Ascend Fund Aims to Elect More Women, With a Boost From Melinda Gates

Fueled by an initial gift from Melinda Gates, a collaborative dedicated to helping women get elected to public office, called the Ascend Fund, this week announced its first grants to two organizations that recruit and train candidates.

The fund is part of a $1 billion gender-equity push Gates announced in September. Over the next 10 years, Gates’s investment fund, Pivotal Ventures, plans to attack gender disparities on several fronts, including helping women entrepreneurs get access to investment capital, ending a culture of sexual harassment, and bringing women’s pay on par with that of their male counterparts.

The effort’s first political grants come as Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been sparring over whether Sanders had pronounced the American electorate unwilling to elect a woman to the nation’s highest office. The recipients are New American Leaders, which grooms first- and second-generation Americans who want to run for office, and Vote Run Lead, which trains women interested in serving. Each nonprofit will receive $1.5 million over three years. Over the past year, the fund spent $1 million developing a strategy and researching support that foundations have extended to women with a desire to run.

The fund is managed by Panorama Global, a Seattle-based nonprofit that manages donor collaboratives and works directly on social issues. It was founded by Gabrielle Fitzgerald, a Gates Foundation alum who went on to lead a $100 million anti-Ebola program at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

In addition to Gates, Fitzgerald said a few anonymous donors had contributed to the fund. More grants are planned in the next month, and Fitzgerald is confident she’ll be able to attract additional donors. She declined to disclose the size of the fund or its fundraising goal.

“We’ve very deliberately not put a fundraising target on this fund because we think there’s a pretty significant investment of capital that’s needed,” she said, adding that by setting a specific dollar amount, potential donors might not appreciate the true need for support.

Breaking Down Barriers

The Ascend Fund’s initial research found that nonprofits that support candidate development are underfunded, with budgets typically under $1 million a year. The cash also waxes and wanes with the electoral cycle, making it difficult for nonprofits to maintain a consistent, predictable budget.

Women face cultural and systemic barriers to elected office, such as stereotyping in the media, scheduling that can place more of a burden on women, and lack of access to established professional networks — there is no “old girls club,” the study said.

As a result, women occupy only 29 percent of state legislative seats, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and 24 percent of Congress, despite making up a larger share of the electorate than men.

The Ascend Fund will attempt to increase those numbers by focusing on organizations developing a pipeline of women candidates. Fitzgerald said it chose that course, rather than attacking systemic or cultural issues, because enough organizations are building candidate pipelines for the effort to gain traction nationally.

Mike Lawrence/Getty Images for Gates Archive

Touching the ‘Third Rail’

Devoting some of her gender-equity investment to women in politics was a bold move for Gates, according to Erin Vilardi, founder of Vote Run Lead.

“For far too long, the women’s leadership conversation in America has really been about the private-sector professional leadership,” she said. “Politics felt like the third rail. Nobody wanted to touch it, whether it was philanthropy or corporate support. She has opened up a national conversation about women’s leadership in a nonpartisan way.”

Vote Run Lead has received grants from a number of foundations, including Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which Vilardi said have each provided six-figure gifts. Other donors include the Omidyar Network and philanthropist Abigail Disney.

The nonprofit has expanded from 30 trainers to 120 trainers. The additional money will help it develop new curricula tailored for different regions of the country and help target its recruitment to rural areas of the country. A more detailed plan will be released in February, Vilardi said.

“This money allows us to experiment,” she said of the Ascend grant. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

Saving Democracy?

The Gates push for gender equity in politics is part of a growing interest in democracy among philanthropists.

Before the 2016 election, many larger philanthropies were reluctant to make grants to support candidate development, said Sayu Bhojwani, founder of New American Leaders. For one thing, she said, program officers tended to be reluctant to put proposals in front of their trustees because such efforts seemed too political for a private foundation, which must tread carefully and avoid even the perception of assisting a candidate for office. Also, she said, foundations have not wanted to change the status quo because many foundations are “part of a system that benefits the well-connected.”

After President Trump was elected, Bhojwani said, more foundations jumped into the fray because they thought American democracy was not functioning as it was designed to and because they saw the new administration as a threat to the immigrant communities many of them supported.

New American Leaders has an annual budget of $4 million, Bhojwani said, and has attracted grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford, Open Society, and New York Women’s foundations.

The Ascend grant is the first to come from a national group focused solely on gender equity in politics.

Bhojwani will use the money to patch what she calls the “leaky pipeline” of women candidates. Often women go through some training but don’t follow through and enter a race. One reason, Bhojwani says, is they lack the confidence they’ll succeed. To address that, she plans to deepen her support for retraining past participants in her program and building out “state squads” of helpers to provide mentoring and encouragement. Doing so, she said, will allow women to sign up for races with the confidence they can enter politics through the “front door,” by connecting directly with voters.

“A lot of women need that affirmation because the back doors to power, where the gatekeepers are the political parties, tend to be closed,” she said.