Global Fund for Women

Foundation for Women, which was the very first women's foundation.

It inspired countless others, including the place that I had the privilege of leading, the Global Fund for Women, and Mama Cash, which was the Dutch women's fund.

But really, the Ms.

Foundation for Women was the very first time that women had gotten together and said, "Well, if nobody else," AKA mainstream foundations, "will fund what women are doing," including, by the way, women artists, women filmmakers, women musicians, "then we're going to do it, and we're going to do it in a particularly feminist way," which was neither Gloria, who grew up poor in a trailer park, actually, in Ohio, nor Dolly grew up with means, right? But they...

And Sakena had done this extraordinary thing in which she had reached out to an imam in her local community when the Taliban had stopped allowing girls to come to school, and she invited his wife and daughter to come to this, uh, small school that they were running.

And she said, "Well, why don't you come and teach what the Quran has to say about women's equality and women's dignity?" And when other people in the community saw that the imam's wife and the imam's daughter were coming to study at the school, of course that gave legitimacy and power and, and a sense of safety also for people to be able to come.

So I think I also, as someone who grew up in India often chafing against things that I saw as being traditionally limiting, have, by the time I was running the Global Fund for Women and meeting all these extraordinary women who were using traditions deep inside their own culture, including Leymah Gbowee in Liberia, who, you know, had, had that wonderful story before she got the Nobel Women Prize for Peace.

There's a tradition in Liberia of if an older woman takes off her clothes, you'll be cursed, right? And so these police came to move all these women away who had surrounded the peace talks in Ghana, and, uh, she begins to untie her turban, and then they're so embarrassed that they all back away.

I mean, I had a huge argument.

I served on the advisory council of the Gates Foundation years ago when I was CEO of the Global Fund for Women.

And I had a huge argument at that point.

The reason I was invited was that I had a huge argument with them about their so-called green revolution in Africa.

And that's what you're now planning to sell Africa? great I mean that's very you know noble of you you know and at that point there was somebody there who said it would be good to have your different point of view on this but you must be willing to say it You must be willing to speak it and you must be willing to lose your job if somebody says like, no, that's, you know, I didn't have to do that until more recently, right? I mean, I didn't have to lose my job when I said it to Adele Simmons or when Inside the MacArthur Foundation or if, you know, John Foster Bay was like...

No, black lives do matter and it is different and we have to think differently.

I didn't have to worry about it at the Global Fund for Women for 14 years when we were taking money from many different people, including 25,000 individual donors, little girls who were sending us their bat mitzvah check for $25.

So I think the question of money and being tainted has much more to do with how we construct the framework within which we are willing to take money, acknowledge that we are using this money for something that we hope will change the dynamics of power, and actually calling out what we find unacceptable in the spaces where that behavior is unacceptable.