Swanee Hunt Favors Underdog Causes
Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Tuesday, September 20 2011
If something is easy, you won’t find Swanee Hunt participating. The former U.S. ambassador to Austria prefers to place her energies on major challenges. Whether it’s trekking in Nepal, working for women’s rights, or choosing a life’s path diametrically opposed to that of her ultra-conservative father, the late oil baron H.L. Hunt, Swanee Hunt prefers to put her money and time into difficult endeavors.
“I’m not going to spend my time on causes that have tremendous momentum,” she says. “Some of us like to work on causes when they are the least popular.”
Hunt explains her philosophy as she talks about one of the many initiatives funded by The Hunt Alternatives Fund, which she established with her sister, Helen, in 1981 as a private foundation to provide grants and technical assistance in the field of human service. Since its founding, Hunt Alternatives Fund has contributed about $90 million to promote social change through a blend of grant making and operating programs. On the national level, her fund is helping one of 50 fellows to form an institution in New York that, as she describes in her memoirs Half-Life of a Zealot, “will ultimately be a model for a ‘new New Deal,’ an updated social safety net for the increasing number of workers living without a wide range of basic benefits and protection.”
When asked why she’d focus on such a project while political leaders are currently talking about ending Social Security or cutting Medicare or Medicaid, she responded simply, “That’s why the timing is right and why it’s not wrong.”
Founding and current director of the Harvard Women and Public Policy Program, Hunt is also trying to double the number of women in Congress. Political Parity is an initiative of the Hunt Alternatives Fund. It is a nonpartisan initiative to increase the number of women in high-level political offices, from the statehouse to the White House.
“The left has been doing this for awhile; now I’m trying to get the right” to focus on it, and for the two to work together. “There’s something very appealing in the Tea Party world. The women are quite glamorous, a Fox News kind of persona. The Republicans are gravitating toward a certain kind of woman.” The question, she says, is what makes women decide to run or not. “They win in the same proportion as men, so why don’t they run?”
Although Hunt hasn’t run for political office, she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to be ambassador to Austria in 1993, where she served until 1997. The timing was propitious. The former Soviet Union had fallen apart, and women in many Eastern European countries that had been a part of the Soviet bloc were tempted with jobs in the West. Unfortunately, the women fell into prostitution. She was one of the first to write about the problem of human trafficking, in Foreign Affairs magazine. “Some people like to describe me as the person who first brought this to the attention of Congress, in 1997,” she says.
She notes that the definition of trafficking keeps changing. First it was when women were brought from one country to another. Then the FBI defined trafficking as any kind of prostitution for sex, anything that involved force, bondage, or anyone underage, which she says is 90 percent of what “we call prostitution.”
Because of her interest in this issue, Hunt Alternatives Fund launched a program called Demand Abolition. This program supports the movement to end modern-day slavery by combating the demand for illegal commercial sex in the United States by convening key stakeholders, conducting research, raising public awareness, and educating law enforcement officials.
According to the fund’s website, “individuals who assume the right to purchase another human being fuel the market that traffickers and pimps supply with victims. The sex trade is inherently dangerous to victims, degrading to perpetrators, and harmful to society. Until demand for commercial sex is eliminated, the sexual enslavement of children, women, and sometimes men will continue.”
In a conversation with Womenetics in anticipation of her keynote address at the upcoming Global Women’s Initiative, Hunt says the model is Sweden, which reduced street prostitution by 80 percent. The Scandinavian country legalized the selling, but criminalized the buying.
“We’ve talked to them about how they did it. In the United States, the focus is on trying to help rescue girls and not going after the men. We interviewed 100 buyers and 100 non-buyers, and men said that ‘if you arrest me or take away my car,’ they would stop buying. We’re reducing the number of buyers in five states, and we’re looking at a pilot and best practices. We want to train police and write legislation, but it’s a cultural shift. It seems like it can’t be done until you do it.”
Although a busy mother and grandmother, Hunt also chairs The Institute for Inclusive Security, including the Women Waging Peace Network, which is based in Washington and conducts research, training, and advocacy to integrate women into peace processes in more than 40 countries.
“The issue is you get different policy if you have women involved, especially if you are trying to stop a war. Every day you shorten a war, that’s huge,” says the former Austrian ambassador who hosted negotiations and several international symposia focused on stabilizing the neighboring Balkan states.
“One woman in Kenya told me that men and women see things differently. Men look at territorial boundaries. Women want security for their families, so their children can go to school safely. There are different drives; woman are not driven by power,” she says.
Power is something Hunt understands. In November 2007, she and her sister, along with the Women’s Funding Network, launched Women Moving Millions, a groundbreaking initiative to inspire gifts of at least $1 million to effect lasting social change by improving the lives of women and girls. The first phase of the fundraising effort resulted in 100 donors giving more than $180 million, or more than $30 million beyond the campaign’s goal. Today that number is in the $200-million range, she says, giving her sister most of the credit.
When Hunt is not raising funds, the Dallas-native who made her mark as a civic leader and philanthropist in Denver where she led community efforts on social justice issues such as public education, affordable housing, women’s empowerment, and mental health services, is a prolific writer.
In addition to her memoirs, published in 2006, Hunt wrote a book entitled, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, which won the 2005 PEN/New England Award for nonfiction. Her third book, Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security, was published this summer, and she’s currently writing Rwandan Women Rising.
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.
