THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Stephanie Clohesy
“It’s pretty interesting to live long enough where you can see the morphing of ideas in your own lifetime.”
Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, January 2024
MJ: Let’s begin, then, with the simplest truth. What is your name, where were you born, and when were you born, please?
SC: Okay, so it’s Stephanie, and I go by my married name, Clohesy. I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and I was born in 1948.
MJ: Can you tell us what your life was like growing up? Maybe something about the background of your parents and any influences you think your early life might have had on your later life?
SC: Yes. So, I was born while my dad was still in college, and he was in college on the GI Bill right after World War II. He always talked to us kids about the sort of mandate in our family that, you will get education after high school, you will go to college or the equivalent, or something. We always valued it, and I just thought it was a norm for his family.
And then one day I was talking to his mother, and she said, “Well, I had all the money saved for his brother” the oldest one. And she said, “Your dad was just going to go to work.” He just went to work after high school waiting to be recruited, or to have his sign-up for the Navy go through. And I said, “Well, where was he going to go to college?” And she said, “I had no idea. We hadn’t even planned that yet because we had to get his brother through.”
He was already accepted at Case Western Reserve University, and I think he might have already been enrolled when he was drafted. It was just very matter of fact for her. “Yes, I have three boys, but I really am only going to worry about the first one.” And so old fashioned. And yet, she was such a modern, self-reliant woman kind of thinker, that she was one of the biggest influences on me. So, I was pretty shocked. And then I thought, “Well, it’s a good thing he got that GI Bill so he could just go to college wherever he wanted.”
MJ: So, nationality and religion in that family?
SC: Well, my family is Polish. On my mother’s side, I always thought that we were pretty intermingled with Ukrainian and Russian because my grandfather always talked about growing up as a child on the Russian border. But later, when I actually went to Poland and saw the history connected with the geography, I realized that they were all from what we would know now as the center of Poland. But for 100 years, Poland was divided between Germany and Russia.
So, some of them thought of themselves in more Germanic traditions; cooking and everything, and some of them thought of themselves as more Russian because of that crazy line that put the two countries in control of Poland. It was funny, growing up, one of my uncles said to me one day – a great uncle the age of my grandfather – he said, “When I was a child, I lived in four countries, but I never moved.” As little American kids, we were just like, “What? How could that even be possible?” Anyway, so, what was the other one?
MJ: Religion.
SC: Oh, Catholic.
MJ: When did you first become aware of the women’s movement, or of your feminist development?
SC: I would say the first partial awakening was in high school. I had crossed over the line into some kind of political activism in sort of the end of grade school, high school. It was the Vietnam War, and I remember reading an article in the paper about the monks setting themselves on fire in Vietnam about the war. I mean, my whole consciousness just changed. I started thinking, “Who on earth would set themselves on fire?” And, “What would have to be so wrong that you would go that far to set yourself on fire?” I started getting that feeling that I could have a voice, or I could be politically active, and I just kind of followed that thread into folk music, into the peace movement.
It was all kind of vague, but I did go a little nuts when I was preparing for college. I had spent my high school years doing amazing science projects and studying literature and writing poetry and doing this and doing that. And when it was time to start thinking about college, the advice I got was, “Well, you could be a teacher, or you could be a nurse, or you could be a secretary.” I was like, “What the hell? This is not possible.” One day in a piano lesson, my teacher just kind of clapped her head and said, “Oh, my God, at least we know you won’t major in music in college.” And I’m like, “Oh, you can major in music in college? How fabulous.”
Through that decision, and knowing I wasn’t really good enough for the big league, I contacted a friend of mine, also as a music major, also from the same teacher. She had decided on a small school in Wisconsin. And so, I got in touch with her and found myself at Alverno College in 1966.
MJ: Wow. We have that in common.
SC: So, you know the significance of that. I got to campus in early September, and the first thing that greeted all of us was this huge college-wide conference that the school had planned on the future of women. And, of course, since NOW had been founded on the campus that summer, and the president of the college was one of the founders, she invited Betty (Friedan) to come and talk about The Feminine Mystique, and its implications for us young women who didn’t know what we were doing yet.
