Client Spotlight: WOMEN’S WAY
In honor of Women’s History Month, Strategy Arts interviewed Diane Cornman-Levy, Executive Director of WOMEN’S WAY, to discuss an initiative started in 2017 to address economic insecurity for women in Philadelphia, called the Women’s Economic Security Initiative (WESI).
In 2017 Strategy Arts worked with WOMEN’S WAY to begin WESI. What have been some of the major outcomes of this initiative and how has it impacted women in Philadelphia over the last few years?
Today, WESI has 85 active members representing over 60 organizations and women with lived experience of economic insecurity. Work groups meet monthly and a steering committee guides the work.
WESI piloted a financial coaching program which trained women to become financial coaches and embedded them in organizations that are accessible to women. The pilot was extremely successful and led to a three-year grant to scale the work across the region to reach 15,000 women in 150 organizations.
The work of WESI helped secure a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to support a 6-month fellowship program called Change the Narrative. For this program, WESI selected 10 women with lived experience of economic insecurity to train and support in telling their stories. The goal is to target media, philanthropy, and policy makers in challenging the negative or incorrect assumptions they may be perpetuating about women who are economically insecure and to spur actions among these three groups to address the root and systemic causes of the gender and racial wealth gap.
We are evolving WESI into the Gender Wealth Institute. This is a 5-year 5-million-dollar plan to deepen the systems change work that WESI has started, with a strong focus on asset-building.
From your vantage point, how did the collective impact model shape this work?
A core pillar of the collective impact model is the backbone role. Strategy Arts worked with us to create a framework and process that empowered us to be an effective convener. We knew that the success of the first meeting was critical to engage stakeholders. We had to learn how to prepare and facilitate good meetings. We also had to learn the nuances of how to facilitate the collective — not control it. WOMEN’S WAY invested in this role with a dedicated staff person that worked with Strategy Arts from the beginning so we could build the framework and skills to be effective as the backbone.
From the beginning you were committed to centering the voices of the women who have experienced economic insecurity. What was important about how this work was done? Can you speak to how our Equitable Community Engagement approach influenced this work?
It was about making the connections to help us build the relationships first. The Community Conversations group that Strategy Arts started for us has been an important space for women with lived experience of economic insecurity to give and receive peer support. It empowered them in their own efforts to build economic security and to gain confidence to join work groups, the steering committee, and take on leadership roles.
Perhaps even more important, the Equitable Community Engagement work changed our way of thinking and doing things. We systematically looked at all our practices to identify barriers that women with lived experience of economic insecurity experienced when engaging in WESI and created an intentional plan to implement more equitable practices. This work has had influence beyond WESI and permeated all our work at WOMEN’S WAY.
It is International Women’s Day — how can organizations center women in their work?
Make a commitment to center the voices of women. Make room and space for women to sit at the table and deeply listen to them and learn from them. When you do, you will figure out how to center women in your own context. Beyond having women with the lived experience of economic insecurity involved throughout the initiative, we have looked for other ways to amplify their voices. We have had women co-author a journal article, speak at our annual celebration, and present at regional and national conferences.
In the field of philanthropy, women with lived experience of economic insecurity need to be part of the grantmaking process, specifically they need to be co-creating new strategies and approaches to address gender inequities and be part of the decision-making process of where the money goes. We have learned that we can no longer afford to have individuals sitting in board rooms who are far removed from the issues at hand determining who and who to fund. To achieve gender and racial equity, it is imperative that women with lived experiences of economic hardship sit at the table and be heard. It is time for them to be actors and influencers rather than passive recipients of services designed without their input and perspectives. It is time for funders and organizations to consider the recipients of services as actors and influencers and move forward in ways that intentionally include their input and perspectives.
Strategy Arts is a planning, facilitation and community engagement firm that works with nonprofits, government agencies and initiatives across the country. To learn more about our work, please visit www.strategyarts.com
