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Can Women Save Philanthropy?
Clockwise, from top left: Newscom (2); Landov; AP Photo
As charitable giving dries up, some women are giving away more than ever. Lynn Sherr talks to these big-money benefactors about how women could bail out strapped non-profits.
Memo to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: Next time you’re seeking a stimulus to jump-start the American economy, just look across the gender divide. Specifically, at sisters Swanee Hunt and Helen LaKelly Hunt, whose $10 million gift in 2006—a “spark” in philanthropy-speak—challenged other wealthy women to make their own million-dollar grants, totaling $150 million, for programs to improve the lives of girls and women. Three years later, they’ve beaten their own goal. On Wednesday, the sisters, inheritors of the gigantic oil fortune amassed by their father, Texan H.L. Hunt, announced that more than $176 million has been committed, striking evidence of the growing power of the female purse.
“I put in six, she put in four,” Swanee, former U.S. ambassador to Austria and founding director of Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program, told the celebratory audience of donors and guests at the Brooklyn Museum, not needing to specify “million” for a group that has so many of them. “And we said, ‘Let’s get it matched.’” The campaign is called Women Moving Millions, a virtual initiative that is funneling its cash through the Women’s Funding Network to one or more of 145 women’s foundations around the globe. Of the 100 individual donors, most (90) come from the U.S.; the rest live in Australia, Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Two donors are men.
“What if it had been Lehman Sisters? I do believe that if 50 percent of the financial community had been female, the judgment would have been more solid.”
Which means 98 women are the stars of this galaxy. Among them: former television programmer Loreen Arbus; Atlanta philanthropist Kayrita Anderson; filmmaker and social activist Abigail Disney; New Yorker Barbara Dobkin, a longtime advocate for Jewish causes; Tracy Gary, a Pillsbury heiress who’s spent her life giving her fortune to feminist, environmental, and other causes; Canadian Body Shop co-owner Margot Franssen, whose donation went to the Canadian Women’s Fund. “It does operate with the efficiency of a business,” she says in a video posted on the charity’s Web site. “So that I know I’m getting my money’s worth out of my donation. But when it operates with the heart of a woman, I know that it takes my feelings into account as well.”
That gender distinction is echoed by many of the donors, including Jennifer Buffett, who, with her husband Peter—youngest son of Warren Buffett—runs NoVo, their own family foundation. “Women define wealth differently from men,” Buffett told me. “For women, it’s about the health of community, the health of the family, the quality of life. Women ask, ‘Do I have access to fresh food?’” And men? “For men it’s more of a competitive game,” she said. “More based on me, myself and I. It’s more materialistic: Am I getting the girl? Am I getting the job? Am I getting the stuff?”
“It’s about community,” added Swanee Hunt, whose own inheritance took a giant leap forward when she and her sister long ago challenged their brother’s command of the family fortune. After the wealth was, in a friend’s word, “readjusted,” Swanee and Helen found themselves very rich indeed, and started giving it away. Today, she says she’s doing it in part for other donors. “There’s a whole huge group of women who want to be part of this,” she explained to me. “But they didn’t want to be exposed. They don’t want to worry whether people are their true friends.” Or just after them for their money. “So by starting this fund, we’re making it safe for them. Basically what we say is, ‘Get over it.’”
The dedication of Women Moving Millions to changing the world through philanthropy (described by Gloria Steinem as "the world's second oldest profession") is palpable. “Instead of safety nets, we need trampolines,” exulted one of the donors at the Brooklyn celebration. “It’s about standing up for what we believe,” said another. “I’ve done a lot of amazing things,” announced one donor. “I have climbed mountains and dived ocean waters. But the very best thing I’ve done is to give this $1 million gift.”
So, I wondered, if women now have all this money, and are getting more comfortable about using it, could women actually be the ones to save our economy today?
“You mean, what if it had been Lehman Sisters?” Swanee Hunt asked me back. “I do believe that if 50 percent of the financial community had been female, the judgment would have been more solid.”