They had women come who represented every field that they felt like women were breaking barriers, and none of us saw it or knew about. It was just like cracking the coconut open. Things that I’d been thinking of and I didn’t have words for, there it was. I hadn’t yet heard of Betty’s book, so it was my chance to talk to her, to get the book, to read the book, to try to understand a little bit. Though truthfully, I didn’t completely get it at all. I got that there was something happening that meshed with my own dissatisfaction about the boundaries I was experiencing.
MJ: Do you remember any of the women who were there who came?
SC: Probably not by name, except Betty because of the book. And we had discussions with her about the book. I remember the women who were in the roles, but I don’t remember their names. Like, I could see them now, but I can’t remember who they were. Probably you would know them. And some of them, I know were the founders. What was the name of the woman who was from the University of Wisconsin?
MJ: Kate Clarenbach.
SC: Yes. She was on the board of the NOW Legal Defense Fund. I got to know her better, and it was just so weird to think of our paths having crossed so early, that we didn’t even connect, really. We probably just didn’t happen to end up in the same discussion group.
MJ: Right. How fortunate. I forgot to ask you if you had any siblings.
SC: Yes, I’m one of five, and I’m the oldest.
MJ: Okay. So, what did you major in at Alverno?
SC: Well, music. So, I did get into the music program and I majored in it, and I practiced 7 hours every day. The truth is, I started studying music at six, at the very same moment I was learning to read. So, I picked up music as a reading skill, not an instrumental skill. I had a really hard time memorizing the music and just being able to play without music in front of me. Which was limiting being a music major, because you were expected to be able to perform no matter what other part of music you were majoring in. I got through the whole year of trying to do this and I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t a good idea. But I was just bound and determined I was not going to default to a nursing degree, or a teaching degree in whatever.
So, at the end of the year, we had a bookend conference. The Future of Women Conference had a part two at the end of the school year; they probably had done it in September but I wasn’t aware. They were recruiting students to facilitate the discussion groups. So, I volunteered, and they gave me one of the discussion groups. When it was over, the president, and her name, I’m just blanking on at the moment. She was one of the founders of NOW.
MJ: Joelle Reed.
SC: Yes, Joelle Reed. So anyway, she came up to me and she said, “You know, I was in part of your discussion group” and she said, “You did a fantastic job. You have some amazing skills at listening, and reinterpreting, and framing ideas.” And she said, “You need to really think about your life and how you’re going to optimize these skills and go with your talent.” And I’m like, “Oh, yes, I will. That sounds fabulous.” And she said, “No, I mean, really. You need to think about this.” I’m like, “Oh, I will. Thank you so much.” She’s like, “No. Really. You really need to think about it.”
MJ: Well, I know who you’re talking about. Joelle Reed. That’s her.
SC: Anyway, I thought, “Oh, I think she means I should get out of my music major.” I mean, throwing up every day is just really not a good thing. So, I decided to get out of the music major, but when I did that, I just thought, “I’m not going to be happy at Alverno. It’s too small. There’s not enough going on here except the actual academic work,” which of course, was fabulous, because they were starting that whole new curriculum. But I thought, “I just have to go to something more adventurous.”
I applied to a whole bunch of places all over the country. I got accepted, but then they would say; and this is 1967 now, and they’re like, “Oh, yes, academically, we can accept you, but you can’t actually come and register until we have housing for you.” All women have to live in university housing. So again, there it was, you know, and I thought, “Well, damn.” I mean, it was late in the year.
So finally, I called one of my friends from Alverno who had been in Austria for the second semester. She was a singer. Anyway, she was back, and I called her and I said, “I don’t know what to know to do.” She had older brothers and I figured she knew something about how they had managed to get through all these things.
And she said, “Oh, I have the perfect answer.” She said, “You should come to Chicago and go to Loyola, because they just started admitting women a few years ago, and they don’t even have dorms. They don’t have anything. You could live wherever you want in the whole city. You could just have this big adventure all on your own, and Chicago is yours.” And I’m like, “Wow, okay.” So, I applied. I got in. And then she said, “When you get here, just go to my parents’ house. I’m back in Austria, but I’ve talked to my mother, and she’ll be expecting you, and just go and stay with them, and she’ll take care of you and help you figure out where to live.”
MJ: Wow, that was nice.
SC: Yes, and the rest is kind of history. A bigger university situated in Chicago, lots of student activism, lots of stuff going on.
