The Strategic Partners Initiative for
Women's Economic Justice and Independence
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"The grant we received through the Strategic Partners initiative gave us the freedom to assess how well our programs were serving women with particular and persistent barriers to employment. It engaged us in conversations with practitioners throughout the country who were wrestling with similar issues. It has resulted in a new initiative that has pushed us to examine and define our mission in broader terms. In the end it has leveraged new private and public funding that will support the initiative in its first years. We could not be more grateful for the Fund’s support and its active partnership with us.
Simply put, this grant has been transformative."
Tiffany Bluemle, Executive Director, Vermont Works for Women
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The Strategic Partners Initiative began with a generous anonymous donation to The Vermont Women's Fund of $100,000 in memory of the donor’s wife. The funds came to the us with the stipulation that they not be placed into our endowment, but rather be granted out into the community for direct, long-lasting impact.
With this opportunity, the Women’s Fund began a process to determine the most strategic use of the funds. After much data gathering and consideration we decided to use the gift to establish an exciting new initiative of multi-year “pro-active” grant awards. The funding would be used to address barriers to women's economic justice, and promote the economic stability, security, independence and self-determination of Vermont women and girls.
Three leading Vermont organizations with proven track records of strong, broad-based, social impact programming and collaboration were selected through a proposal process to participate in this new initiative – Central Vermont Community Action Council in Barre, Mercy Connections in Burlington, and Vermont Works for Women in Winooski. The first round of Strategic Partner grants were awarded in May 2007, with each organization receiving a total of $30,000: $15,000 a year for two years.
With the idea of information sharing and collaboration being an integral part of the initiative, representatives from the four Partner organizations, (the three grant recipients and the VWF), have come together on a quarterly basis since 2007. These forums have given the Partners a chance to present progress reports on their work and, more importantly, discuss the challenges and opportunities involved in addressing women's economic independence and such interwoven issues as poverty, job readiness, credit education, and incarceration. As a tool to help better understand and gauge the desired impact of this body of work, the Women's Fund also engaged the services of a professional evaluator to work with the group at the quarterly forums as well as provide one on one consultation with each of the Partners over the course of the past two years.
As we near the end of this initiative in summer 2009, the VWF Strategic Partners Committee is hard at work determining the best way to share with community leaders, legislators, educators and fellow philanthropists the knowledge gained through this experience - including awareness of promising program models that address economic justice for the women and girls of Vermont, and valuable insight into this more intensive, partnership-model of grantmaking.
Please revisit our web site in the coming months to learn more about the Strategic Partners' collective body of work and hear about next steps for The Vermont Women's Fund's Strategic Partners initiative.