Women

Women are exerting a greater influence on how philanthropy is done as they accumulate wealth and use their clout to change the way funds are raised and distributed. Roughly 1 million women in the United States each have assets of at least $2 million, according to 2007 Internal Revenue Service data, the most recent available. Wealth controlled by charitably minded women can be expected to grow as they build careers and inherit money from their parents and their husbands.

Bright Pink is a national nonprofit organization with an annual operating budget of $900,000 that provides education and support to young women who are at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer.

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta announced that the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) named the pediatric nonprofit as one of the NAFE Top Nonprofit Companies for Executive Women. A newly released report revealed that women hold 38 percent of the executive positions at the NAFE Top Nonprofit Companies. The new report, conducted by the Working Mother Research Institute, also finds that women hold 27 percent of all board of director seats at the NAFE Top Nonprofit Companies, compared with 16 percent across the Fortune 500.

In nearly 90 percent of high net worth households, women are either the sole decision maker or an equal partner in decisions about charitable giving, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2011 Study of High Net Worth Women’s Philanthropy.

Wal-Mart has committed $100-million in grants to nonprofit groups that provide job training to women as part of a $20-billion campaign to boost female economic development, according to The New York Times and the Associated Press.

The grants will support development of work and financial skills for hundreds of thousands of women in the United States and abroad, including female employees at Wal-Mart’s suppliers.

The NoVo Foundation kicks off its Move to End Violence initiative, a groundbreaking, 10-year, $80 million initiative designed to strengthen the movement to end violence against girls and women in the United States. The program is designed as a series of five cohorts, each on a two-year cycle. Over the life of the initiative, Move to End Violence will engage over 100 individuals and as many organizations, establishing a powerful infrastructure of sophisticated leaders and organizations to lead the effort to end violence against girls and women in the United States.

To Mama With Love is a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in remarkable women who are transforming our world.

A new research and community awareness project set to kick off next week will aim to zero in on the gender gap in the nonprofit sector — particularly why women nonprofit executives trail men in salaries.

The effort, called "74 percent: Exploring the Lives of Women in Nonprofits," is being launched by the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University with funding from the Bayer USA and Eden Hall foundations.

In April, a panel of experts gathered at Spelman to address how women are leveraging this economic power to redefine philanthropy in the 21st century. "Funding the Future: How Women are Shaping Philanthropy" honed in on how women are changing philan
thropy as heads of foundations, individual donors and major supporters of a variety of institutions and projects.

Next time you're out raising money for your favorite charity, you would do best to first hit up your female friends — or perhaps the wives of your male ones. Women, it appears, are much better givers.

According to a recent study by the Women's Philanthropy Institute at the University of Indiana, women are as much as 40% more likely to donate than men. What's more, women at nearly every income level are better givers. Not only do they give more often; they also tend to donate more.