All three have aligned their foundations with the Women’s Funding Network (WFN), a coalition of about 100 private and community foundations across the world, that, since its founding in 1985, has awarded more than $200 million in grants aimed at the symptoms and causes of poverty among women. “These are powerful women with incredible expertise that could be utilized by this country and by a global network of lawmakers to actually shift and change the world,” WFN executive director Christine Grumm says. The money distributed is a relatively small amount in the philanthropic world, however. Grumm notes that only about
6 percent of all foundation grants directly support programs for women and girls, although the figure has risen from 2 percent when the network launched 20 years ago.
In a conversation with Grumm and Worth features editor Jan Alexander, the three philanthropists, Disney, Gary and Hunt, discussed growing up with highly visible wealth and how they have used their money.
 Abigail Disney: My mother used to say to me, “Be proud that you have a name to live up to, and not a name to live down.” I’ve always been very aware that I have a name that resonates in a positive way for people, and I feel incredibly blessed by that. I didn’t really understand, though, the way it can be the elephant in the room for people until I got to college.
It’s hard to tease out what in my heritage is about the name and what is about money, so I lump it all together. But it is a bit like being born really, really beautiful; it makes people gravitate to you for all the wrong reasons. Some people take you too seriously; some people don’t take you seriously enough. Somewhere around my 20s, I started figuring out that the name of the game was going to be finding people well-adjusted enough that they would have a neutral reaction to me.
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