That faith in women’s financial abilities was also the topic for a different group of women at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, during the“Women Entrepreneurs Driving Global Economic Growth” panel. Dina Habib Powell, who runs Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women program, a global initiative to provide business-school training for women in the developing world, said that corporations now understand that funding women’s advancement “is just smart business.” She described the hunger for such education—600 Rwandan women applied for the first 60 slots there; 1,000 women applied in China—saying women just want the skills. Amanda Ellis, of the World Bank, pointed out that a study in 1999 “showed that a 1 percent increase in girls finishing secondary school fed through into a 0.3 percent increase in GDP.”
And when I asked the same question about solutions to our current financial crisis—can women do it?—Fortune magazine’s Pattie Sellers, who has spent a quarter-century chronicling the nation’s business leaders (starting with “white men—that was the world back then.”), and now runs Fortune’s famed Most Powerful Women Summit, didn’t hesitate.
“I think a lot of the classically female leadership traits—like flexibility and adaptability and our ability to juggle, and collaboration, and communication and empathy—are all the things you need today to manage and to lead,” she said, implying that she could have made that list of qualities much longer. “And so I think that gives women a certain advantage.” But maybe this crisis is just too big for any one group.
“I think to get out of this,” Sellers added, “we need both genders.”
Probably. Which makes it especially rewarding that both are now at the table.
Lynn Sherr is a former ABC News correspondent, author of Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words and Tall Blondes, a book about giraffes. She is also co-editor of Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life. Her most recent book, a memoir—Outside the Box: My Unscripted Life of Love, Loss and Television News—is out in paperback.
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Lynn Sherr is a former ABC News correspondent, author of Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words and Tall Blondes, a book about giraffes. She is also co-editor of Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life. Her most recent book, a memoir—Outside the Box: My Unscripted Life of Love, Loss and Television News—is out in paperback.
Let me add a plug for the Global Fund for Women which has been doing both mainstream and cutting edge funding for women mostly in the developing word for 20 years. Run by Kavita Ramdas the Fund has a network of thousands of grantees and has helped move philanthropy beyond the decision making of wealthy northern women - not a crticism - into the hands of women in the south by helping to launch a dozen or so women's funds from Mexico to South Africa. Every woman can be a philanthropist and the women who give the largest percentage of their income to others are poor women.
The last quote by Sellers is the key! Instead of "this gender, or that gender" being better suited to face our global issues.
"But maybe this crisis is just too big for any one group.
"I think to get out of this," Sellers added, "we need both genders."
The "white conservative male" has been running the show and women have still been able to succeed and thrive under this patriarchal umbrella (or I should say, "in spite of...").
But creative problem solving is now dependent upon both "sides" coming together, finding the middle ground in aiding the oppressed.
If viewed through Jungian concepts, instead of the two being at odds, the masculine and feminine balance one another out, and too much of either side causes the imbalance we been experiencing - through our present financial disaster and of course our propensity to wage "war" on everything - eg: war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, etc... And, simply take note the article in Time magazine about "the birth wars" - the "war" between doctors & midwifery. http://bit.ly/hx05k
I find this language in our news & media culture exhausting, and less polarizing language and attitudes are needed in coming together to help solve our national, global, economic & cultural disparities.
Thanks to Lynn Sherr for reminding me that our successful & visionary women are aiding and raising up women of developing countries through philanthropic concerns along with a balance of thought and approach so that we do not continue to pit one side against the other and gain nothing.
What a spectacularly wonderful article.....Ms. Sherr...keep it up! Update the wrap and woof of love!
What? No more glass-ceiling articles? Make up your mind, would you?!?
Thank you Lynn for a great summary of this historic achievement and for getting the 'word' out about it. I was lucky enough to be at the Brooklyn Museum reception and to share the enthusiasm.
Of course I understand the idea of charity is important, but I don't think that the damage to a person's pride is taken into account, and women seem to be the worst at damaging people's pride.
I see it in the library. The way those women talk to those homeless people as if they are all druggies, they have no idea what their individual situation is.
We have an empty hotel here, it could be a component of the solution to the homeless problem, instead the women that tend to take over, dismiss other women more than men would, as if it is too complicated for them to understand.
