Grantee Partner

Congratulations to FAIR Fund, winner of the online vote!

Posted on by Lisa Kays

From February 1-15, 2008, 1,187 people cast their vote for one of eight outstanding local nonprofits–the 2007 Leadership Awardees–working to improve the health and safety of our region’s women and girls.

More than 400 of those votes went to FAIR Fund, the winner of this year’s online vote!

FAIR Fund contributes to social change in our community–and around the world–by engaging youth, especially young women, in civil society in the areas of anti-human trafficking, domestic violence and sexual assault prevention, and through youth training programs.

Each month in Washington, D.C., up to 30 adolescent girls are identified as victims of commercial sexual exploitation. FAIR Fund’s programs work to change this reality by providing young people with an authentic opportunity to express their own realities, get help navigating the resources available to them and gain a better understanding of what exploitation is and how they can avoid or exit an exploitative situation.

FAIR Fund is making its impact on our community by:

  • Working with 350 local D.C. teens, mainly girls, to provide them with a preventative educational program where teens learn to protect themselves from human trafficking through arts and empowerment;
  • Training over 600 community members–teachers, law enforcement, social workers, health practitioners and legal professionals–to identify and assist youth who are at risk or have experienced commercial sexual exploitation; and,
  • Training more than 100 university students to become the next generation of anti-trafficking leaders in their community.

Andrea Powell, Fair Fund’s executive director, has more to say about how sex trafficking is impacting young people in Washington, D.C. and how you can help. Check out her thoughts here.

The Women’s Foundation congratulates FAIR Fund for being this year’s online vote winner, and for contributing daily to social change on behalf of women and girls.

The Women’s Foundation also congratulates the seven other Leadership Awardees who participated in this year’s online vote.

Each of these organizations has already been recognized by The Women’s Foundation with a Leadership Award of $10,000 to recognize and encourage their effective, innovative efforts on behalf of women and girls.  The Women’s Foundation congratulates each of you!

To learn more about how you can support FAIR Fund’s efforts to reduce adolescents risk toward human trafficking and exploitation or to learn more about the issues, visit their Web site or call 202.265.1505 and ask for Andrea Powell or Amelia Korangy.

To learn more about participating in the next Leadership Awards Committee, contact Carolee Summers-Sparks at csummers@wawf.org.

Fair Fund: Don't look the other way as girls are exploited in D.C.

Posted on by Andrea Powell

I recently returned from a trip to former Yugoslavia, where my organization, FAIR Fund–a Grantee Partner of The Women’s Foundation–leads a program designed to help sexually exploited, homeless, and trafficked girls find safety and meet basic needs like housing or legal documentation.

These 20 girls, and more than 200 like them in Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, have mainly been living on the streets. At ages as young as 11, many of these girls have been sold into a life of prostitution and are often forced to use drugs by dangerous pimps. These are not hidden girls and often the pimps are well known by local law enforcement.  I have seen people just walk right past these children and look the other way.  They are begging for food, they are standing dirty on street corners, they are being kept in abandoned buildings that are just blocks away from major centers of business and neighborhoods.

I have many times asked myself and others, including governmental representatives, one question that I have yet to find the answer:  How can you walk past these girls? If you know they are there, why won’t you reach your hand out?

In a country where leading MSNBC reporters will casually use phrases like “pimp out,” or where top selling rap artists name their songs P.I.M.P., we are also turning our backs on some of the most vulnerable youth of today’s society. 

So, I can’t judge without also acknowledging that right here in Washington, D.C., we are also walking right past girls and boys who are in desperate need of assistance.  In D.C. alone, law enforcement identify sometimes as many as 26 girls monthly who have been exploited through commercial sexual exploitation. 

Many of these girls, just like their young counterparts across the world in places like Serbia and Kosovo, are being controlled and abused by pimps.  Here in D.C., someone looking to purchase sex from a child need to look no further than Craigslist and the ads are right there on their erotica section. Or, drive through the downtown area of Washington, D.C. late at night and you will see those girls.

