Hunt: Part of the ethic of a women’s fund that drew me to it was the board compilation, the commitment to cross-race, cross-class, cross-socioeconomic women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. The boards are
a compilation of the population served, which keeps it from being that top/down model. The second ethic that attracted me was that we had made a commitment to fund where there is the least access to resources, which makes sense. Maybe we could go where no one else was going, helping that Albanian woman or that Afghani woman. The third was the idea that the victim is the expert. When we heard that some women had a problem, instead of sending PhDs from MIT to come in and say, “Well, let’s analyze this, and let’s talk about the solution,” we would listen to the woman with the problem.
Disney: The New York Times ran a piece recently about domestic
violence. The police department had done a study about domestic violence in New York City, and what they found was, first of all, that immigrant women are especially vulnerable, and second, programs that work with immigrant women in a culturally appropriate way tend to work better. Well, hello! We have been funding such programs for 10 years. We could have told the police department much more than they learned in their independent study. It is time for us to really step up and start to tell our story, because we have learned about domestic violence, immigration, job training, welfare reform, housing, safety, the environment and sex trafficking. They are totally, totally connected; you can’t simply address one aspect of the system of obstacles that poor women confront.
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