Funds for Women and Girls

Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Wednesday, May 05 2010

Snapshot: Christine Grumm

Christine Grumm is president and CEO of Women’s Funding Network, which encompasses more than 155 organizations that fund women’s solutions across the globe, making it one of the largest collaborative philanthropic networks in the world. Its members are women’s foundations that span public charities, private foundations, and funds within community foundations. Under her leadership, the network has experienced amazing growth. In 2000, the network’s membership numbered 70; since then it has more than doubled. In 2000, the women’s funds held $150 million in assets; today that number exceeds $500 million. The organization gives away $65 million annually. Prior to joining Women’s Funding Network, Grumm served as executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women.

Grumm lives in San Francisco, but travels more than 100,000 miles a year for work.

Womenetics: How would you describe who your member funds are?
Grumm: Women’s funds provide funding for women’s and girls’ leadership and problem solving on the ground locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. Women’s funds collectively invest more than $65 million per year in women and girls, with more than $500 million in working assets. They include public and private foundations as well as funds within larger foundations and organizations.

Womenetics: Does your network focus on assisting your members with their goals of raising money and helping women around the world, or do you also raise funds yourself?
Grumm: We do both, assisting women’s funds to attract more funding through campaigns like Women Moving Millions, funding training programs and capacity building for women’s funds, and raising money for projects that member funds benefit from. We are also responsible for raising our own budget for Women’s Funding Network.

Womenetics: Explain what Women Moving Millions is.
Grumm: The campaign is a partnership between visionary donors Swanee and Helen LaKelly Hunt and Women's Funding Network, sparking an initiative to inspire high net worth women to make gifts of $1 million and more to women’s funds around the world. To date, the Women Moving Millions Campaign has been astonishing in terms of its success, raising more than $187 million from 105 donors to 53 women’s funds. The goal of the first phase of the campaign, which ran from 2006 to May 2009, was to raise $150 million in three years and we exceeded that goal by more than $30 million!

Women Moving Millions is groundbreaking in that it has made seismic changes to the landscape of the women’s rights movements. The campaign is reshaping philanthropy as women and men combine their financial power to propel women-led ideas and solutions to improve the status of women around the world. Women’s funds inspire donors to engage with the community partners to bring about lasting change. And women’s funds set bold fund-raising goals that have never before been imagined.

Women Moving Millions exists to both deepen within the Women’s Funding Network as well as broaden into other parts of the women’s movement. As the campaign unfolds, Women’s Funding Network will work with member funds to build upon the momentum created in Phase 1 and launch an exciting Women’s Funding Network Women Moving Millions Phase 2 campaign. And we have only just begun.

Womenetics: Women’s Funding Network is global. How many countries are you involved with? Can you give some examples?
Grumm: Our members include 160 women’s and girls’ funds in 26 countries on six continents around the world. In addition to the more than 125 funds in the United States and Canada, we have funds in Latin America (Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Nicaragua), Europe (U.K., Germany, Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, and Ukraine), the Middle East (Israel), Africa (Ghana, Kenya, South Africa), Asia (Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Mongolia), and Australia.

Womenetics: Is your organization unique in funding programs to help women and girls around the world?
Grumm: We’re unique because for 30 years we have funded women and girls because it is the smartest and most effective approach to improving communities around the world. Women’s funds know the problems women and girls face are complex, therefore they invest in solutions that address the intersections of problems like poverty, violence, lack of access to education and health, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses. There are more funders in this space now, but we carry a long history and have a depth and breadth of expertise related to the work of women and girls in changing the world one community at a time.

Womenetics: Why do you think it’s important to have a network of funders that focuses on females?
Grumm: Women and girls make up 51 percent of the world’s population and are disproportionately challenged by major global problems like poverty and violence. For example, women and children make up 70 percent of those living in absolute poverty. However, women and girls are also tremendous assets with ideas for solutions to the problems they face. However, they require financial resources to put those ideas and solutions into action. We know when you improve a woman’s life, it spreads to her family, her community, and – when this approach is taken in aggregate – entire nations. What we have learned over the past 30 years is that there is a major improvement in communities when women are fully engaged and their solutions are fully funded.

For example, in the Washington, D.C., metro area, funding from Washington Area Women's Foundation has led more than 5,000 women to increase their collective assets by more than $19.5 million; placed nearly 600 women in living wage jobs, increasing their incomes by $2.3 million; and assisted 220 women in purchasing homes. With the improvement of these women’s lives so are the lives of their families changed.

Womenetics: What do you find most frustrating in your work?
Grumm: Understanding women and girls can provide many solutions to our world’s greatest problems, but knowing they do not have the full financial resources to implement them.

Womenetics: What makes you laugh? Good jokes? Being with family or friends?
Grumm: I have a large family; there are seven of us siblings, five of whom are girls. When we get together, there’s a lot of laughter and telling of stories. Once a year we get together without the kids. All five of the girls are feminists, and my brothers are strong advocates of women. They are strong themselves, but the women set the tone in the family. We’re all involved in progressive politics.

Womenetics: Do you have daughters?
Grumm: No, but many nieces and they are following in their own leadership footsteps.

Jan Jaben-Eilon was a founding staff writer of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Since then, she has been the international editor of Advertising Age magazine and has written for such publications as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Journalism Review, and Consumer Reports. She is the author of soon-to-be-published (There is) Life After Cancer. Jan and her husband have homes in Atlanta and Jerusalem.