September 1, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
Women, Philanthropy, and Social Change: Visions for a Just Society
edited by Elayne Clift
“Not so long ago, the phrase ‘women and philanthropy’ seemed an oxymoron to me,” writes Elayne Clift in her introduction to this volume. From Ms. Clift’s experience as an employee at the National Women’s Health Network and other nonprofit groups focusing on women’s issues, she could see that women seldom received grants and were rarely in a position to make decisions about who would get support. This collection of essays is designed to show the hidden history of women’s involvement in the nonprofit world and discusses how women are using philanthropy to achieve social change.
In the book’s first section, scholars and nonprofit officials reflect on women’s philanthropy to date. They explore the growth of grant makers run by women, the challenges of documenting women’s giving, prominent female donors, women as volunteers, and the role of feminism in grant making.
Part Two examines more closely the relationship between women, philanthropy, and social change. The essays in this section discuss, for example, how giving by women has propelled discussions of domestic violence “from the shadows” into the hallways of government, and has helped women across the globe achieve economic self-sufficiency. In other essays, Barbara Y. Phillips, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, dissects her employer’s grant-making approaches to women’s causes, while Kalpana Krishnamurthy, director of the Third Wave Foundation, describes the emerging voice of young women in philanthropy.
Publisher: University Press of New England, 37 Lafayette Street, Lebanon, N.H. 03766-1446; (800) 421-1561; fax (603) 643-1540; http://www.upne.com; 293 pages; $29.95; ISBN 1-58465-492-9.
