"...When you support the people who need it the most, you end up taking care of everybody. And so that's our answer, is that we're really just trying to take care of the most vulnerable people in our city, who are doing the most amazing work on the ground... And they deserve a lot more than 2 cents on every hundred dollars that's moving through philanthropy." - Natanja Craig Oquendo
A new report shows the region's philanthropic sector can raise up to $1 billion for women's and girls’ causes in a year, but only about 2% of that goes to efforts supporting women and girls of color.
"Greater Boston’s philanthropic sector can raise up to $1 billion for women's and girls’ causes in a year, but only about 2% of that goes to efforts specifically supporting women and girls of color, according to a new report.
The chief executive at Boston Women’s Fund, which commissioned the report, believes nonprofit groups supporting women don’t necessarily need to raise more money to address the disparity, they just need to rethink things."
“Are we over-extending in some areas and underfunded in others? Most likely – that’s what this report is telling us,” said Natanja Craig Oquendo, Boston Women’s Fund CEO. “It’s about redesigning how we are pooling our resources together, how we are partnering as a philanthropic sector.”
"For women of color leading on the frontlines of social change, carrying the weight rarely comes with accompanying resources. There is an urgent need for new models of what can be possible when sustained investments replace extraction and partnership replaces paternalism. This is demonstrated in a new report, Carrying the Weight, Leading the Change: How Women of Color Grassroots Leaders Navigate Inequities While Driving Solutions, a collaboration between researchers, philanthropic leaders and movement organizers from the Boston Women’s Fund and UMass Boston’s Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy.
Philanthropy praises leaders’ resilience as they are being structurally denied the conditions that make sustainability possible. When the applause fades and the grants fall short, women of color are left holding communities together while their own bodies and lives absorb the cost of structural neglect."
