To the Editor:
The announcement of the NoVo Foundation’s apparent retreat from its longstanding support of women’s rights and gender-equality work has cast a shadow over an already difficult time (“NoVo Fund, Led by a Buffett Son, Criticized for Staff and Program Cuts,” May 19).
Many NoVo grantees, including feminist funds like the organization I lead, worry not only about a decline in funding at a critical moment but also about what the foundation’s radical shift will mean within philanthropy.
It’s hard to name another funder that has been such a champion of gender justice, particularly for women and girls of color in the United States and globally. That NoVo has long been cherished by grantees for its egalitarian, internationalist ethic makes the loss that much harder. The foundation’s pivot also makes it important to take stock of the lessons that philanthropy can learn from the legacy that Peter and Jennifer Buffett created with visionary leadership from Pamela Shifman, NoVo’s former executive director. Here are three such lessons to build on.
First, although many are reeling from the seemingly sudden “philosophical shift,” at NoVo, we should perhaps be less surprised by the shift itself. After all, as anyone familiar with private philanthropy knows, donors can and do change direction — with consequences proportional to the scale of their giving. It’s a perennial weakness in the business model of most nonprofits, and one that we’ve not effectively solved for.
As we contemplate the seismic impacts of NoVo’s reorientation, funders can take this opportunity to recommit to practices that protect grantee partners when the funders do change course, like long runways to wind down funding and clear, early communication. Nonprofits, for their part, would do well to grapple with some of the less sustainable aspects of our funding model, starting with the ever-present possibility of donors simply changing their minds.
Second, NoVo’s perceived move away from gender-justice funding starkly reveals how few other options remain to sustain this important work. From 2016 to 2018, NoVo funding made up a full 17 percent of domestic funding for women’s rights and services and 37 percent of funding in that category for black women. Similarly, for many of us working internationally, NoVo has consistently been our single largest funder. Moreover, the foundation has been among the few to fund and link movements in the United States and internationally.
There’s a bitter irony to the timing of NoVo’s shift. It comes just as a worldwide pandemic forces greater recognition of the leadership of women and girls in sustaining communities, and just as women and girls bear the brunt of a global economic collapse. Funding with a gender lens is not merely a matter of addressing growing threats induced by the pandemic, like spikes in domestic violence and unemployment. Rather, supporting grass-roots women’s organizations, both in the United States and internationally, is a powerful solution to these and other crises, ranging from armed conflict to climate change and more.
That’s because local women’s organizations serve those who have always been the world’s essential workers, providing food, water, health care, education, child care, and eldercare.
In the global South, it’s women who grow the food and collect the water that most families rely on. This reality will only become more significant in the months ahead as economic meltdown and climate catastrophe conspire to threaten millions with starvation.
Even in the United States, the primacy of care-work has been put on full display during the pandemic and is increasingly understood as a basis for a sorely needed reorientation of national priorities. The foundation’s new direction doesn’t change any of that; it only makes it urgent for more funders to take up the mantle of resourcing women’s rights work across borders.
Third, NoVo understood that the long and winding path to social justice requires the kind of grant making that distinguished the foundation, namely, large, flexible, multiyear grants that transform the capacity of small organizations.
For instance, NoVo upended the practice, widespread in philanthropy, of pegging grant amounts to budget size. As Pamela Shifman points out, that approach perpetuates inequality, keeping smaller groups, disproportionately run by women, starved of resources.
NoVo also understood that to support those pushed to the margins, grant making must encompass both life-sustaining services and transformational advocacy — strategies that are siloed within too much of philanthropy. Perhaps this should be the most enduring lesson from these first 15 years of NoVo’s work: truly democratic, sustainable social change depends on feminist grass-roots mobilization that centers on the priorities and perspectives of the most marginalized.
The evidence is all around us, in the accomplishments of NoVo grantees the world over. NoVo demonstrated how philanthropy could help create and sustain wins like these. In this moment of global crisis, it’s time to double down on these lessons.
Yifat Susskind
Executive Director
MADRE
New York
To the Editor:
Women tie our communities together. Increased violence against women is breaking this strong social contract and threatening not only lives but community cohesiveness. At this crucial time, philanthropic leadership is essential to ensure that women’s safety and security are protected. While sheltering at home, women who experience violence at the hands of their partners or family members are most dangerously exposed.
Fourteen years ago, the NoVo Foundation stepped up to fill the deficit of sustainable funding to organizations working to end violence against women, modeling a new approach to philanthropy. It made multiyear gifts that were flexible, were larger than government grants, and unlocked the promise of making sustainable change. Its leadership in this sphere has had a huge impact in lifting the veil off this scourge and enabling women facing abuse to raise their voices.
It took a decade for results, but at last, laws are being passed (most recently in Iraq and Sudan) to criminalize domestic violence and female genital mutilation. Justice has begun to raise its sleepy head. I made my first large commitment in this area inspired by the trust-based philanthropy that I saw. NoVo changed the rules of philanthropy, and the world was grateful.
Then, in the midst of the pandemic, it announced the scaling back of its extensive investment in ending violence against women, citing “dependence on the stock market.”
The world is reeling, and now we must find new leadership to fill this void.
Long-term, trust-based investment in grass-roots women who are close to the issues of gender discrimination is the only long-term sustainable answer to decades of patriarchy and white privilege. Social change does not happen overnight.
At Women Moving Millions, we prioritize the investment in women and girls because we know, and research has shown, that this is a more effective way to achieve impact for everyone.
Historically, women and girls are largely forgotten in the global philanthropic landscape, with only 1.6 percent of all philanthropic dollars being sent their way. The risk grows exponentially as critical programs that built safety nets will now be dismantled due to lack of funds. Furthermore, increased vulnerability is exacerbated from women’s unemployment hitting double digits (15.5 percent) for the first time since the Great Recession.
As funders of women and girls, we recognize that what we decide today has a long-term impact on what happens tomorrow.
What is clear is that all funders have a shared responsibility based on trust to ensure that vulnerable communities most affected by this crisis have the resources to recover.
In the weeks and months ahead, philanthropy has an obligation to stay the course or even double down in support of organizations that will lose funding and will need to rebuild.
Foundations should consider a one-time increase of their endowment drawdown percentage. Donor-advised funds, which have no spending requirements and hold billions of tax-exempt funds, should set a spending threshold. Endowments and donor-advised funds are pools of capital that can and must be tapped at this moment of critical need.
Now more than ever, opting out or scaling back is not a viable option. Let’s be united in shared purpose to protect women from violence and lift them up as agents of change.
S. Mona Sinha
Board Chair
Women Moving Millions
New York