At the 2007 Evening to Honor Maine Women and Girls, we, the
Maine Women’s Fund, launched our Economic Security Initiative – a new strategic
program that will be the focus of our grantmaking and technical assistance for
the next year or two.
We wanted to take the opportunity to describe this focus to
our current, past, and future grantees (i.e. the community of nonprofits
serving women and girls) in greater detail, and in doing so, opening a channel
for questions and general dialogue.
Historically, the Maine Women’s Fund has invested in four
distinct issue areas – economic empowerment, freedom from violence, access to
high quality affordable health care, and self determination. The benefit of
this strategy is that it allowed us to strengthen a nascent sector of
organizations serving women and girls by touching, even in small ways, a large
number of organizations. Since 1980, we’ve invested over $1.4 million in 250
organizations.
The cost of this strategy is that our investments have not necessarily
reinforced each other and that our investments are not big enough to serve the
critical needs of women and girls, and the organizations serving them.
The strategic planning process we undertook sought to
identify how to build a stronger grantmaking program that would better serve
the sector. We undertook conversations with grantees and other nonprofits,
donors, and women leaders. We collected research and data and conducted focus
groups.
This led us to a new integrated strategy, whereby we would address
the same issues by addressing a root problem of those issues, simultaneously
enabling and encouraging reinforcing activities. It was the broader community
of women’s organizations that identified economic security, as the root issue
that threads through their work – either accelerating it or inhibiting, no
matter their subject area. Economic security is by no means the only root issue
– but it is the one most articulated by the community and from a strategic
focus, it’s an area with proven solutions for dismantling the problem. In the
next few years, we intend to have multiple initiatives like the Economic
Security Initiative addressing additional root problems in an integrated way,
while providing substantially more, and new, resources to your organizations.
It is our hope that these new initiatives will always come from you, the
community we serve, and that you will engage us in conversation as ideas come
to you.
In addition to using economic security as the lens through
which we address multiple issues facing women and girls, we also intend to use
economic security to address a core need of most nonprofit organizations –
their own financial security. It is a core objective of the initiative to bring
substantially new resources to the sector, as well as invest in resource
mobilization strategies and tools for the sector through technical assistance.
Finally, it is also our goal to be a communication platform
for issues facing women and girls, and to bring new resources to bear through
this platform. Our goal is to engage more women across the state in women’s
issues, and we are holding regional and state-wide public education events to
make this happen. We’d love to co-sponsor events with you, or to distribute
your messages to our broader community as part of our collaborative commitment.
Both our grantmaking and technical assistance will begin in
March 2008, with a series of meetings designed to bring together nonprofits
serving women and girls. We hope that these meetings will build collaborations,
share best practices, set specific goals, and define technical assistance
needs. Following these meetings, we will issue a Request for Proposals, using
April and May to review proposals and define grantmaking priorities. We will
issue the first round of grants in June 2008.
Our goal is to triple our grantmaking over the next two
years, offering over $600,000 in grant dollars. This is a stretch goal for us,
making the July – March timeframe so important.
While we gear up, please send your ideas and thoughts about
the initiative directly to me at Elizabeth@mainewomensfund.org.
As many of you know, I’ll be taking some time off (in the near future) to have
a baby. I’ll be back in action before not to long will respond to you then. Additionally,
if you have ideas for using our communications platform, please contact our
community outreach coordinator, Brianna McCabe
.
We look forward to what the New Year has to offer and we
wish you all the very best.
With warm regards, Eli
This sounds like a really exciting program. I appreciate your taking the time to explain the initiative here on your blog, so that people like me who've missed a few of your more recent events can still get the lowdown.
Posted by: Sally | December 12, 2007 at 09:21 AM