June 12, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Forty-two percent of women consult their spouse when deciding where to give, and the same percentage consult no one, according to a new online poll of women conducted by Town & Country magazine for its annual philanthropy issue (June).
Among the other findings:
- Ten percent never open fund-raising appeals received in the mail.
- Forty percent don’t like black-tie galas as fund-raising events but understand why charities run them.
- Eighty percent said it was very important or somewhat important to them to support causes that relate specifically to women.
The poll was based on results from 1,967 women; the majority said they contributed $25,000 or less a year.
Among the other topics covered in the issue:
- How to volunteer outside the United States without offending cultural sensitivities of the people receiving help.
- How to give overseas and find ways to keep tabs on the donations.
- A reflection by Dena Kaye, the daughter of the entertainer Danny Kaye, on her efforts to bring Indian women out of poverty. In 1996, Ms. Kaye made a donation to Unicef to start a small project in India. Today, that effort has reached several hundred thousand people and served as a model for government.
Ms. Kaye credits the success of the program to Mukti Datta, a local woman she met through Unicef. Together, the two helped train women in Ms. Datta’s hometown of Almora in the art of weaving. The business they created, Panchachuli Women Weavers, sells shawls, scarves, and blankets in places such as Whole Foods and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The World Bank studied the business as a prototype for socioeconomic development, writes Ms. Kaye.
The pair also founded a hospital that provides care to poor people. The institution, she says, is recognized as the best secondary-health-care hospital in the state of Uttarakhand. The weaving business, meanwhile, employs more women there than any other company.
“When I first told friends I was going to fund work in India, many responded, ‘But the problems are so big, how can you make a difference?’” Ms. Kaye recalls. “I am, honestly, knocked out with pride and a smidgen of disbelief that in just a little over a decade we have reached more than 200,000 people and created two institutions from nothing — no infrastructure, no traditions — that serve as role models and affect government policy.”
