist organizing is an effective strategy to confront authoritarian power is that women’s movements are nonviolent, inclusive movements, which means more people can join them and more do. Click here to read more!

Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 1

A key strategy of patriarchal power is creating conditions and cultures permissive to violence against women and gender-expansive people that impose strict gender roles. Over the last few years, a global surge in right-wing, authoritarian movements and “strong men” governments have contributed to a monumental rollback of women’s rights and have aggressively attacked protections against gender-based violence.

  • In 2017, Vladimir Putin signed into law legislation that decriminalized much of what was previously defined as domestic violence. Unless the abuse results in broken bones and occurs more than once a year, it is no longer punishable by long prison sentences.
  • Spain’s surging far-right Vox party proposed that the country repeal a landmark law to protect women from violence, citing its unfairness toward men, claiming that men would be the victims by being unfairly accused.
  • The Trump administration diluted the definition of domestic violence in reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. No longer does it classify as domestic violence if a woman’s partner isolates her from her family and friends, monitors her every move, belittles and berates her, or denies her access to money to support herself and her children, which are the core strategies of control used by domestic abusers.

In 2020, The New York Times best summarized the trend in their headline: Across the Globe, a ‘Serious Backlash Against Women’s Rights’: The rise of authoritarianism has catalyzed a rollback of gender violence protections and support systems. It was also reported in Human Rights Watch. Click here to read more!