MJ: What did you decide to major in?
SC: I decided to major in English Lit, because I figured I was looking for something that would be easy enough, but interesting enough that I could still do political work. “I can read novels, I can read poetry, no problem, and then I’ll have time left over to do all this great stuff,” and quickly ran into the sexism of the university itself. Some really significant experiences that just kind of boggled the mind.
I got through my degree, worked in the university’s international program for a year, but based in Chicago, and then during that time, I got married. My husband and I both wanted to live in New York; for different reasons, but we both wanted to go there. So, we spent an interim year or so in Chicago getting ready, and then he got accepted to The New School for his PhD. I just wanted to be in New York, I thought, as a journalist. But when I got there, I ended up running a public policy nonprofit, and volunteering at Majority Report, which was the women’s feminist newspaper, and got a complete and total women’s studies education.
MJ: Is that the first time you intersected officially with the women’s movement?
SC: Except for knowing Betty, yes. And it was the first time that I was really getting a picture of what was really happening. I saw all this other activism but the women’s role was still very shadowy. Going to Majority Report, my job was to sort stories, read a million things, and then either recommend things that should be in the paper, or the editors gave me stuff they thought should be in the paper, and having to rewrite it. This would be 1971, ’72.
So, beginning to learn about everything from genital mutilation, to Supreme Court cases, absorbing Roe v. Wade. Trying to understand what all that was, was just amazing. And then at the public policy job, we ended up doing a partnership with the NOW Legal Defense Fund. Betty was on the board at that time, and she had one of her usual fascinating conversations with, I think, the CEO of Xerox or somebody. And he quickly caught on through the conversations with her, about the implications for women in the economy in the future. So, he and Betty cooked up this idea of doing a conference, and some research papers, on women in the economy.
But the foundation at Xerox said, “We’re not going to hand this much money to the NOW Legal Defense Fund for God’s sake.” And so, Betty knew my boss, the founder of the Public Policy Center, a sociologist named Amitai Etzioni. He said, “Yes, we’ll go into partnership with you to get this grant done and help you get the research done, and the money can come through here.” So, this was a joint project. A bunch of us had to work on it. And at the end, four of us went to the NOW Legal Defense Fund to work. At least three, if not four.
MJ: Do you want to mention their names?
SC: Yes. So, that was me, Susan, and somebody else. Sue became sort of the administrative assistant to the founder. I was like the executive director, and then there was somebody else. I can’t remember the third person. Anyway, from the Public Policy Center, going to the NOW LDF, we all sort of dug our own channels deeper and deeper into the women’s movement. And probably I dug mine deepest of all, just because I had so much access. When we all went, it was by then, 1977. So that was the end of ’76 or early ’77, somewhere in there. That was the beginning of working for the extension of the Equal Rights Amendment approval.
MJ: Who had been the director of the NOW Legal Defense Fund?
SC: It was Mary Jean Tully, and then her assistant was a woman named Barbara Cox. When Mary Jean pulled back, Barbara became the executive director, and then I followed Barbara.
MJ: Who was on the board? Do you remember?
SC: Muriel Fox. Sylvia Roberts. Gene Boyer. Sheila Tobias. Mary Lynn Myers. I’m trying to see the faces around the table those first few years. And then people from NOW were embedded into the board. I think by the time I went, Ellie was probably just elected for her first term as president. I forget the other people from NOW. I can see their faces, but I can’t think of their names. The top three officers had automatic seats on the NOW LDF board.
MJ: Now you’re the executive director, and you have this lovely board, and, what’s up? What are you doing?
SC: Well, we were signing on to lots of the Supreme Court cases. It was at the time when Sylvia Roberts was kind of in the midst of both the academic tenure cases and also the defining of gender and jobs. She had the AT&T case that she was involved in, and sort of led the preparation of the Supreme Court brief.
In the meantime, right after I was hired I think, or maybe actually reverse order, Phyllis Siegel was hired to be the legal director. Phyllis and I came on at about the same time, and by the grace of God, formed a fabulous partnership with each other, that allowed us to handle the rough and tumble of an organization trying to formalize itself without anybody really knowing exactly how to do it. All the board members wanted to be directly active on the cases or on projects. Nobody was really wanting to figure out, “How do you build an organization?”