Here are three simple things you can do to help right here in D.C.:

  1. Don’t look the other way.  If you see a young person who looks like they may need help, you can call the Washington D.C. Police Department and speak to the Youth Division or call 911.
  2. Be conscious of language.  If you hear someone casually using the word pimp, take five minutes to explain to them that pimps are not cool, that they are abusive and controlling people who exploit those more vulnerable–often girls as young as 11.
  3. Get involved.  Volunteer with youth groups to mentor or speak with youth at risk of exploitation.  Many of the girls we work with from places as far away as Bosnia to right here in D.C. really just need someone to listen to them and sometimes explain to them how to keep themselves safe.

Andrea Powell is the executive director and co-founder of FAIR Fund, a 2007 Leadership Awardee of The Women’s Foundation.

Vote today and help a local nonprofit earn $5,000!

Posted on by Lisa Kays

The primaries aren’t the only elections where women can really make a difference. 

Starting today and going through February 15, anyone interested can contribute their voice to an online vote for one of eight nonprofits that they think is doing the most to improve the health and safety of women and girls throughout the Washington metropolitan area.

The eight organizations are The Women’s Foundation’s 2007 Leadership Awardees, selected for $10,000 awards because of their effective, innovative work on behalf of women and girls.

The winner of the online vote will win an additional award of $5,000 to support their work.

It’s all part of The Women’s Foundation’s efforts to make philanthropy accessible to everyone, much like The Case Foundation is doing through its new experimental online fundraising contest.  The Case Foundation is hosting the contest largely to raise awareness about different online fundraising tools.

We’re doing it to make you aware of the excellent work being done by organizations right here in our community, and to inform and gather feedback about the strategies and approaches viewed as the most effective in improving the lives of women and girls.

So, what do you think will make the greatest impact on the health and safety of women and girls? 

Providing mental health services to low-income families?  Training to help identify and assist children that have been coerced into prostitution?  Support for women affected by cancer or HIV/AIDS?  Empowering women through training and seminars in self-esteem, health, effective parenting?  Providing funding to help women who couldn’t otherwise afford to have an abortion?

Read about the realities of the health and safety of women and girls in our region, and then have your say today in our online vote, and help support work that you really believe in.  That, after all, is what effective philanthropy is all about!

Anyone can vote!  Vote now through February 15, 2008! 

And, if you’d like to share your thoughts about what strategy you support and why, email me (lkays@wawf.org) to discuss being a guest blogger or leave a note in comments! 

Also, drop me a line if you’re interested in volunteering to serve on the next Leadership Awards Committee.  Not only do you get to support and learn about awesome organizations like these, but it’s fun!

Looking at the mortgage crisis through a gender lens.

Posted on by carolee

Staff from homeless shelters and advocates for the homeless spent much of yesterday canvassing the metropolitan area for a “point in time” study to get a count on the region’s homeless population, and to learn more details about their needs and challenges.

Laurel Advocacy and Referral Services (LARS), a Washington Area Women’s Foundation Grantee Partner, participated in this study and was highlighted in today’s Washington Post article, "A Growing Desperation: Housing, Economic Slumps May Portend Rise in Ranks of Region’s Homeless, Survey Shows."

Studies such as this are important because they allow service providers to get a handle on the rising homeless population and help to guide their services based on real data collected on the numbers of people they serve. It helps them make their case.

And it shows the continued, powerful fallout from the mortgage crisis – from the huge impact on homeowners with subprime loans, who are disproportionately women, to workers in the service and construction industries.

As the Washington Post piece explains, these families are “doing the right thing,” but the weakening economy is hitting very close to home for the already vulnerable women in the Washington region – more than half of families living in poverty here are headed by single mothers.

At times like this, it is important to recognize and support the work of organizations like The Women’s Foundation’s Grantee Partners, such as LARS, who provide vital services to low-income women and their families in our community.

Other resources on this issue and its impact on women are:
Buying for Themselves: An Analysis of Unmarried Female Homebuyers

Women are Prime Targets for Subprime Lending: Women are Disproportionately Represented in High-Cost Mortgage Market (Press release) (Report)

Learn more about our Grantee Partners and how you can be involved in their work and make a difference in women’s lives.

Announcing the 2007 Leadership Awardees!

Posted on by Lisa Kays

But first, a little FAQ about the Leadership Awards!

