Through our “Calling In Philanthropy” campaign, Washington Women’s Foundation became one of the first funders to sign the Funder Pledge. Recently, President and CEO Maria Kolby-Wolfe wrote the following:
“… in 23 years of granting and over 100 grants given out, we had only granted two gifts to organizations run by women of color that focused on people of color. Two. In over two decades. Whatever metrics we were using, whatever best practices we were employing, BIPOC communities — and the women of those communities in particular —were being left out of our circle of support. The impacts of white supremacy are insidious indeed. We had unwittingly perpetuated our own version of the very same inequities that drove the need we were trying to alleviate, granting an overwhelming majority of our resources to white-led organizations. Change was needed.”