In those days, there weren’t any nonprofit centers. There were no consultants in nonprofit development. There was nothing. And one of the best tools we had at that time was Mary Jean’s report that I was tracking down through you, that documented to some extent how much or how little money was going into women’s, especially feminist projects, from philanthropy. And that became kind of our strategy for building a case for funding. That, “This is the changing world, and you’re not in it, you’re not funding it, you’re not helping to define it. You need to get in there, because this is world changing stuff going on here.” And eventually, we decided to have a real specialty in family law issues. So, everything on property, division of property, the definition of a women’s role in marriage.
At the time I went to the NOW Legal Defense Fund, Georgia still referred to women as chattel in the marriage law. There was a lot to do. And then we had the big project on equal education rights in the K through 12 program that then was joined to champion Title IX, and its agenda became Title IX implementation. Well, writing the regulations first and then implementing. I was at NOW LDF almost seven years, and it was breathtaking. There was no calm minute. I was also required to attend all the NOW board meetings; there was my graduate degree in women’s studies. My favorite meeting was the one where the woman did the workshop on how to put a condom on a guy without him knowing it. That was fab.
MJ: I love it. I’ll bet. That wasn’t your everyday workshop.
SC: Yes, I dined out on that for quite a while.
MJ: That’s amazing. I love it. Those were the days.
SC: It was pretty great. Anyway, when I left NOW LDF – I had won a Kellogg fellowship while I was at the NOW Legal Defense Fund – it opened up an incredible world of experience to me. Again, pretty much focused on women. And so, what came out of that whole experience, was I ended up with this interesting specialty so to speak, on the advantages that women bring into post conflict and post dictatorship countries.
Because while wars are going on, women are left behind for the most part. Israel may be an exception, but most countries don’t recruit women into their armed forces. And so, while men might be doing the violent fighting, women are left behind trying to think about, “What in the hell is going to happen when this is over?” Because, “Surely this civil war will end, or surely this border conflict will end, and we will have to go back to being a country.”
I worked in Latin America, especially in Argentina. I worked in the former Yugoslavia. And then I worked in South Africa, doing this work with women who wanted to figure out how to be leaders that could be political, small “p”, after these conflicts were over. So they could both provide services, but also guard social change and democracy. And so, the world opened up to me in a different way.
I had been a little bit part of the Ms. Foundation discussions, and the Women’s Funding Network discussions that were happening in New York, but I didn’t get into it too seriously until I went to Kellogg, and my boss and I cooked up the idea of trying to start funding women’s philanthropy as one of the ways in which Kellogg wanted to do more diverse philanthropy support. And so, we started funding the Women’s Funding Network, and this and that, and some of the first women’s foundations. And then over the years, developed increasingly serious strategies about how to push the women’s funds into multimillion dollar endowments.
I went into consulting, and I spent a lot of time even as a consultant, doing that work. Either for the women’s funds themselves, or for Kellogg, or other funders who were trying to be a funding partner to that work, but needed a consultant to help the funds get to the goals they had set. And so, that really became the focus of my women’s work. Both the strategy to the funds to have impact on changing women, trying to also do some research and monitoring of how women’s funds were actually holding themselves accountable for impact, and then doing the work to actually build the infrastructure, and the giving capacities of the funds.
MJ: You were there on the ground floor of all these rapidly changing realities. Going from noticing that women needed some money, to developing nationally and internationally.
SC: Everybody realized we had to also be advocating so that the big funders would do more women’s work. I mean, you needed Ford in there, eventually Gates, all the big ones that were coming on the playing ground. Just because there was a women’s fund didn’t mean they got away without bothering to think about women. So it was that two-part agenda of advocacy in the whole field of philanthropy, but then building the funds. Because when push comes to shove, there are a lot of things that nobody, even the most wise foundation, will touch. And therefore, the women have to do it themselves.
The gender mutilation, child marriage, women’s health, a lot of the more gruesome stuff that women were living with. Now, Of course, it’s the prenatal care and maternal health work, which has just become a nightmare in two years. A lot of the big funders, they don’t really want to touch that, forthrightly. It’s too political. I mean, some will, Ford will touch it, a few others, but it becomes all of a sudden, just too something. Too political, too harsh. And so, who’s going to do it? Okay, it’s the women’s funds who are either going to step in or not. And then they’re going to bring some of their bigger funders with them. I mean, obviously there is the cabal, the Gates Fund, thank God, and some of the other foundations that have had good women’s leadership. They’re not going to turn their backs on this.