What are the Leadership Awards?
In 1998, The Women’s Foundation made $17,500 in grants, in the form of Leadership Awards, to five organizations in our region. The first five Grantee Partners of The Women’s Foundation each received $3,500.

In 2007, only nine years later, the Leadership Awards Program gave $80,000 in awards to eight organizations, each receiving $10,000 to recognize their work focused on the health and safety of women and girls.

The idea behind the Leadership Awards is to recognize and bolster organizations doing amazing work–and getting results–for women and girls. A Leadership Award serves as a vehicle to promote their work and helps them leverage additional support.

In many ways, the Leadership Awards Program represents the spirit of The Women’s Foundation: to foster innovative, effective organizations that truly change the lives of women and girls, and to help deepen the impact of their work.

Who selects the awardees?
The awardees are selected by members of our community. A dedicated committee of volunteers vets applications, conducts phone interviews and site visits and recommends a panel of organizations for approval by the board of directors. The volunteer committee is open to any donor to The Women’s Foundation at any level–making it a public, citizen-based grantmaking process reflecting the diverse interests and experience of people throughout our region.

Jeanie Lee, a 2007 Leadership Awards volunteer, says, "It was an enormous learning experience, and I really appreciated having the opportunity of getting to know our community organizations that are doing good work."

Want to become a Leadership Awards volunteer?  Contact me and I’ll tell you all about it!

What do awardees do with the money?
The awards are not grants in the traditional sense. They are not funded to conduct specific work outlined in a proposal. Instead, a Leadership Award is an acknowledgment of work already accomplished and allows the organization to continue to build on those achievements. It says, "Thank you for the excellent work you are doing for the women and girls of our region. We support you in your efforts and we’re encouraging others to do the same."

Do Leadership Awards really make a difference?
As a result of this support, many organizations in our region have been transformed.

Deborah Avens of Virtuous Enterprises, Inc. cites The Women’s Foundation–and receiving a Leadership Award–as having been the cheerleader that inspired her to expand her work with women in Prince George’s County.

In 2002, a Leadership Award was granted to Tahirih Justice Center, and this year, their accomplishments were acknowledged with a Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management.

Consulting the list of past Leadership Awards recipients reveals many more organizations in our region that have grown and expanded their impact–in many cases due largely to that first recognition from The Women’s Foundation through a Leadership Award.

Who are the 2007 Leadership Awardees?
This year, The Women’s Foundation is proud to announce the eight 2007 Leadership Awardees, which represent excellence, innovation and impact on behalf of women and girls in the area of health and safety.

Congratulations to the 2007 Leadership Awardees, and many thanks to every member of our community for supporting The Women’s Foundation and making it possible for us to continue to inspire and cultivate leadership on behalf of women and girls in our region.

Learn more about these outstanding organizations.

Stay tuned for a public, online vote in the new year to give an additional $5,000 award to one of these awardees!

To learn about the Leadership Awards Program, click here, or contact me for more information on how to become a volunteer and get involved.  (It’s fun!) 

Ayuda partners with The Women's Foundation to shatter myths about domestic violence.

Posted on by Lisa Kays

Ayuda, a Grantee Partner, featured The Women’s Foundation’s support of Ayuda’s work with immigrant women facing domestic violence in their most recent issue of Ayuda Today.

The report that emerged, Shattering the Myths: Barriers Facing Immigrant Victims of Domestic Violence, was funded by The Women’s Foundation’s Open Door Capacity Fund in 2006 to provide research that Ayuda could use to deepen the impact of its work with immigrant women vulnerable to domestic violence.

View the newsletter article to learn more about the report’s key findings.

Learn more about Ayuda’s work with women affected by domestic violence.

The Women's Foundation's got the spirit. Yeah, yeah!

Posted on by Lisa Kays

If you catch the staff of The Women’s Foundation in an informal setting, you’ll often find us joking and teasing certain staff members about their former status as cheerleaders.

Not in a mean way.  Let me be very clear, we have nothing against cheerleaders.  Just in that surprised manner of learning that someone that is now your colleague and in a suit every day used to sport pom poms.

Sort of like when you would learn that your elementary teacher was also a human being who went to the grocery store.  

