This essay is part of a Women & Democracy package focused on who’s funding the women and LGBTQ people on the frontlines of democracy. We’re manifesting a new era for philanthropy—one that centers feminism. The need is real: Funding for women and girls amounts to less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving; for women of color, it’s less than 1 percent. Explore the “Feminist Philanthropy Is Essential to Democracy” collection.
Many people don’t realize the significance of June 25, 2013.
On that day, thousands of Texans—most of them women—peacefully protested two extreme bills restricting access to abortion at the state Capitol, which culminated in then-state Sen. Wendy Davis’ successful filibuster of the legislation. More than 180,000 people around the country watched the proceedings via livestream.
I was in the Senate gallery at midnight when the session adjourned and the legislation failed—my heart lifted by the power of solidarity and devastated by the testimony of survivors of rape and incest, who bravely came forward to illustrate why abortion care is health care.
June 25, 2013, was the same day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, effectively gutting the Voting Rights Act and revoking the country’s promise that all Americans, regardless of their race, have the right to vote. The weakening of this landmark legislation was an ominous precursor of what was to come.
Within just 10 years, the successful conservative capture of the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and a series of anti-democratic decisions making it easier to discriminately purge voters from the rolls (Husted v. APRI), criminalizing ballot collection and increasing ballot rejection rates (Brnovich v. DNC) and more.
For me, June 25, 2013, is a solemn, oft-forgotten reminder that as long as racial and gender inequality persist, the promise of American democracy will remain a promise unfulfilled.
Perhaps more so than any other moment in my career, that day led me to my current position leading One for Democracy, an organization unlocking resources to build a healthy democracy by fostering meaningful relationships between philanthropists and the democracy leaders of our time. We are guided by the belief that democracy can only thrive when it is structured as an inclusive system that distributes power and influence equitably, rewards cross-partisan collaboration, and sustains these outcomes through a robust set of checks and balances.
One for Democracy funds near-term strategies to put out fires jeopardizing the security and legitimacy of our elections, and longer-term strategies to address the root causes of these fires. These root causes are fundamentally about exclusion from the benefits a society can bestow on the basis of gender, race and class, and about domination of limited resources to maintain a status quo that benefits the few, not the many.
We do this by activating a diverse cross-section of donors: women and men of varying ages, races and industries, with earned and inherited wealth. We offer them fee-free advice on how to structure their democracy giving and introduce them directly to nonprofit leaders to fund, rather than acting as a shield between donors and leaders. And we gather these folks with intention, offering opportunities to learn and co-fund, and to find common ground and shared aspirations we can pursue together.
We invest in a diverse body of work, most of which is led by women and people of color, and we work with these leaders to close the gap in gender and racial representation at every level of government, and to remove structural barriers to that leadership. Our approach is intentionally collaborative: One for Democracy doesn’t decide who the most deserving organizations are, or which strategies are the most important at the exclusion of others, which is a fundamentally patriarchal approach.
We support policy agendas that give different sets of stakeholders a seat at the table—working people, parents, community advocates, business leaders—and witness how those agendas serve far more constituents when they are designed by people with lived experience and expertise. This includes but goes beyond expansion of childhood tax credits, free school breakfasts and lunches, expansion of Medicaid, adoption of paid family and medical leave, raising wages, and making small business applications and loans more accessible.
We strengthen facets of civic life that have been co-opted or eroded by big tech and consolidated mass media, by partisan capture of state and federal courts, and by lawmakers who refuse to make elections modernized, accessible and secure—who instead erect barriers at every turn.
Democracy is a set of complex questions of power—who has it, who decides who has it, how it is wielded and how power is held to account. One for Democracy structures our funding accordingly.
Think investing in women is essential to democracy? We do too. Sign up for our daily or weekly emails to hear from (and join!) the feminist philanthropists funding the future. (We heard alliteration is back in style.) Or go back to the essay collection.
