Saturday, July 31, 2021

In Her Words: ‘Equality can’t wait’

When philanthropic giving goes to women and girls
Anna Parini

"It's the first competition centered on gender with an award of this magnitude."

— Nicole Bates, director of strategic partnerships and initiatives at Pivotal Ventures

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A groundbreaking competition for gender equality concluded on Thursday with $40 million awarded to four initiatives that advance the influence of women across the United States.

The Equality Can't Wait Challenge — hosted by Pivotal Ventures (the investment company of Melinda French Gates) with support from MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett, and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies — gave $10 million to each of the four winners: a collaboration between New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead; Girls Inc.'s Project Accelerate; Ada Developers Academy; and a coalition of partners formed by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations. The awardees were selected from a pool of more than 550 applications.

Historically less than 2 percent of philanthropic giving has gone to initiatives specifically geared toward women and girls.

"We hope this sends a clear signal that philanthropy has a role to play in supporting these projects," said Nicole Bates, director of strategic partnerships and initiatives at Pivotal Ventures. "It's the first competition centered on gender with an award of this magnitude, and our hope is that this is now the baseline."

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The competition is part of a wave of recent philanthropic commitments to gender equality. U.N. Women convened the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, where political leaders, corporate executives and activists unveiled $40 billion in commitments to support women's advancement. Some of the major single investments included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which pledged $2.1 billion to the cause over five years, and the Ford Foundation, which committed $420 million over five years.

The four winners of the Equality Can't Wait Challenge have developed strikingly different strategies around gender equity, some focused on empowering individuals and others on broad-scale policy change.

Here's a look at the winners:

New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead

New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead will provide female Native American entrepreneurs across a wide range of sectors — including floral design and food distribution — with networking events, professional training and a retreat space, while also bringing together a circle of investors committed to funding Native-owned businesses. The award will help at least 3,000 women.

The initiatives tap into a long history of Native entrepreneurship, which has evolved from older trading and bartering systems to today's larger business endeavors.

To Elizabeth Gamboa, executive director of New Mexico Community Capital, and Jaime Gloshay, a founder of Native Women Lead, the $10 million award is an opportunity to show that female Native American entrepreneurs are worthy of substantial investment.

These kinds of contributions will go an especially long way because of the economic role that women play in Native American communities, Ms. Gloshay said. Native American women are chronically underpaid, at around 60 cents for every dollar paid to a white man.

"We see business as a way for women to not only reclaim their values and worth, but also assert the need to have economic stability in their communities," she said.

Girls Inc.

Girls Inc. takes a two-tiered approach to gender equity. As part of its Project Accelerate program, the organization works directly with young women, offering them college readiness classes, internship opportunities and other programs to prepare them for their careers. Girls Inc. also engages with the leaders of corporations to help them rethink hiring and improve diversity and inclusion policies.

Girls Inc. primarily serves low-income girls and girls of color. Roughly 80 percent of its beneficiaries are Black and brown girls, and 60 percent come from families earning below $30,000 annually. The Project Accelerate program reaches over 5,000 young women.

"It's the dual strategy that makes this visionary," said Stephanie Hull, the group's chief executive. "We have said to workplaces, 'You have to have policies and practices that are more welcoming.' And then we work with young women to say, 'Hey, they're not always welcoming, and here's what you have to do to be prepared for that.'"

Ada Developers Academy

Ada Developers Academy's key offering is an 11-month software development program that is intended to equip women, nonbinary people, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people of color with skills to enter the tech industry. The program includes six months of classes followed by a five-month internship. To date it has placed 92 percent of its alumni into full-time software developer jobs.

Prepandemic, Ada had offered its classes in-person in Seattle. But the group quickly transitioned to remote learning last year, and now plans to offer both virtual and in-person options moving forward. With the funding, the group will serve 3,000 more students and expand into more cities including Atlanta and Washington.

"Tech is the wealth and culture driver of our time," said Lauren Sato, chief executive of the academy. "That's where the highest-paying, most flexible and most benefited jobs are. We see the tech industry as a powerful lever for getting women into high-paying jobs that will serve their communities."

The National Domestic Workers Alliance

The National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy organization fighting for domestic workers, and Caring Across Generation, a campaign to transform caregiving in the U.S., have formed a coalition. It includes the National Women's Law Center, The Arc, MomsRising Education Fund, and Family Values @ Work and its goal is to mobilize grass-roots advocacy for child care and paid family leave.

Its calls for care solutions have taken on new resonance during the pandemic, when so many people scrambled to look after their loved ones, whether children learning remotely or older relatives in locked down nursing homes.

The ultimate goal is a United States where everyone can afford quality family care. It's ambitious given how far the U.S. has lagged other developed countries on care infrastructure.

"Historically people have thought about caregiving as a personal responsibility to be dealt with in the privacy of one's own home, and if we couldn't figure it out, it was seen as a personal failure," said Ai-jen Poo, head of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. "The pandemic helped us see that we can do our very best and it's still not sufficient, because we need public policy programs that support our ability to take care of families."