It’s kinda weird, and a funny new image to have in your head because it’s so different than the one you had previously.  So anyway, on occasion, you’ll find us teasing each other about our mysterious past lives.

So, after all this joking around, you can imagine how pleasant it was for us to be cited, as an organization, as a significant cheerleader for a local nonprofit in our area.

Deborah Avens, who just started a blog about her work with women in Prince George’s County, noted that for her nonprofit, Virtuous Enterprises (VEINC, Inc.) The Women’s Foundation has been a tremendous cheerleader.

She explained how our Leadership Award, which VEINC, Inc. earned in 2004, provided the confidence for Deb to realize that the work she was doing was really valuable. 

She also talked about this with me when I spoke with her earlier this year.  She explained, "It helped me build confidence that our organization could transition from a volunteer organization to a fully operable organization.  It was a part-time passion and when I became a Leadership Awardee and started seeing the impact that The Women’s Foundation was making in the lives of women and girls, it gave me the support I needed to transition to full time."

As a staff member of The Women’s Foundation, and a Leadership Awards Volunteer this year, I was very much struck by this–by the power of a relatively small award ($10,000) and public recognition–to completely transform an organization.

Deb isn’t the only organization I’ve heard this from.  One of the nonprofits I visited as part of the Leadership Awards evaluation process this year (the 2007 awardees will be released soon!!!) hardly mentioned the money when I asked what the award would mean to them. 

Instead they talked about access to this community, to its learning, and to the public recognition and acknowledgment that would really make them feel that the work they’re doing matters, and give them the credibility they need to build even more support.

Looking at some of our amazing Grantee Partners, it’s always hard for me to imagine them questioning their value to their community.  That it wasn’t always just blatantly obvious.  The quality of their work is so astounding, and the impact they’re making is so significant–in terms of changing lives and communities.  It’s hard to imagine a time when they could ever doubt their impact, their importance, their contribution. 

But for many, The Women’s Foundation’s Leadership Award–or another grant–is the first time anyone really acknowledged their work and said, "Thank you.  What you’re doing matters."

Deb’s blog post, and the conversation I had during my site visit, are reminders to me of the value of programs like the Leadership Awards, that illuminate, showcase, recognize and give credibility to the amazing work going on around us that may be too "small," too unique, too hidden in a neighborhood or county we don’t tend to hear much about, to really be well known or well invested in.

And to encourage it–by bolstering those organizations themselves, and by encouraging others to adopt the unique, successful models that are working around them.

In many ways, it really is like cheerleading, I guess (Though I must admit I don’t know, as I’m not one of the staff members who ever was a cheerleader [far too lacking in coordination; also, fear of falling down]). 

It’s looking out over the field and having faith in the players, even when they’re doubting themselves.  It encourages them to play better, to stay in the game, and to keep their heads up when things look rough or it’s raining, and all the spectators have gone home.

It’s a constant reassurance that yes, someone is watching, someone is seeing, someone cares about the outcome.

It’s fitting, really, that The Women’s Foundation can play this role for nonprofits in our area-and particularly for those serving women and girls, which tend to be under-recognized anyway in terms of funding priorities. 

It’s fitting that we can serve as their cheerleaders, because that’s the role so many of them play for the women and girls–and families–that they serve.

Learn more about how you can become a Leadership Awards Volunteer and search out great organizations like VEINC, Inc. throughout our region.  Or, contact Lisa Kays for more information.

The sister next door, in Prince George's county.

Posted on by Lisa Kays

Deborah Avens asks us to take a thoughtful, real look at our sisters next door on her new blog, Sister Table Talk.

Avens is the founder and president of Virtuous Enterprises, Inc., a Grantee Partner that provides programs and services designed to give women and girls of all walks of life the skills they need to succeed in academic, business, and work environments.

With its inaugural post put up yesterday, Avens invites us to consider how poverty seems to weigh more heavily on women than men, and how, in particular, this is due to the insufficient lack of access to affordable housing and healthcare.

And she’s doing so to provide a unique perspective on these issues–that of low-income women in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

A welcome voice and perspective, given the recent efforts to bring nonprofits, government and citizens in Prince George’s County together to build relationships, forge collaborative strategies and advocate for policies and practices that work for this unique area where only four nonprofits have budgets of more than $25,000 per year.

