Joseph Lelyveld: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
Homa Sabet Tavangar: Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World
Stephen Carter: The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama
Courtney E. Martin: Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists
Margaret May Damen: Women, Wealth and Giving: The Virtuous Legacy of the Boom Generation
Robert C. Solomon: The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life
Posted by WPWI on 06/06/2011 at 12:12 PM in ACUMEN FUND | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by WPWI on 04/08/2011 at 01:15 PM in ACUMEN FUND | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A Significant Increase in Sex Trafficking in Minnesota?
The Advocates' Staff Attorney Beatriz Menanteau participated in a panel discussion on sex trafficking in Minnesota hosted by the Sexual Violence Prevention Program on November 5. Along with other panelists, Ms. Menanteau described the issue and the prevention work that is being done. Nearly 100 people participated from throughout the state.
The panel presentation discussed:
Posted by WPWI on 01/08/2011 at 05:06 AM in ACUMEN FUND, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
| 1828 L Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, DC, 20036 |
Posted by WPWI on 12/28/2010 at 11:03 AM in ACUMEN FUND, NONPROFIT ADMINISTRATION, RESOURCES | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted by WPWI on 09/15/2010 at 03:35 PM in ACUMEN FUND, APPEALS, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted by WPWI on 08/19/2010 at 11:17 AM in ACUMEN FUND, GLOBAL ISSUES | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The United States trails behind the rest of
the world, ranking 84th in the
number of women in our national legislature.
Its no secret: Despite our progress, women are vastly under-represented in politics and in the highest levels of management in nearly every professional sector: business, law, media, you name it. We must stand together to empower women in these diverse fields, and give them a leg up on the ladder to success. Take a night to invest in clear-cut solutions that will make a difference for women.
Ladder to the Top is a full evening of programming, starting with an inspiring reception at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and ending with intimate dinners across our nation's capital. Together we will draw attention to the crisis of women's under-representation in leadership.
First, raise your glasses to women's
accomplishments on the Hill and beyond at our Hail
to the Chiefs Reception.
Held from 6:00-7:30pm, this tradition shines
the spotlight on the Class of 2010 women Chiefs of Staff who support our leading
members of Congress.
At the reception, we will honor Senator Olympia Snowe, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for
their distinguished leadership for women.
A new twist on WCF's recently
premiered Voices from the
Ladder performance piece will be debuted.
Then, at 7:30pm, proceed to the Dinner
Party of Your Choice in extraordinary
women-owned DC restaurants. Join WCF-Endorsed Candidates, Chiefs of
Staff, and talented women and men from the fields of politics, law, banking,
labor, media, and more to discuss how we can solve this crisis of leadership.
Mark your calendars for September 23, for a sparkling evening with a serious task at hand: empowering women in every aspect of leadership. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell every woman you know: On September 23, we stand together to say we need more women in leadership - now.


P.S. Also mark your calendar for March 14, 2011 for our Parties of Your Choice Gala at Christie's Auction House in New York City.
Posted by WPWI on 07/28/2010 at 02:49 PM in ACUMEN FUND, EVENTS, WCF, WOMEN AND POLITICS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SOURCE: http://www.womenforwomen.org/
Visit the places where we work
2010 Sudan Elections
The first Country Director for Sudan and DR Congo, Judithe Registre, notes that regardless of Sudan election outcomes, we must continue investing in women. Read the Article.
Zainab Salbi states that future agricultural policies need to incorporate the 70% of the world's farmers who are women.
Women for Women International UK invites you to host a lunch for your friends and make a significant difference in the lives of women survivors of war. Learn More...
Make a donation to help women survivors of war.
Learn
more
Make a Difference in a Woman's life.
Learn
More.
Women for Women International is a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) organization. EIN/Tax ID # 52-183-8756
Visit our UK web site: www.womenforwomen.org.uk
Posted by WPWI on 04/16/2010 at 06:17 AM in ACUMEN FUND, GLOBAL ISSUES | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SOURCE: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-09/philanthropys-transformer/full/
by Liz Goodwin
Jacqueline Novogratz, who will speak at The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit this weekend, is all business in her approach to attacking the gap between rich and poor. She talks about her adventures in Africa and writing her best seller.
Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of a nonprofit venture capital fund that serves the developing world and best-selling author of The Blue Sweater, is a former banker who is all business about closing the widening gap between the rich and the poor in developing countries. She became a globalist early on in her life, a moment that is crystallized in the incredible anecdote that begins her book. While jogging in Kigali, Rwanda, Novogratz spotted her castoff blue sweater, given to her by her Uncle Ed when she was a kid, on a little boy. She had tossed the beloved sweater in the Goodwill bin in Virginia a decade earlier, after a classmate teased her about it. She ran up to the little boy and tried to explain that he was wearing her old sweater. She turned down the collar and saw her name written on the tag. The lesson she learned was simple, but became a mantra for her: "Our actions—and inaction—touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe," she wrote.
"I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25," she says.