It's an optimal moment to build the movement, she said. "We were all living in our own version of a care crisis in the pandemic," Ms. Poo said. "That helped us understand how fundamental it is that we invest in policies and programs to support us."

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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley.

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On Politics: Biden, Republicans and the pandemic blame game

G.O.P. intransigence has helped fuel Covid's resurgence. But Biden will have to clean up the mess.

Hi. We're sending you one last Saturday edition of On Politics, courtesy of our national politics reporter Reid Epstein, before the newsletter shifts to a weekly schedule of Tuesday and Thursday evenings. You can continue to read Lisa Lerer's political coverage on our site, and you can follow her on Twitter.

President Biden began wearing a mask again at the White House this week.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

President Biden is in a tough spot: He campaigned on the ideas that he had the team to manage a pandemic and that his five-decade career as a Washington deal maker was just the ticket to overcome the country's political polarization.

That's not happening, not even a little.

Not only are Republicans resisting Biden's push to end the pandemic, some of them are actively hampering it. Republican governors slow-walked vaccination efforts and lifted mask mandates early. In Washington, G.O.P. leaders like Steve Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican — who himself didn't get vaccinated until about two weeks ago — mocked public health guidance that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors as "government control."

There's little Biden can do. Nearly a year and a half of pandemic living has revealed precisely who will and won't abide by public health guidelines.

Just in the last week, in my Washington neighborhood, which has among the highest vaccination rates in the city and voted 92 percent for Biden, people began re-masking at supermarkets and even outdoors in parks.

In places like Arkansas, hospitals are over capacity with Covid patients and vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. The anti-mask sentiment is so strong that the state's General Assembly passed legislation forbidding any mandate requiring them. On Thursday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, declared a special session of the legislature to amend that anti-mandate law he signed in April so that schools would be allowed to require masks for students too young to receive a vaccine. Good luck with that, his fellow Republicans in the legislature replied.

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That leaves the president in a pickle. As the Delta variant shows itself to be far more contagious and dangerous than previous iterations of the virus, the people he most needs to hear his message on vaccines and masks are least likely to.

Six years of Donald J. Trump largely blocking out all other voices in his party have left Republicans without a credible messenger to push vaccines, even if they wanted to. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, may be using his campaign money to air pro-vaccine ads in his native Kentucky, but he is hardly a beloved figure within the party and is viewed by its base as just another member of the Washington establishment.

There are certainly other communities of vaccine resisters, including demographics of people who have historically been mistreated by the federal government (and also a small-but-vocal minority of professional athletes and Olympians), but it is Republicans and Republican-run states that have emerged as the biggest hurdle in America's vaccination efforts.

With little ability to persuade the vaccine-hesitant and little help from the party he had pledged to work with, Biden and the federal government were left with a move he had resisted for weeks: make life more difficult for the unvaccinated, to try to force them to change their minds.

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Which brings us to the president's news conference on Thursday. Biden said that, for the first time, all federal employees would have to show proof that they've been vaccinated (or else wear a mask at work), submit to weekly testing and maintain social distance.

He stopped short of a vaccine mandate, saying such a requirement was a decision for local governments, school districts and companies. He said that if things got worse, and those resisting vaccines were denied entry from jobs and public spaces, maybe then things would get better.

"My guess is, if we don't start to make more progress, a lot of businesses and a lot of enterprises are going to require proof for you to be able to participate," Biden said.

This maneuver — essentially a shifting of responsibility away from the federal government — is consistent with the way that Biden often tries to project a hopeful tone while airbrushing the reality of a starkly divided nation.

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The market for disinformation in America is larger than ever, with Trump, despite starting the program that has led to the full vaccination of 164 million Americans, leading the charge to discredit the same program during the Biden administration.

But it wasn't Trump and Republicans who ran last year on ending the pandemic — it was Biden and Democrats who successfully made the election a referendum on managing a once-in-a-century global public health crisis.

Now, just weeks after he celebrated the great progress made against the pandemic, Biden faces a new wave. And it probably won't be long before Republicans who have done all they could to resist measures to combat it start to blame the president for not getting the country out of the crisis he pledged to solve.

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Sunisa Lee's Olympic gold is a triumph for Hmong Americans

When I traveled to Wisconsin in May to write about a dispute over whether Marathon County should declare itself "A Community for All," the overwhelming sentiment from members of the Hmong community at the center of the dispute was whether they were accepted and seen as equal citizens.

So this week when Sunisa Lee, a Hmong gymnast from nearby St. Paul, Minn., won the gold medal in the women's gymnastics all-around competition, she not only became America's latest Olympic hero but also catapulted herself to become the country's most famous Hmong person.

"SO EXCITED. SO PROUD," Ka Lo, a Marathon County Board member, wrote in a series of jubilant text messages on Thursday. "IT'S SOOOOOO GOOD!!!"

How much of a boost Lee's triumph gives to local efforts for Hmong recognition in Wisconsin remains to be seen. Both Marathon County and Wausau's City Council have rejected "Community for All" resolutions, leading to a proliferation of "Community for All" yard signs and yet another effort to pass the measure at the county board.

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