We are grateful for inspiring philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott who is simply giving for a fairer future.

She shares the insights from her team’s rigorous process of research and analysis, as well as reflections of her personal journey. If you haven’t read her posts, please do:

1. 116 Organizations Driving Change (July 2020)
2. 384 Ways to Help (December 2020)
3. Seeding by Ceding (June 2021)

In just last year over 3 instalments, she donated no-strings-attached $8.5 billion to 786 organisations / initiatives / teams who are high impact, under-funded and overlooked. That means the average gift to a team is $10.8 million.

“Over 700 million people globally still live in extreme poverty. To find solutions, we all benefit from on-the-ground insights and diverse engagement, so we prioritized organizations with local teams, leaders of color, and a specific focus on empowering women and girls.”

Investing in women and girls has a proven multiplier effect, with benefits flowing to family and community, and women are often key to leading social change. Investing in women and girls can accelerate progress on a range of social issues.

Some of the 286 teams empowering voices of women and girls the world needs to hear include: 

• AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) a global, feminist, membership, movement-support organization working to achieve gender justice and women’s human rights worldwide.
• Co-Impact Gender Fund believes that effective systems change requires a resolute focus on equality and inclusion – and needs to explicitly address discrimination and barriers on the basis of gender, class, race/caste/ethnicity, sexual identity, disability, and other markers of exclusion. Co-Impact is a global collaborative for systems change, focused on improving the lives of millions of people around the world.
• Fondo Semillas is a non-profit organization focused on improving women’s lives in Mexico. They dream of a country where all women, indigenous, mestiza, black, young, migrant, heterosexual, lesbian, mothers, and students alike, can make their own decisions and have access to education, health services, a decent job, justice, and happiness.
• Girls First Fund bring together donors to fund community-based organizations that are working on the front lines to stop the practice of child marriage and early unions.
• Jan Sahas means ‘People’s Courage’. It is a 20-year-old community centric organization working intensively in 14000+ villages and urban areas of 57 districts across nine states of India. They work with the most excluded social groups on safe migration and workers’ protection; and prevention of sexual violence against women and children.
• Mann Deshi Foundation empowers female entrepreneurs and their communities by providing access to knowledge, capital, markets and social support. Their vision is to empower women to make their own choices and to be celebrated as equal and valuable members of their families and communities in India.
• mothers2mothers is building a healthy, thriving Africa. They employ women to guide other women and their families on the journey to good health.
• Muso means woman in Bambara, a lingua franca of Mali. Muso works to create a cure for delay because no one should die waiting for health care.
• Rise Up activates women and girls to transform their lives, families and communities for a more just and equitable world by investing in local solutions, strengthening leadership, and building movements.
• Room to Read, because knowing how to read makes people safer, healthier and more self-sufficient — yet over 750 million people are illiterate and two thirds are women and girls.
• Solidaire Network is a community of donor organizers who mobilize quickly to get critical resources and unprecedented amounts of solidarity to the frontlines of social justice movements. It was born out of a need to fight against corporate greed, economic inequality, climate change, gender and racial injustice, and anti-Blackness.
• The Antara Foundation deliver preventive public health and nutrition solutions at scales adequate for state and national impact. Their goal is to help improve some of India’s worst health outcomes, especially in maternal and child health, including malnutrition.
• The BOMA Project is ending extreme poverty in Africa by unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of women.
• The Freedom Fund is a leader in the global movement to end modern slavery. They identify and invest in the most effective frontline efforts to eradicate modern slavery in the countries and sectors where it is most prevalent.
• Tostan — which means ‘breakthrough’ in the Wolof language —empowers communities to develop and achieve their vision for the future and inspires large-scale movements leading to dignity for all. Men and women work together to promote equality and develop new social norms around respecting the human rights and dignity of women and girls and men and boys.
• Urban Bush Women seeks to bring the untold and under-told stories to light through dance. They do this from a woman-centered perspective and as members of the African Diaspora community in order to create a more equitable balance of power in the dance world and beyond.
• Women’s Audio Mission is a San Francisco/Oakland-based nonprofit organization that uses music and media and an incredible “carrot” of a training environment –  the only professional recording studio in the world built and run by women/GNC individuals –  to attract over 2,000 underserved women/girls/GNC individuals every year to STEM and creative technology studies that inspire them to amplify their voices and become the innovators of tomorrow.
• Women’s Funding Network is the largest philanthropic alliance in the world dedicated to advancing the essential role of these funders in the unwavering fight for gender equality and justice.
• Womankind uses the multidimensionality of its Asian heritage to work alongside survivors of gender-based violence as they build a path to healing.

Strengthening investment in women and girls helps create gender equality, and a fairer world for all. Everyone benefits from gender equality.

As Australians Investing In Women, we encourage philanthropists to ask two critical questions: Do you want your giving to support gender equality? And, how does your giving affect women and girls? Introduce gender inquiry into your giving, and intentionally address gender differences in your philanthropic policies, practices and programs – be a gender-wise philanthropist

Whether your passion is education, the arts, safety from violence, medical research or the environment, inter alia, our online project showcase can connect you to impactful projects that benefit women and girls across a range of social issues.