Giving Compass' Take:

• As Fast Company reports, the Obama Foundation has partnered with GoFundMe to act as a coordinator for donors to support organizations empowering young girls through education. 

• This Global Girls Alliance hopes to reduce the rates of childhood marriage and other obstacles to future opportunities. Will crowdfunding prove to be a strong tool in this effort?

• Here are a few other ways individual donors can help fight for gender equality.

Michelle Obama announced the launch of the Obama Foundation’s Global Girls Alliance, an effort to provide more educational access to adolescent girls around the world. An estimated 98 million adolescent girls aren’t currently enrolled in school despite plenty of evidence proving that better attendance correlated with reduced poverty, better life chances, and especially lower rates of childhood marriage and mother and infant mortality.

The Obama Foundation raised nearly $233 million in private donations last year but in this instance appears, for some reason, to be operating largely as a cause coordinator — not putting up its own money. In addition to creating a network with 1,400 different grassroots cause groups sharing lessons, resources, and ideas, it’s partnering with crowdfunding giant GoFundMe to create a Global Girls Alliance hub where groups can ask the public for more support.

“We chose this model of support to grassroots leaders so that donors can see and support real people and real projects, and so that the foundation is supplementing but not replicating the work that other major nonprofits in this field are doing,” says Tiffany Drake, the director of the Global Girls Alliance. “Our hope is to create an additional way for grassroots leaders around the world to get funding, closing that last 10 feet between financial support and an organization seeking help.”

Read the full article about the Global Girls Alliance by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.