Novogratz stole moments to write her book late at night while keeping her her nonprofit Acumen Fund running during the day. In it, she recalls her time in Rwanda building a microfinance institution, attending Stanford Graduate School of Business, returning to the country after the genocide to try to make sense of the crimes, and building her new philanthropy. "It turns out it was all about, do you really believe in an interconnected world, and what kind of systems do you create for that world. And it all went back to that blue sweater," she says.
Novogratz, who is participating in The Daily Beast's Women in
the World summit this week, has transformed the way people think and
talk about philanthropy with her idea of "patient capital," a way of
investing in businesses in developing countries at below-market returns
and for longer periods of time. Donors are called investors, and they
expect a return on their capital measured in social change. Aided by a
lot of management support, the businesses are expected to scale up to
serve at least a million customers with basic services. One of the many
topics that gets Novogratz excited is empowering the poor in developing
countries by treating them as customers with choice. Even people who
earn a dollar a day want choices on how to spend that money, and
building local businesses to create that choice also creates jobs for
low-income people, which empowers them to have more choice as consumers.
Some of Acumen's success stories: an entrepreneur who started a bed net factory that employs 7,000 people, mostly women; a chain of hospitals that delivers babies in India for slightly higher prices than the government hospitals but under much better conditions; and a plant in India that provides clean water to a quarter of a million rural poor people. The fund has invested $40 million so far, and hopes to reach $250 million in the next seven to eight years.
• Tina
Brown—Women in the World: Stories and Solutions
Long
before Novogratz founded Acumen in 2001 and shook up the philanthropy
world, she was a just-out-of-college banker at Chase Manhattan. At her
job, she helped write off loans for the elite in developing countries,
and wondered about the nations' middle class and poor, and why they
couldn't get credit. She quit and moved to Africa to work at The African
Development Bank. At her first job in Cote d'Ivoire, she was warned
that her resentful co-workers might try to poison her, and she did
become mysteriously, wretchedly ill for a week, eventually moving home
to recover from the disastrous work experience. Then it was on to
Rwanda, where she helped found a microfinance institution that serves
women. Novogratz worked with 20 unwed mothers, called prostitutes by
their neighbors, to make a bakery profitable. The women quickly went
from earning 50 cents a day to up to $3.
"The reason why they were called prostitutes is the landlord would sleep with them," Novogratz says. "'You can't pay? You give me sex.' And suddenly for the first time, the women could be like, ‘No here's the money, no.' And I saw the transformation that was all about in some ways the ability to say no." She saw that one or two extra dollars a day made the difference between being powerless, having no choice, and being able to make your own decision.
Novogratz left Rwanda before the genocide in 1994, but returned in 1997 to try to make sense of how the massacre could have happened. One of the women who helped found the microfinance institution with her was in jail for encouraging the genocide as the leader of Parliament. Another of her former co-workers had lost much of her family in the mass killings. The bakery she had founded was now occupied by a squatter who had never heard of the structure's former incarnation. No one was left unscathed. But though Novogratz has seen horrible things in her quest to reach the world's poorest, she says she has not lost the idealism she had as a 25-year-old determined to save the world.
"I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25," she says. "I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power."
Although Novogratz got her start on Wall Street, she has occasionally had trouble convincing financial titans of the viability of her particular mission. She says she once got into an argument with someone who worked at a hedge fund about subprime mortgage loans. He said that as long as no more than 90 percent of people default, the system works. Novogratz was shocked, since for Acumen Fund to succeed, it's vitally important that every single person pays back. "What we're saying is, in an interconnected world we have no choice but to think of ourselves as one tribe. And if we think of ourselves as one tribe, there is a place in it for this kind of patient capital that is really used for each others' success since we're vested in each others' success."
Novogratz is not embarrassed to shine a light on the world's problems, and in that way shares something in common with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is a big fan of Novogratz and worked to bring attention to the genocide in Darfur through his writing.
"I adore Nick Kristof," she says. "Once he said to me, ‘I really like you because you're not anti-sweatshop.' I said, ‘Nick! What a terrible thing to say!'" She laughs. "I think both Nick and I have seen enough of the really awful in the world to realize that the perfect is really the enemy of the good."
In her book, Novogratz conveys the frustrations of trying to transform inefficient charities from within, and of the often Sisyphean nature of making any progress. She skewers the good intentions of unwieldy projects because they are not enough: Results are what matters. She also grapples with the complexities of helping the poor from the place of privilege, and stresses that any change must come from the people themselves.
Novogratz has the simultaneous intensity and calm of someone who is doing what she believes in. "When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves," she says.
Liz Goodwin is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast. She has written for the New York Sun, GothamSchools, the Tico Times, and Fodor's Travel Guides.
Posted by WPWI on 03/14/2010 at 07:53 AM in ACUMEN FUND, WOMEN PHILANTHROPISTS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SOURCE: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Women_and_leadership_Learning_from_the_social_sector_2336
Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, shares lessons in leadership from her work in venture philanthropy.MARCH 2009
As a venture philanthropist, Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz leads entrepreneurial projects across the globe—many of which put women at the helm of emerging local businesses. In this video interview, she discusses her experience developing other women leaders, the way they have shaped her own approach to leadership, and the different leadership cultures she sees at play in the public and private sectors.