But everything that’s, I would say, super important but it has a more common-sense defense; like women should be able to get jobs they’re qualified for. I mean, there’s hardly anybody who’s against women having their fair place in the workforce. Equally, is a little different. We’re not so sure we really agree with that. But if you have the credentials, you should get the job. So, some things are easier for people to support, and other things seem to take a lot more courage. And where there’s a courage question, then the women have to just stand up and do it for themselves. And I think that’s why the women’s funds are important. And I think the challenge of the next stage, which will be a lot of generational turnover of leadership in the women’s funds, is to make sure that they end up feminist.
MJ: Is that in jeopardy in any way do you see? Or, you don’t know?
SC: It’s so individual. It depends on the leadership and the community.
MJ: Do you think the absence of it, or is there an absence of a dynamic movement that pushes that idea?
SC: Well, the Women’s Funding Network is there, and then there’s an international parallel. It’s got a new name now, but it was the International Women’s Network or Women’s Funding Network, but it has a name now that’s harder to remember. And they are both, I think, very clear about values, and very clear about what the women’s funds are set up to do. And a lot of the women’s funds that are real leaders in the field, they know where North is.
I mean, I’ve been super active in the Iowa Women’s Foundation, and we have a governor right now who’s downright scary, and things cannot be said certain ways. The Iowa Women’s Foundation took a very creative, very dynamic approach to childcare, on the basis of a statewide series of meetings. Out of which, that emerged as the biggest barrier to women’s economic participation. So, they took it on, did an amazing job of local organizing, and policy, and everything. And then the governor formed a task force, and she of course, wanted the Iowa Women’s Foundation to be part of it.
There are some things that have come through in funding, et cetera, that have been great and have helped to start closing the gap of available childcare. But at the same time, because the foundation is trying to walk side by side with the state government to make sure the system gets built, there’s a lot of things like – I noticed we were doing an invitation to an event one day, and I don’t know what word I used, and the PR person said, “Oh, we’re not using that word right now.” I agree, I don’t want to alienate this governor over a small thing like the choice of a word. On the other hand, if you start choosing your words carefully for, ten years, let’s say she’s in power for eight to ten years because she finished out somebody’s unfinished term. Who are we by then?
MJ: Good point.
SC: We do have an advisory council. That’s the old blue wall. They raise a lot of issues and sort of hold the line on some things, but it’s only a matter of time that that wall is going to disappear. So, I do think the amount of money now that’s now sitting in women’s funds is, I don’t know, a billion? I don’t know, it’s really big.
MJ: So, the choices that are made about who the next generational leader is, are extremely critical.
SC: Yes. I mean, most funds are trying to be careful, but a lot of the funds have had some very visible bad failures. Some of it has been hiring, or recruiting too many people from such a different culture, that of course they can’t hold together what is the vision. And they’re not strong enough advocates yet to understand or bring a new vision to the table, completely. The White House Project went down for that reason. I mean, when you bring the corporate people on the board, they’re worried about, “Why are we the same as so many other organizations? Are we doing things that other people could deliver? Are we efficient?”
You have to define your paradigm of efficiency, and if you define it as efficient about delivering a product or a service like, “Oh, we help people do this,” you have to be careful that you define the service as activating women in philanthropy, activating people to give more money. That is your service, basically. And your ability to make grants and prove that women’s solutions are good, is the argument for expanding the philanthropic choices of women, and drawing them more to the change towards equity for women.
So anyway, they ended up with a board that did not understand the organization, its mission, its structure, the nonprofit sector. I don’t know all the inside stuff, and whatever I knew at the time we were not allowed to talk about it. I only knew because I was a consultant. One of my clients was a funder who was funding Ms. and so I was involved with them, but you know, it’s not your place to go tell the story. Anyway, I do think that’s on the horizon. It’s a fabulous challenge to have in some ways, because what we’re talking about, is making sure that money stays directed towards change for equity, and not too much piecemeal showboating, or whatever people like to do these days. It’s a big thing on the agenda for the women’s funds, and for their networks, to make sure that they’re on top of this.
