Funder celebrated for modeling how to leverage multi-year, multi-use, and cross-identity efforts through radical generosity and radical collaboration.
WASHINGTON, DC – With connected issues and needs urgently impacting today’s women, gender-expansive people, and families, the New York Women’s Foundation (NYWF) is resisting philanthropy’s trend of limiting its grantmaking to one focus area. The Foundation has modeled how to build relationships with under-represented and vulnerable communities impacted by systemic causes of social, economic, or environmental changes.
That is why the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) is honoring the group with its 2023 “Smashing Silos” Award for Intersectional Grantmaking. Their model of radical generosity and radical collaboration invites other funders into a practice of addressing the systemic causes of social, economic or environmental challenges.
NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman said that the Selection Committee found the foundation’s strong participatory grantmaking response in the areas of reproductive and environmental justice particularly noteworthy.
“Our Selection Committee chose the New York Women’s Foundation for their extraordinary work advancing justice for women and families in New York – work that is rooted in gender, racial, and economic justice, that uses trust-based philanthropy, and engages community in identifying and developing solutions,” said Dorfman.
The last several years have seen a steady and intense erosion of people’s decision-making power over their bodies. Reproductive, sexual, gender-affirming and caregiving protections, resources and rights have been under attack at the city and state level, even in places like New York. NYWF leaders have stepped up to the moment, responding aggressively to the dire need. The Foundation’s open grantmaking cycle prioritized reproductive justice, leveraged its participatory grantmaking model and brought community members to the center of their decision-making and final recommendations.
NYWF works with various reproductive justice partners and grantees, like the NY Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF).
NYWF’s grantmaking committee specifically committed five years of general operating funding to the work and evolution of the organizational structure of the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), becoming one of their first foundational investors. The Foundation has since doubled their 2022 investments and plans to reach $1M in 2023 for this strategy.
“We take pride rooting our work in the interconnected needs of women and gender expansive people in New York City and beyond,” said NYWF President and CEO Ana Oliveira. “ At a time of unprecedented attacks on our bodily autonomy and national abortion rights, it more important than ever for funders to address the immediate health and reproductive needs of communities and invest in pathways for long-term solutions.”
The NYWF is one of five honorees that will be honored October 18 in Los Angeles, CA at the 2023 IMPACT Awards. The biennial celebration of philanthropy’s best actors will take place at the 2023 CHANGE Philanthropy Unity Summit, a three-day conference that looks to create a diverse and safe space to gather and deepen individual and institutional practices that advance equity with an intersectional lens and community at the center.
Past winners of NCRP’s “Smashing Silos Award” includes the Third Wave Fund, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, and the Groundswell Fund.
Leveraging Resources & Trust to Build Community-centered Power
NCRP’s 2023 “Smashing Silos” Award for Intersectional Grantmaking is given every two years to a funder that worked in deep partnership with under-represented and vulnerable communities and supported multi-issue and cross-identity efforts to address systemic causes of social, economic or environmental challenges.
That is just the kind of work happening at the New York Women’s Foundation. Since 1987, the NYWF has advanced a dynamic philanthropic strategy that is rooted in the belief that people living the issues know the answers and that when women and gender-expansive people thrive, their families and communities also thrive. The Foundation has used the blueprint of radical generosity and radical collaboration to drive the future we collectively desire, locally and globally.
The Foundation, among the largest women-led grantmaking organizations in the world, has used a trust-based philanthropic model to support multi-issue and cross-identity efforts affecting women and families. The Foundation’s grant-making is driven by a Grant Advisory Committee that has donors, grantee partners, and community members collectively making the investment decisions. The grants themselves are multi-year and general operating support.
Click here to read more about the New York Women’s Foundations work and why they were chosen to be NCRP’s 2023 “Smashing Silos” Impact Award for Intersectional Grantmaking.
ABOUT NCRP
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has served as philanthropy’s critical friend and independent watchdog since 1976. We work with foundations, non-profits, social justice movements and other leaders to ensure that the sector is transparent with, and accountable to, those with the least wealth, power and opportunity in American society.
Our storytelling, advocacy, and research efforts, in partnership with grantees, help funders fulfill their moral and practical duty to build, share, and wield economic resources and power to serve public purposes in pursuit of justice.
ABOUT THE 2023 IMPACT AWARDS
Since 2013, NCRP has awarded 29 Impact Awards to grantmakers in recognition of support, leadership and partnership with grassroots organizations and community leaders around LGBTQ rights, minimum wage, environmental justice, health equity and other critical issues. This year, we will add a fifth, the Pablo Eisenberg Memorial Prize” for Philanthropy Criticism, in honor of NCRP’s founding board chair.
The biennial event has been traditionally held on the last night of Change Philanthropy’s Unity Summit. This year’s edition is slated to be held in Los Angeles, CA, the first in four years to be held in person. (The previous event was held virtually in 2021 due to COVID-19 concerns)
ABOUT THE CHANGE PHILANTHROPY’S UNITY SUMMIT
This year’s Impact Awards — and the 2023 Unity Summit in general — are expected to be the biggest yet, with over 1200 people expected to attend the conference from Oct. 16-19th. The three-day conference will explore strategies for utilizing power to advance philanthropic equity, with emphasis on how philanthropic institutions and individuals working in philanthropy can shift their practice. Across various session types and formats, summit participants will explore shifts in internal organizational practice that consider organizational climate and culture as well as realizing intersectional racial equity within philanthropic organizations; and external practice that examine use of capital, ways of engaging with accountability to community, and methods for leveraging collective power.
For more information on the 2023 Unity Summit, or to explore past Unity Summits, visit https://www.changeunitysummit.info/
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CONTACT(S): Russel Roybal, rroybal[at]ncrp.org
Elbert Garcia, egarcia[at]ncrp.org
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