Avens’ new blog is therefore a much needed and welcome one to contribute to the discussion around the realities facing women in Prince George’s County, which are unique and often lesser known, as Donna Callejon found out during a forum there earlier this month.

Avens’ asks a serious set of questions in her first post, writing:  "What will it take to decrease or eradicate the growing ‘trend of poverty among low-income, headed families in particularly in Prince George’s County, Maryland? What will it take for the economical gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ to close? What will it take for policy makers to increase the livable wage so that people can live the true American Dream without constantly working to simply pay bills and taxes. What will it take for the general public to move with more compassion and less criticism?"

She reminds us that it will take a true understanding of the realities facing the sister next door–and surely Sister Table Talk will serve as a great resource for those interested in getting to know their sisters next door in Prince George’s County.

The Women’s Foundation is proud to have Virtuous Enterprises within its Grantee Partner community and applauds the addition of their voice to the important dialogue about how to make investments in women and girls work for the women and girls they work with every day.

The inspiring independent women of Prince George's County.

Posted on by Donna Callejon

I spent a few hours yesterday in Prince George’s County, Maryland, helping to facilitate a Voice and Vision session for Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

Although I’ve been on the board for seven years, I have been focused on pretty much everything except our programmatic work in an intense way. Don’t get me wrong, I can recite the stats and progress and impact and all that good stuff.

Like that the DC metro area is a "tale of two cities," with the highest paid and most highly educated women in America.  We’re the fastest growing city for women entrepreneurs, and we’ve got a woman presidential candidate living in our midst.

BUT, we’ve also got the highest rate in the country of new incidences of HIV in women, and 1 in 3 kids lives in poverty –more than 75 percent in households headed by single women. 

See, I didn’t even have to check my notes (or our research) to lay that out.

But yesterday, instead of talking about it conceptually, I was with some women in Prince George’s County who, themselves, have come through the fire and are now doing amazing work to help lift struggling women out of poverty, away from destructive behaviors and relationships, and to independence.

Deborah Avens runs a non-profit called Virtuous Enterprises, Inc. Kim Rhim runs one called Training Source.  (Both are Grantee Partners of The Women’s Foundation.)

These women are doing God’s work for sure — against a fair number of odds and in an area that is somewhat forgotten in a metropolitan area where many people don’t really know the geography and demographics of their hometown.

Prince George’s County is the ultimate tale of two counties. While folks there don’t like to hear it said this way, these women – and others who were there – most definitely framed up the "inside the beltway" vs. "outside the beltway" dynamics of this county, which is the most affluent minority-majority (aka majority black) "municipality" in the world.

I feel lucky and proud to work with The Women’s Foundation and with women like Deborah and Kim.  They inspire me to keep investing in the future of independence – financial and otherwise – for women in our community.

Donna Callejon serves on The Women’s Foundation’s Board of Directors, and is Chief Operating Officer of Global Giving.  This blog was originally posted here before we subsequently stole it.  (With permission, of course.)

Leadership Luncheon '07: The power of the collective!

Posted on by Camille Cormier

I just want to thank all of you again for the wonderful opportunities that have and will come out of our Women in the Protective Services project being featured at yesterday’s Community Briefing. 

As an example of the power of the collaborative that ensues from being connected to The Women’s Foundation, a program officer from a family foundation approached me afterwards and indicated her serious interest in the project.  We’ll be meeting soon.

This combined with other audience interest and connections I made or strengthened at the VIP reception will just be great for the project, I’m sure.

The entire day went off just about flawlessly, I thought, as usual.  My congratulations to all at The Women’s Foundation!

Camille Cormier is director of local programs and policy at Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), a Grantee Partner of The Women’s Foundation.  WOW’s Women in the Protective Services program was featured as the discussion topic of this year’s Community Briefing.  WOW is also a partner of Washington Area Women in the Trades, whose work was featured at this year’s Leadership Luncheon.  You can see the video here.

Ready to join the power of giving together?  There are three ways that you can help support nonprofits like WOW, and others doing amazing work, through The Women’s Foundation.