Live Blogging: NCRW Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurship and Activism

Richard Brown, from American Express talks about the intersection between corporate philanthropy and leadership development.
Janelle Shubert, from Babson College, talks about social entrepreneurship. Babson College, which she claims is the premier educational institution globally for social entrepreneurship, is based on three principles: people, planet, profit. According to Ashoka, one of the leading organizations on social entrepreneurship:

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Janelle says that her hope is that women worldwide continue to have access to employment and training, income and knowledge. If you’re interested in S.E., you should also check out Echoing Green, the Schwab Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation. For a critique of the SE framework, check out this coverage of Dr. Paul Farmer’s speech on the subject.
Maria Torres from the NYC Economic Development Corporation is up next. She talks about the Five Borough Economic Opportunity Plan-(1) create jobs today, (2) diversify economy so we can create more jobs for tomorrow, (3) more affordable housing.
How can women take advantage of this? Check out government partnerships with organizations like Nontraditional Employment for Women.
She also talks about Opportunity NYC, a somewhat controversial program aimed at helping families break out of cycles of intergenerational poverty by paying them incentives to reinforce certain behaviors. It will be evaluated for effectiveness at the end of a five year stint.
“The big message is that we think opportunity exists, that this is the best time to invest in New York City, to invest in women.”
Next up is Sara Gould, of the Ms. Foundation.
She starts by talking about women’s funds and the network which the Ms. Foundation is a part of, The Women’s Funding Network.
She also talks about the ways in which this economic downturn has often been framed as a men’s issue, but she reminds us that this is also because of years of gender segregation in the workforce. We can’t talk about all women in the labor market as one group because women of different races and classes have such different experiences. Women still comprise the majority of low-wage workers. Women are more likely to be without health or employment insurance. We are still living with the pay gap, and we are still living with this extreme occupational segregation. There are 27 million women and children living in poverty in the U.S. Unemployment for female heads of household is 10%, increased over the last year, of course.
Ms. Foundation, the oldest women’s foundation (36 years old), is taking a new approach to their work which they’re calling “creating connections.” It is about lifting up leaders out of issue-area silos, being able to fund at the intersections, and build great power to bring about policy and cultural change to benefit women of color, poor women, and in so doing, benefit everyone. This means less restricted money and more funding at the race/class/gender intersections.
“We believe in funding sustained civic engagement, we believe in funding the trusted messengers in communities, we believe in getting resources to the ground.”

One woman from the audience who is from New Orleans asks about the problem of having funders come in from the outside–
“All the helping has really atomized and injured our women’s community. It has hindered our reality. People have dropped in from the outside and there has been very little transparency.” She’s obviously angry. She also quotes another women’s fund who allegedly admitted: “You have to understand that we’re coming into New Orleans to raise our domestic diversity profile with our funders.”
Sara Gould: Affirms that there is not enough research on the impact of the funding in the gulf south. We felt called, because of our mission, to be involved. We discovered right away that there was a whole lot of experience, and even some literature, about what you named: the experience of women in disaster zones. We began to learn about that and how it informed our practice. I have a feeling that most funders that got involved post-Katrina had no idea about that.
Even in the midst of the disaster, there is a race/class/gender perspective brought by the funders. Women of color were largely invisible. Women all over the world are disproportionately impacted by disaster across the world, and often invisibilized.
The facilitator Ana Oliveira, from The New York Women’s Foundation, talks about how important it is to have these kinds of dialogues where funders and the funded get in rooms and speak with one another, and that it’s also important for philanthropists to continue to evolve and re-evaluate best practices, and educate one another, as part of their social justice work.
I’m loving the transparency and moral courage at this panel!
I’d love to ask about the tension between accountability and funding with less strings attached, some of the issues that I discussed in my last column for The American Prospect, but I don’t think there’s time.