The reality us, charity is a non profit business. big business. Where CEO's, many who are women, are earning 6 figure bracket incomes. Just do a search on charity navigator. http://www.charitynavigator.org/
Sometimes a simple solution is what is needed, not something that centralizes the people that need help, grouping them together, as they were all the same.
These emergency shelters are more expensive to run, than independent affordable housing. Some say 10 days in an emergency facility is equal to one month's rent. Of course a person is not even allowed to stay for ten days. Of course an emergency shelter is not home. They are designed to be used as an emergency shelter.
Why can't they be designed to be used as 24/7 homes.
That man that died outside the shoppers drug mart could have lived.
Some of the women in the so called charities make the assumption that everyone would waste money if it was given to them.
Women will be the first ones to phone complaining that they are afriad of someone and feel threatened. I would be more afraid of a woman police officer with a gun than man.
Look at Miss California, not thinking twice about another person's feelings. That so called Christain atttitude, appears to take over charities.
In the the library the women, will threaten the homeless people with phoning the police on them, for lying down. They took out the public phone so people.
They act like they own the library.
The big thing about management is how you manage risk, not how you push people around, and how you embarrass them so they are willing to crumble to lie down behind shoppers drug mart and die. Women are much better doing that to people. Possibly that is why so many men commit suicide compared to women.
The way government manages risk can lead to that too of course.
Where it is one way, one way roads, one way driveways, and often the loss is not calculated in the cost of the project, it is the opportunity cost that doesn't get calculated, just the cost for the hotel or something, in that man's case.
People say, that is life people die. Just like India. Is that the kind of country we want to live in. A third world country, a big divide between the haves and have nots?
I find in the bank women who are supposed to be giving information, are talking like social workers, not letting you use the phone even.
Not taking risk always look betters in the short, it is just like debt, debt is necessary to build up assets.
Women make it much harder to be interviewed for a loan, they won't even let you speak about a business plan, before they patronize you.
Look at Miss California again, getting almost hysterical over her "believes". Well that leaves some of the people that funded the contest she entered, out of the consideration loop. What does she care about that. She broke the contract. Miss fancy pants gets away with it.
Reverse sexism is still sexism.
Pics
http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444
Re: the pride thing again, you look at those pics, especially the gross one and the underwear one, why would that be torture, because your pride and sense of self worth has been broken.
People go on about torture assuming it works cause it is painful, it might work cause it breaks your mind.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/leaked-torture-photos-published-in-2006-went -largely-unseen-graphic.html
Now these pics, are more typical of what you think of as torture. Painful.
But the pride thing, I think is what makes people crumble, give up, and lie in the cold outside of shoppers drug mart and die.
And how do you turn that around. Money is one thing, but there is more to it than that, too many programs are not designed to be gentle enough, so they do not destroy a person's self esteem, to the point where sometimes I wonder if these programs are designed to cause "mentally illness."
I think women can do alot of damage, maybe they don't mean to, maybe they do.
What protects us from it, when people have to get financial help, or a job from a so called born again, what protects a person from the mental abuse.
Do women really connect the lack of respect they show to loosers when they are being priced out of the market and are not able to provide for their familly. Or are they fine with taking away their kids and giving them to rich people while they do their job as "social" worker. Paying those people to look kids they won't help their own flesh and blood look after.
I don't think sisterhood is powerful if it condones destroying a person's sense of self.
And Ms California could sell us that. We would probably buy it.
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Philanthropy needs to be an ESSENTIAL part of your business plan and mission; without it you may achieve worldly "success" but you will never achieve significance.
Significance comes through helping others; it doesn't spring from selfish reasons either (like tax write offs), but out of a genuine desire for social justice to prevail.
My focus is on promoting women and men- owned businesses that have made philanthropy a priority. We need smart men and women to solve the social ills of our time.
Their common sense, desire to see the larger picture and the interconnectedness of all life on this planet is what gives this new entrepreneur the "EDGE" they need to be significant.
The business model built upon behaving like an insatiable attack wolf has been replaced (thank God) with a mother elephant who joins trunks with other mothers to put a circle of protection around the young, and it is just about time, don't you think?
Sincerely,
Rosanne Ferreri-Feske, CEO
The New US Woman
www.thenewuswoman.com
Thank you.
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