November 27, 2003 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Lisa Woll’s day jobs have mostly been at big nonprofit groups that operate on a national or international scale, but she has devoted her free time in the past decade to building a small charity to help impoverished women in Washington.
Her newest day job combines both worlds. As head of the International Women’s Media Foundation, she is now working for a group that helps women and has a global reach, but it is relatively small, operating on a $2-million budget.
Ms. Woll has received plenty of attention from the news media herself. In 1999, when she worked for Save the Children Sweden, she wrote a widely publicized report on the effects of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And as executive director of Friends of Vista, a group that works to strengthen the federal government’s Volunteers in Service to America program, she was able to arrange a clever, no-cost publicity campaign. In 1987, Ms. Woll persuaded a Friends of Vista board member, Chicago’s Msgr. John J. Egan, to write a letter to Ann Landers urging former Vista volunteers to join together to demonstrate their support for the organization, whose budget had been cut during the 1980s. Ms. Landers, an old friend of Monsignor Egan’s, published the letter in her column. Within three weeks, more than 1,000 former volunteers wrote to Friends of Vista to show their support for the federal volunteer program.
Ms. Woll was named a Washingtonian of the Year, by Washingtonian magazine in 2000 for another elegantly simple idea.
In 1992, she started Suited for Change with a group of friends in Washington. She and her friends had heard about a group in Chicago that provides low-income and jobless women with business attire to wear for interviews. Suited for Change now does more than provide clothes: It also offers training in time management, etiquette, and answering job-interview questions.
As more and more groups around the country started organizations like Suited for Change, Ms. Woll helped to found the Women’s Alliance, a coalition of 30 groups that work to help women get jobs. She just completed a term as president of the consortium.
“I’m one of those people who likes to do multiple things at one time,” says Ms. Woll, 42.
“When you work at large international organizations,” she says, “you sometimes have limited ability to know if you’re having a big impact. That’s why it’s satisfying to work with a much smaller organization and have more of a hands-on role. It’s harder to move organizations to a new place when they’re bigger.”
Ms. Woll’s new position at the International Women’s Media Foundation will find her working on projects at home and abroad. Based in Washington, the foundation tries to promote opportunities for women to become leaders in news media across the globe.
Founded by a group of female journalists in 1990, the International Women’s Media Foundation now has 1,500 members in 130 countries. It offers opportunities for female journalists to meet one another, as well as providing professional education and leadership-training programs.
While the organization has conducted seminars in places ranging from Asia to Latin America, it has only established permanent locations in the United States and Dakar, Senegal, where it has operated the African Women’s Media Center since 1997.
The African Women’s Media Center is the only continentwide organization working to develop and train African women for jobs in the news media, and has trained more than 900 women through 21 programs.
Ms. Woll is enthusiastic about the opportunity to help expand the permanent reach of the foundation to additional countries and hopes to establish centers similar to the one in Africa, accelerating the international aspects of the organization.
In an interview, Ms. Woll spoke about her new role:
After spending so much time on children’s rights, why did you want to work for an organization that focuses on the news media?
I’m very committed to advancement and empowerment of women. This is a media organization working to advance the role of the women in the media, but I don’t think that you can look at media as an atomized component. It’s linked to a whole range of democracy and human-rights issues.
I looked at this and saw a job that had multiple facets that were interesting to me, like empowering women, and then I started looking at the organization itself. I’m a big believer in working with an organization that has a committed board, and it had a very committed and interested board. Most of the staff had been here between three and seven years, and that is indicative of a healthy organization.
In terms of the work it does, it’s accomplished a lot and has the opportunity to do much more. The fact that it’s focusing on women’s voices in the media is very important.
There are a lot of media organizations that deal with ethics or skills. But I think dealing with broadening the presence of women’s voices is highly important in and of itself, and very impressive.
Why is it important to increase the number of women’s voices in the news media?
If you look at the opinion pages across the country, there’s a real lack of equal voices in terms of op-ed columns. And I say that not as a media professional at all, but as a newspaper reader.
And it’s the same with the top anchors. You see very few women. And the effect of that is that women are being held back from having senior, well-paid positions in the media. When women see media models that are male, it tends to limit their perception of what is possible for them.
What are your major goals for the foundation?
There is a real opportunity to establish more partnerships. It could be with media organizations, but also groups that work to promote a civil society, or human or children’s rights organizations.
I think there’s an opportunity for joint training, so if an organization is training political leaders, it could also train media leaders.
With those partnerships, we could broaden our donor base. We get a lot of support from media, and a lot of our foundation support is for media-based work.
My feeling is the work we do, while focused on the media, has impacts that extend far past the media, into the areas the media affects, like human rights and the rights of children. Those are the kinds of folks we honor, the ones who really open up free debate, the ones whose coverage of issues ends up unearthing corrupt government practices and the suppression of human-rights violations.
While we try to develop media people, we clearly have an impact in other areas. I’d like to see us talk about that some more.
ABOUT LISA WOLL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S MEDIA FOUNDATION
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Illinois and a master’s in women’s studies and public policy at George Washington University; won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Deakin University, in Australia.
Previous work experience: Executive director, Friends of Vista; legislative assistant, U.S. Congress; New York City Urban Fellow; director of the Washington office of Save the Children and a consultant to Save the Children Sweden and PLAN International.
Book on her bedside table: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides.
