When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the storm killed more than 4,600 people and left millions without power, running water, or other basic services.
The storm also intensified the violence and inequality women and girls there had faced for decades. Data on 911 calls showed increasing complaints of domestic violence since the hurricane, with local experts saying perpetrators knew authorities were too overwhelmed to respond to claims of abuse.
This month, a new nonprofit, the Women’s Foundation in Puerto Rico (Fundación de Mujeres en Puerto Rico), will start providing financial and other support to local women’s charities and nonprofit advocacy groups that are fighting gender-based violence and inequality, promoting economic security, and protecting reproductive rights for women, girls, and gender-fluid people.
The creation of the new foundation was spearheaded by Elba Montalvo, the founder of the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families, and Ana Oliveira, CEO of the New York Women’s Foundation, which kicked in $100,000 to help start the nonprofit.
To date, the new nonprofit has raised more than $125,000 and hopes to raise an additional $550,000 from individuals, foundations, and corporations by the end of 2020, said Montalvo, who along with Oliveira serves as co-chair of the new organization’s executive board.
The new nonprofit will be based in Puerto Rico, and its board, which includes five members from Puerto Rico and four from New York, plans to hire an executive director once it has raised enough money to pay an executive-level salary, said Oliveira.
Rising Violence
Montalvo and Oliveira are cautiously optimistic the organization can meet its fundraising goal. However, they’d like to pull in funds faster, given the overwhelming needs of women’s groups in Puerto Rico, which have operated on minuscule budgets for years to address an overwhelming and growing problem.
“The hurricane exposed that the underfunding of community-based organizations was pre-existing to Hurricane Maria,” said Oliveira. “For the organizations that are led by and for women, that are about women’s lives, that underfunding just got so violently denuded with the hurricane.”
The instances of women facing domestic or gender-based violence in Puerto Rico have become an increasingly urgent matter of life and death, said Jodie Roure, an associate professor in the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A lack of reliable data on domestic violence against women in Puerto Rico was a problem even before the hurricane, said Roure, who has studied how the storm affected the safety of women and girls in Puerto Rico. Even with those limitations, data collected by some government offices and women’s advocates on the island in the two months following the storm showed that even with few pockets of functioning cellphone reception, the numbers of women calling 911 to report domestic violence shot up significantly, Roure said.
Experts say the people of Puerto Rico had little to no government response or access to emergency services after the hurricanes. With police attention diverted to other problems brought by the hurricane, such as looting, the numbers of women murdered by a domestic partner in the year following the storm grew.
“It was a prime time for aggressors to do whatever they wanted to do to women, knowing there would be no repercussions,” said Roure.
In addition, of the eight residential domestic-violence shelters serving women that were in operation when Hurricane Maria hit, three ceased operations immediately after the storm, and two closed temporarily, according to data Roure included in a report she authored earlier this year.
Longterm Support
The idea for the Women’s Foundation in Puerto Rico came about when Montalvo, who then served on the board of the New York Women’s Foundation, was approached by a former colleague for help for the shelters destroyed or struggling in the aftermath of the storm. Oliveira suggested the foundation do something beyond recovery efforts, and it made sense to try to connect those efforts with the Puerto Rican diaspora living in New York and elsewhere.
“I didn’t think we could add much to the emergency response since there were others that are better at that,” said Oliveira. “But what we could do best is support the autonomy of Puerto Rican women.”
Knowing that women running women’s nonprofits in Puerto Rico would have the best solutions, Montalvo, Oliveira, and others met with women’s charities, advocates, and grant makers in Puerto Rico about 18 months ago to find out what they needed and if they wanted help from outsiders. They did, and what they said they needed most was money to cover administrative and operating costs and help building up their development and financial infrastructure.
Montalvo said the new organization, which will be announced at an event in New York on Tuesday, plans to focus on helping women throughout the main island, not just in the metropolitan areas, and on the islands of Vieques and Culebra as well.
The new nonprofit’s board is planning a retreat in Puerto Rico with charity leaders and advocates there to develop a set of criteria for how the foundation will operate and articulate a set of goals for what they want to accomplish over the next year and well beyond.
“We want to be very careful that we don’t overstep and say what we think should happen,” said Montalvo. “But really let the Puerto Rican women come up with what they want to happen.”
Maria Di Mento directs the annual Philanthropy 50, a comprehensive report on America’s top donors. She covers wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, and key trends, among other topics. She recently wrote about Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy as he considers becoming a presidential candidate. Email Maria or follow her on Twitter.
