By Jessica Lee, Senior Director of Partnerships and Senior Affairs at Women Moving Millions
With the combination of a sustainable base of support for operations and catalytic investments in capacity building, Women Moving Millions has been able to grow to new levels of scale and impact in order to respond effectively to the urgent, critical moment in the movement for gender equity.
Women Moving Millions is a community of individual philanthropists who each commit a minimum of $1m in philanthropic support to organizations serving women and girls. The organization fosters community and support among its members, supporting them in their journey as donors and leaders with learning and growth opportunities. Leveraging collective strength, voice, and networks, WMM advocates for gender equity and gender lens philanthropy. To date, the community of 360+ individuals has mobilized over $850M to advance gender equity around the world.
In 2021, the Board of Women Moving Millions made the decision to launch a member contribution model. The successful implementation of sustained member support has had numerous ripple effects. The first was that the organization was able to add to its senior team. With hires came the ability to pursue bigger partnerships and complementary revenue sources, which directly advanced the mission “bottom line” — membership growth, enhanced member programming, and strengthening advocacy and influence objectives.
The organization also pursued strategic projects only possible with a larger staff team, notably undertaking its most thorough impact assessment to date. Robust measurement, evaluation, and learning (MEL) is not a capacity most philanthropy serving organizations are able to build. With the resources provided by member support as well as a dedicated 3-year grant–its largest ever from a member–WMM could complete a high-quality evaluation and lay the groundwork for building a MEL function in the organization. WMM aims to both set the bar for the field and produce evaluation results that are meaningful and informative for practitioners outside the WMM community, strengthening the broader field of gender lens philanthropy with the results.
Jessica is the Senior Director of Partnerships and External Affairs at Women Moving Millions. She is responsible for strategic partnerships, revenue growth, and external relations. Jessica has fifteen years of experience working alongside social entrepreneurs to resource, structure, and implement innovative social change initiatives.
This blog post is part of a series of published materials that are contributing to Propel Philanthropy’s Collaborative Media Campaign.