MJ: How are you working to influence the outcome of this?
SC: Well, a couple of things. I’m not trying to work too hard anymore. That’s a little bit of a downside, is there’s not that much to go around. But about, I don’t know, it’s got to be five years or more, Chris Grumm and Helen Hunt and I, and I don’t know who else, we were just sort of chatting and part of what popped out of the conversation was, “You know, before it’s all lost, we really should write a book about women’s philanthropy.” Because in a way, what we discovered from the early conversations and trying to imagine what story would the book tell, is that the women’s movement is the only major social change, or any social change movement, that has a parallel money movement built right next to it, and completely integrated.
The women’s funding movement at this point generationally, is still not very far from the women’s movement itself. The women’s movement often is defining the standards, defining the boundaries, defining the issues, and the women’s funds are overlapping with that to find out where money needs to go. The research that women’s funds are picking up on, is research, and data definition, and things like that, that are coming out of the daily lives of women that are represented through the women’s movement organizations. Whether they’re professional women, or they’re everyday women, community women, whatever.
And that’s how it’s been at the beginning. That the mission statements were, “We’re forming a women’s fund that will go hand in hand to advance the equity goals of the women’s movement.” Some mission statements have probably been revised by now, but that was, no matter how it was written, that was the sentiment of the early women’s funds. Who else has a highly structured, highly goal conscious, strategy minded, values based, funding movement, to change the minds of donors, to advocate in big philanthropy, and to build their own money? It just doesn’t exist. You could say, “Oh, the environmental network has so many great donors.” Yes, but where’s the money movement?
MJ: Interesting.
SC: There’s no money movement, there just happens to be a fit with donors that could come or go. And they may or may not have integrated those donors as their own donors, or if so, maybe just organization by organization. But they’re not invested in a whole movement so to speak. So, it’s very unusual. I just think the women’s movement stands out. In some ways it just shows how damn practical we are. That we’re over here turning the nation upside down, and somebody’s saying, “Ooh, where’s the money in the bank?” And, “We can’t depend on all these external funders,” or, “We can’t just depend on a mailing list that we build out of Ms. Magazine. We’ve got to get our own money in the bank.”
MJ: So, where is that book?
SC: It ended up then, that as we kept getting into the issues, we realized we had to really expand it to represent the International Women’s Funding movement, and that there had to be a lot of voices. So, we committed to a collaborative. It’s kind of like the old, Our Bodies, Ourselves in some ways. There’s like ten women who are in the collaborative writers group. As a group, we hired a ghostwriter, and then we hired editors to help us. It is being published by Rutledge out of London. And it’s there. I don’t know how long it’s going to take them. It’ll be primarily online for people to download so that it’s affordable.
MJ: Okay. But it’s not going to be a hard copy at all?
SC: There will be hard copies for libraries and whoever wants hard copy, but the sales strategy is going to be a download strategy. We just want it in a lot of hands, and we want the ability to update it. So, if like a year from now, we wanted to add some names, or do more profiles, or add a new story, you could just go online and add.
MJ: It’s a living book for a living movement. How’s that?
SC: Yes. So, the working title, which I hope the publishers will keep is, The Uprising of Women in Philanthropy.
MJ: That sounds good.
SC: Yes, I think it sounds pretty sexy. We’ll see if the publishers keep the title. I don’t know. It’s London. It’s a pretty big publisher. I think they wanted a pretty hard hitting, pretty adventurous book, but I don’t know. I’m not their liaison, so I don’t really understand them very well.
MJ: What’s the target date?
SC: I think April, but I’m not sure. We submitted it in November. We haven’t heard much from them yet, so I don’t know.
MJ: But hopefully spring.
SC: Yes, hopefully spring that it will be out. I think it will really put some of these, what I would call more feminist issues, and why the money issue is so – you have to integrate that, and the whole donor consciousness has to be integrated for solutions to work. I just feel like it’ll tell some pretty exciting stories, talk about how conscious decisions were made, about values, and structure, and voice, and everything. No book can do it all, but I hope it has some thread of value. So anyway, that’s one thing that several of us have been working on. Trying to get that done. And then I’m still consulting to a few women’s funds. I should blog more, is what I really should do. I should make some kind of deal with the Women’s Funding Network to do a blog for them.
