Health Funder Puts Women of Color Front and Center

Southern California Grantmakers
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Health Funder Puts Women of Color Front and Center Giving Compass

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Southern California Grantmakers (SCG) reports on the California Wellness Foundation’s investment in supporting improved health for women of color.

• The issues tackled (including a jobs initiative for formerly incarcerated women of color) have been underfunded in the past. How can the nonprofit world better focus our efforts to this population?

• Women of color still need more access to checkups and health screenings. Here’s one effort to help in that area.

The California Wellness Foundation is putting up $13 million over the next five years to better health outcomes for women of color through two distinct initiatives tackling issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite women.

Part of the funding will go toward treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. The rest will support a reentry and jobs initiative for formerly incarcerated women of color. Neither field is new to attention from philanthropy, but California Wellness is a rarity in focusing on the effects of these plights on women of color in particular.

As we’ve often reported, funders have tended to zero in on different parts of a sprawling criminal justice system that’s entangled millions of people. Cal Wellness is a case in point. All its work, including in this issue area, has been focused in California. The foundation has been part of a coalition of funders working to improve the state’s juvenile justice system. It is on the leadership team of a grantmakers group that’s led the work called California Funders for Boys and Men of Color.

Now, it’s putting money into another important niche. Despite the growing number of funders working on criminal justice issues, few focus on formerly incarcerated women or women of color specifically. But women are the fastest growing sector of the population behind bars, which includes jail, according to organizations that track those numbers. Women of color are overrepresented at every level of the prison system — federal, state and local.

Read the full article about the health funder prioritizing women of color by Caitlin Reilly at Southern California Grantmakers.

If you are looking for more articles and resources for Women and Girls, take a look at these Giving Compass selections related to impact giving and Women and Girls.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Microfinance as a Feminist Strategy

    With every day in America bringing news of regressive political changes that will negatively impact women, it’s important for those who want to increase gender equality to explore different strategies for reaching women who need resources. One strategy that recently caught my eye was Grameen America’s announcement that, in celebration of its 10-year anniversary in the U.S., it would enter the fray of impact investing and disburse an added $11 million in capital in microloans to low-income women across the country. With this new fund, over a five-year period, Grameen will make $140 million in loans to low-income women who are struggling to get a foothold in the U.S. economy as entrepreneurs. In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, many low-income women have been essentially locked out of the market for affordable financial products. These women are often excluded from traditional bank loans because of low or no credit, or they are gouged with usurious interest rates by predatory lenders. Microfinance, the loaning of small amounts (under $50,000) to borrowers with low or no credit, offers a nonprofit solution to this problem. Grameen America is the fastest growing microfinance organization in the U.S., and its model of lending to low-income women can have profound impacts on individual lives. But ultimately, the growing popularity of microfinance in America may be another indicator of the increasingly unstable financial picture for many American families, who can’t get credit, and are patching together an income between part-time jobs, personal enterprises, and small loans. Read the full article about growing women's financial power by Kiersten Marek at Philanthropy Women.

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