New Campaigns Seek to Generate More Than $1 Billion for Women and Girls

Three new efforts to steer a total of more than $1 billion to women and girls have emerged less than six months after the Novo Foundation announced it would shutter two anti-violence and civil-rights programs.

The grant maker in May laid off staff and said it would close its Ending Violence Against Girls and Women program and spin off its Advancing Adolescent Girls’ Rights program. Together the two efforts totaled more than $170 million in grant commitments.

The loss was “devastating” to the gender-equality movement, according to Sarah Haacke Byrd, executive director of Women Moving Millions, an organization to encourage wealthy women to give.

Byrd’s group this month called on its more than 300 members to participate in its “Give Bold. Get Equal” campaign to raise more than $100 million by the end of 2022. Members, who already give at least $1 million over the course of 10 years to participate in Women Moving Millions, have been asked to give at least $1 million more to programs that support women and girls. Members have already committed more than $70 million to the new effort, Haacke Byrd says.

Separately, a group of Black women leaders this month created the Black Girl Freedom Fund with a goal of steering $1 billion over the next decade to efforts to help Black women and girls thrive. The campaign is led by Grantmakers for Girls of Color. Other participants include Tarana Burke, founder of the “MeToo” movement, and LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund and founder of the Black Girls Dream Fund. The fund has received commitments totaling more than $13 million.

Valerie Macon, AFP, Getty Images

The third effort, the Million Girls Moonshot, is smaller, having received a total of $3.3 million in grants from the STEM Next Opportunity Fund and the Intel and Mott foundations. (The Mott Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.) The money will be used to support a network of after-school programs for girls to study science, technology, engineering, and math.

“It is our hope that we will continue to raise this kind of money every year for as long as it takes” to reach 1 million students, says Penny Noyce, who chairs the Stem Next Opportunity Fund. Noyce’s father, Robert Noyce, co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore, who co-founded the Moore Foundation.

History of Underfunding

Philanthropic support for women and girls has historically lagged. According to a July study by the Ms. Foundation, grants to organizations that support women and girls of color totaled less than 1 percent of the $66.9 billion given by foundations in 2017. Data collected by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy showed that less than 2 percent of all philanthropic dollars go to women’s and girl’s causes.

Women Moving Millions is not establishing a separate fund for its “Give Bold. Get Equal” campaign. Donors give to groups as they like and report their gifts. Women Moving Millions plans to provide an analysis of where the money went. An April survey found that three-quarters of the groups’ members planned to increase their giving this year. The top causes were economic security, domestic violence, and health care. Activists Gloria Steinem and Alicia Garza and actress Laverne Cox were among the many involved in the campaign launch.

According to Haacke Byrd, the women’s movement has gotten stronger in the past four years, as events like the 2017 Women’s March and the Me Too movement developed a new group of leaders.

“I think that there is movement readiness right now,” she says. “What’s missing is the flow of capital. The movement for gender equality remains chronically under-resourced.”

Avoiding the “Same Old Stories”

On September 15, the 57th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, which killed four black girls who were attending church, the leaders of the Black Girl Freedom Fund wrote an open letter calling on philanthropy to end the crisis faced by Black girls in the United States.

Referring to the recent grand jury decision not to charge any of the officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor with murder, Monique Morris, executive director of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, says the fund is an attempt to “create spaces of healing so that we’re not telling same old stories 57 years later about black women and girls who have been killed in the name of racially motivated violence that is then treated by the criminal legal system as no big deal.”

Morris, whose organization receives support from NoVo, says it was never a good idea for to depend so much on a single foundation’s support.

She wants to both broaden the pool of donors to the cause and invite grassroots leaders to help decide how the money will be spent. Broadly, she says the money will be spent on health, safety, and research relating to the challenges faced by young black women.

Black Girl Freedom Fund

Morris is confident the fund can attract $1 billion because doing so would only require a slight shift in overall foundation giving, and both institutional and individual donors recognize the urgent needs of Black women and girls. The campaign has attracted several high-profile participants, including former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, actress Rashida Jones, and nonprofit leaders including Jane Kimondo, executive director of the Crossroads Fund and Felecia Lucky, president of the Black Belt Community Foundation.

“We’re talking boldly about a billion dollars because we’re at the convergence of multiple pandemics,” she says. “We have ongoing structural, gender-based violence that girls are experiencing. And we have the pandemic itself that is threatening so many of our lives, but disproportionately the lives of black and brown girls.”

But Morris also sees another component to the fund. The key, she says, is to help girls thrive and be happy.

“Joy is a part of resistance to oppression. Joy is partly how we address some of the systemic violence that our girls are dealing with,” she says. “And joy is absolutely how we get to the healing aspect of this work. Joy is how we have shaped much of the resilience that we see that we call black girl magic.”