MJ: Is anybody blogging on this topic?
SC: I don’t think consistently.
MJ: It’s a very important message that you’re talking about.
SC: Yes.
MJ: So, yes. I have to push your blogging. I mean, it’s all of us, who, of a different generation, have had to learn these different skills. It’s being effective. As the newspapers sort of diminish in their reach, then these specific blogs are really making an impact, I think.
SC: I think the most consistent coverage has been probably from Ms. Magazine, but I don’t think they ever really integrated women’s philanthropy as a real deep subject for them. It’s not in the same category as women in reproductive rights. And it’s too bad, because once the money, and the generations change, and the money is settled into endowments and permanent gifts or whatever it is, it’s just stuck there for a very long time.
So, if it’s not where you want it, if it’s not where women need it, if it’s not flexible and open for women, it’s not good that it’s just – I mean, I believe in the scholarships, but it’s like Harvard, why should that many billions be shuttered inside Harvard? All the women’s colleges have these fabulous fundraising campaigns, and they also have very loyal, consistent donors. And I definitely want the women’s colleges to have some of that money and have women’s scholarship alive and well. But if you have too much money hidden behind academia, it’s the same problem.
MJ: It’s not there for the everyday work.
SC: Yes. The women’s funds at least are accessible. They raise the money in order to give the grants, and the money that’s in their permanent endowments is all, most of it, aimed at grant making. At least it’s open and it says, “Hey, this money is tagged for women.”
MJ: Have you been able to do any mentoring of the next generation?
SC: Yes, but not broadly enough. For a while, partly through the Women’s Funding Network, this little cabal of me, and Chris Grumm and Helen Hunt were doing this series of women’s retreats that were sort of trying to recruit women nationally and internationally who saw themselves – they could be big givers at the local level, but saw themselves as wanting to be more identified with women’s giving, and have more impact.
So, we were doing a series of retreats that really were designed to; sort of the deal was, “Give us three days or four days,” whatever it was, “We’ll take care of you, and what you’ll leave with, is the assurance that your money will have a higher impact on the lives of women.” And it’s like, “You cannot walk out of here without that, and you won’t.” And so those retreats were amazing.
Many of those women became the million dollar and more donors, through Women Moving Millions, and most of that money has gone into women’s funds. Many of them are on boards, or chair boards of some of the bigger foundations, or some of those international foundations. And then out of that, a lot of the people who came and got those workshops said, “Oh, well, do it for my fund.” “Come to Washington state and do it.” “Come to Mississippi and do it in Mississippi.”
And the one that ultimately decided to do the most in-depth work on donor development, was the Dallas Women’s Foundation. And they have increased, I mean, I don’t even know the percentage of how much they’ve increased in the last ten years. It’s been phenomenal. Partly it’s been this investment in donors through these local retreats in Dallas. We might travel to other parts of Texas, but originally it was recruited through Dallas Women’s Foundation, now the Texas Women’s Foundation. And they put the most in. I would say they probably have the most loyal and active network of donors, and the most understanding network of donors.
Like, people want to do it; donor-advised-funds, but have now the wisdom of saying, “I want to parallel my subject area with your top priorities.” So, that’s been a big success and that is an area I would like to do more of, but I don’t want at this point, to create it, run it, organize it. I would like somebody else to say, “Gosh, we need to go back to those good old days,” where we were doing this incredibly hands on, very high level of warmth towards our donors, to get them to feel like insiders. To the movement, to the strategies on funding, to bringing in other donors. It’s like we want them as insiders, not just people using our service. If it gets too transactional, it starts getting bad. So, I would like to do more of it.
MJ: But you can’t do the day to day.
SC: I have to think about that, actually. I’m going to take that away from this conversation and think about what I would be willing to do and who else might be willing to do it.
MJ: Yes. I think that’s our obligation at our age, is to try to figure that out. You’re identifying so beautifully what the assets, that over the years the women’s funds, and the thinking about the women’s funds, has brought to the table. And now to think about how to continue that. The dynamic of that is really wonderful.