This interview was conducted by Bill Javetski, an editor with the McKinsey Quarterly, in February 2009. It was recorded in the New York office of Acumen Fund.
The Quarterly: One of the secrets of your activity in building entrepreneurialism is focusing on women as workers. Can you talk about that?
Jacqueline Novogratz: I had been in Rwanda where I worked with a small group of women to start the first microfinance organization in the country and, simultaneously, a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. My own background has taught me a lot about the power of investing in women, because you do end up feeding a family and not just an individual.
I worry actually that the international-development community may, in focusing so much on the women, end up demoralizing and devaluing men even further. I don’t want to be glib about just investing in girls. We have to build healthy societies and we have to recognize that boys and girls develop differently and [we have to] find ways really to include, to value, to have high expectations, and to provide opportunity.
And so there’s this big, philosophical question around how do you hire, how do you encourage different behavior. Can you—in the dormitories—bring in other activities to bring in reproductive health, to help with microfinance and savings? There’s a really interesting platform here.
The Quarterly: Your story of the bakery in Rwanda was in large part a story about developing the women that you worked with there. What did you learn about leadership from their experience of developing into owners and operators of that business?
Jacqueline Novogratz: I went in as a leader with pure audaciousness. I didn’t have as much humility in that I just assumed—I’m the eldest of seven, I can do the Bad News Bears thing really well, I’m just going to cheer them on—without having the humility of really understanding what their starting place was.
After many mishaps, including having them steal from me and having them not really know how to sell—I mean they would look down the whole time and have to explain to me that they were considered prostitutes by many; for them to go and look somebody directly in the eye and shake their hands was not exactly a Rwandan-woman kind of thing—so I had to learn to have the humility myself to really listen to their perspectives, and yet not stop there; to have the audaciousness to say, “It’s a good starting point, but we want to get you to this other place.”
The real lesson for me was how that dignity is so much more important to the human spirit than wealth. And that what these women, as all of us, needed was to know that we could cover basic needs, but to have the power of being able to say no to things that we didn’t want, that we didn’t want to do. And so leadership as a way of inspiring, listening, and letting people, you know, grow themselves in their own way.
And it was a small experience in some ways, and yet one that I think about all the time that taught me so much about listening and dignity—and laughter as a really, really key component. The more stressed I got, the less anything worked; and the more we could laugh, the more we got done. And so that was probably another really big lesson.
I’m a big optimist. I really believe in setting impossible goals and then making them possible. And I really love people—and I think people feel that from me. So it’s probably that sometimes very confusing mix of optimism, idealism, but also high expectations, lots of discipline, and pragmatism.
Part of the journey that those of us who are privileged, which is pretty much everyone in this country, has to make is not being embarrassed by privilege or guilty for privilege or confused by privilege, but to start from that place of recognizing that your responsibility is to use that privilege in the best way you can to serve the world. And there are lots of ways of serving the world.
The Quarterly: Many women work in social sector, fewer in finance. Let’s say actually fewer lead in finance. You’ve succeeded in both. Any thoughts on the skill set, and why one isn’t more prevalent in the other area?
Jacqueline Novogratz: I think that girls really are relational, and what I love about finance—and what I love about accounting even, which is kind of embarrassing to admit—is it’s another form of storytelling. And if you could teach young people to find the stories in the combination of the balance sheet and the income statement, I think we would see a lot more girls taking leadership in finding that comfort.
I just did a panel for women on Wall Street, and what they spoke about was how rigid our financial institutions continue to be around integrating women into the workforce—particularly after they’ve had children—and that the rules are so driven by a different kind of discipline that the social sector has taken upon itself to reinvent. And that may be more to the point as to why we don’t see as many leaders—women leaders—in finance. It’s a much older club. It’s been driven by a stricter set of rules and expectations.
I have four brothers who all work on Wall Street, and I remember when one of my brothers’ wife had a child. And I said, “Well, is there, you know, paternity leave?” And he said, “Oh, yeah. We have the most liberal paternity leave on Wall Street—but I would never take it, because if I did, everybody would think I was, you know, wimpy.” And I think there’s great truth to that. So there’s a cultural piece that needs to be looked at. Whereas in the social sector, as a woman leader, you have the opportunity to invent the culture in which you want to work and thrive.
Young people often will come to me and say, “I really want to do this, but first I feel like I need to do A, B, C, D, and E.”
In some ways I think we’ve put young people, especially, on a track
where they have these expectations that they’re going to do one thing
after another because that’s what everybody else does—and then they
will get this freedom. And I think there are lots of different paths
and that the path isn’t always clear, but you just should start; that
work will teach you; and that I can’t imagine a more joyful way of
living than a life when where you are serving in the spirit as equally
of adventure as you are of change. ![]()
Posted by WPWI on 01/19/2010 at 01:12 AM in ACUMEN FUND, NOTABLE WOMEN | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
