The Roles Women Can Play As Leadership Mentors

Forbes Dec 18, 2018
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• In this Forbes post, the CEO of the organization Room to Read discusses how women can support each other in finding their voices and negotiating for their own interests.

• There’s an emphasis on mentorship and advocacy here. What can nonprofits do to advance such efforts?

• These other women CEOs share how they smashed the glass ceiling.

My daughter is what most would describe as a typical nine-year-old girl. She is bold, strong-willed and not afraid to test boundaries. Quite often, I find myself in a flustered stalemate with her, likely because she inherits those attributes from me.

Under our same roof lives my mother, a woman whose spirit — even through the fog of Alzheimer’s disease — emanates the unrelenting will of a girl who escaped early marriage in India 65 years ago, pursued an education and then built a multi-faceted career, unlocking a new life for herself and endless possibilities for her future family.

Negotiation and persuasion effectively altered the lives of women in my family so, even in moments of mania-inducing frustration, I encourage and revere my daughter’s ability to be a force of nature …

As leaders, regardless of our gender, it is incumbent upon us to venerate women who break the mold and celebrate their bravery. For those of us who are female leaders, we can lead by example and ostensibly advocate for ourselves and female colleagues when policies and practices disadvantage women. Here are a few additional actions we can take to champion the young women in our personal and professional communities:

  • Strengthen the connections among women.
  • Embrace mentoring moments, offering insight or support that may provide a needed boost of confidence or assurance.
  • Negotiate communally. Acknowledge that each personal success is a collective victory for all.
  • Encourage positive feelings about negotiation and a strong sense of self-worth.

Read the full article about girls in leadership roles by Geetha Murali at Forbes.

Learning and benchmarking are key steps towards becoming an impact giver. If you are interested in giving with impact on Women and Girls take a look at these selections from Giving Compass.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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    Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector: Evaluation

    If done properly, evaluation holds the potential to be a valuable tool for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in individual foundations and throughout the work of the field. Indeed, if DEI is to mean anything, evaluation must become fully incorporated into everything that happens in the work of philanthropy. Toward this goal, there is a wonderfully promising effort called the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, a five-year effort that attempts “to align evaluation practices with an equity approach — and even more powerfully, to use evaluation as a tool for advancing equity.” The Initiative’s approach is based upon four important principles: diversity of teams, cultural appropriateness, use of evaluation to reveal structural inequity, and advancing the community role in shaping evaluation. It is establishing critical infrastructure for embedding and assessing DEI efforts throughout the field and should be supported and embraced by foundations and field infrastructure organizations alike. Philanthropy needs to recognize that organization size and access to resources should impact considerations of the type of evaluation deployed. In particular, small nonprofits and those operating in poorer regions and communities of color in literally every state are often negatively impacted by broad, one-size-fits-all approaches to evaluation.   (Of the nation’s estimated 1.5 million nonprofit organizations, 72 percent have budgets of $500,000 or less, and of those, 61 percent have budgets of $100,000 or less, according to Nonprofit Finance Fund.) At the end of the day, the sector must recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach to evaluation doesn’t benefit foundations, nonprofits, or the constituents nonprofits seek to serve. Read the full article about social justice by Miles Wilson at The Center for Effective Philanthropy. 

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