SC: Yes. I think the Women Moving Millions has taken on some of this role, but I think they’re not even ten years old yet. So, I think they’re just still searching around, and floundering around a little bit with their role. And also how to keep bridging it between I would say, maybe somewhat more isolated donors who are giving the million, and donors who are more entrenched in movement-based thinking about changing women’s lives. I haven’t recently looked at their board, but I would like to look at their board and see how they’re mixing the cultures on the board itself.
MJ: Yes. That’s all worthwhile. And it’s a living thing. All of this is a living thing.
SC: Yes. It’s there for the making. It’s like we could make so much more out of it.
MJ: Right. And we’re far from done, and it could be done in our lifetime, so we have to see what we can do.
SC: If it gets done in my lifetime and then I’m too old to enjoy it, I’m going to be really pissed. If I just go and I don’t know what happens, then that would be better.
MJ: So, you’ve made enormous contributions. Is there anything that stands out as kind of the most favorite thing that you’ve been involved in, or something you want to raise up that you haven’t already? I mean, I think your history in the Women’s Funding Network stands on its own, but what do you think?
SC: Well, the thing that I sort of treasure most, and it’s something that’s very hard to get that much attention for out loud, is that when we were forming women’s organizations, and formalizing an organizational mindset with NOW, with all the offspring of NOW, the Women’s Political Caucus and the offspring of the Women’s Political Caucus; all that organizing, and organization building and whatever’s left of it, new and old, that we’re still managing and taking care of it.
All of that was done with an insistence on new values. So, what did we value? Voice, participation, diversity, who was at the table. Not speaking for those who could speak for themselves and making sure there was a place. Deciding nothing about you, without you. It’s like, “We’re not going to tell you how to change that community. You need to come to the table and tell us what needs to be changed.”
So, all that participation, all that voice, all that clatter that came to NOW board meetings. That was in such a formative time. But just the idea of, “How are we going to make these organizations? How do you structure it for participation? How do you not have a top-down power model? How do you create constituency around it?” And we did all those things. It was rough, it was messy.
I cried buckets when I was running the NOW Legal Defense Fund. But now, everybody in philanthropy and corporations are asking these questions. “Gee, how do you build diversity?” In other words, how do you have a constituency for new ideas that a company might have, or a big health delivery system or whatever? How do you get participatory decision making without just losing complete control of an organization? I feel like, “Wow, welcome to 1970. You guys are really with-it here.”
I feel like we changed the culture, because women went from our organizations into all kinds of other places. Their jobs, the schools, the hospitals, their community organizations, and started just doing things differently. So, I feel like one of our biggest influences has been the culture of organization building. But nowhere really, I don’t think, has anybody drawn that thread clearly enough that people would just say, “Oh, yes, I heard about that in college, or, “I read something about that,” or “I read an article that really showed how women sort of turned the organizational structure, and especially philanthropy at some point, upside down.” And we’re all sort of living off of that now and trying to have a more participatory culture. But I feel like I lived it. I believe that. I see the evidence. I don’t know how to tell that story without sounding braggy or crazy.
MJ: But it’s a truth. Yes, it’s underestimated in its value, and not told. I think telling our story is critical. It’s partly why we’re doing this project.
SC: And it’s underestimated in an interesting way. It’s not just like, “Ha ha, we did it first and now you’re copying it,” but it’s like, “Why did we do it? Why did we insist on building the organizations differently?” And all women were fed-up enough with sort of top-down culture, that even if they didn’t understand all the “why” of what to build new, they understood why to not build old. And that insistence on changing that in the culture, I think that is part of the women’s revolution. I just look at organizational structures saying, “You just can’t miss it,” really.
MJ: It’s not talked enough about. And you’re right, the braggy stuff; you’ve got to be careful of that so that people can hear it. But the exposition of it is extremely important, so that it can be brought forward. So that people do more of it, and they bring it into their conscious thinking.
SC: That’s pretty interesting to live long enough where you can see the morphing of ideas in your own lifetime.
MJ: One of the advantages we have of getting here and still being conscious and being able to talk to each other and talk to other people. So, this has been a good conversation. Have we missed anything?
SC: When you’ve done it for, let’s see, it’s going to be 65 years or something like that, I’m sure we’ve missed pieces. But I think you got all the big movement; you got all the big circles in there.
MJ: Good. Well, this has just been a great pleasure. I learned a lot, and great memories with you, really.