After taking a few weeks off this summer, I’ve returned to The Women’s Foundation re-energized and excited about the coming months.

Today is Women’s Equality Day – the anniversary of the day that women finally won the right to vote in 1920.  In a year when a woman was a serious contender for the Presidency and another woman is Speaker of the House, we should take a moment to celebrate how much has changed thanks to the work and sacrifices of the suffragettes.

I always knew the Women’s Foundation’s grantmaking process was rigorous, but it wasn’t until I joined the Open Door Capacity Fund Committee that learned why it is so successful in identifying the most deserving organizations and in holding each of them accountable for the greatest possible impact in their community.

I was thrilled to open the Washington Business Journal last week to see the work that we’re doing to form a collaborative around the issue of child care and early education in our region highlighted!  (To view the article online, click here.  Or, for a PDF, click here.)

I frequently ponder and analyze various issues affecting women, and the lives of women in general.  How far we have come over the last few decades, how grand the numerous obstacles that still hinder us are, what the plentiful definitions of feminism are and how women choose to adopt them.

Last week, seeing the story of the African American Women’s Giving Circle gave me such a professional high.  Nothing I had been involved in to date had been deemed so newsworthy as to grace the front page of The Washington Post!  So I was thrilled to be connected to this. 

I didn’t do it because I had the perfect body.

I did it because I didn’t.

I was just recovering from the birth of my second child, and needed to shake a bit of baby fat, in fact.

I hope you all have had a chance to read Phyllis’ commentary in the Spotlight on Poverty.

I am one of the staff here at The Women’s Foundation working on the Women’s Economic Security Collaborative (WESC) and I think it is a very exciting project.  We have the opportunity to really help low-income women and their families throughout the country by bringing greater attention to the issue and the policies that affect it.

Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity is a foundation-led initiative that aims to build and sustain public and political will to alleviate poverty.  This week, The Women’s Foundation’s president, Phyllis Caldwell, had the opportunity to write a commentary focusing on the importance of developing a Poverty Impact Statement to measure the effect of proposed policy on women and their families.

The Post headline, "Africa’s Last and Least: Cultural Expectations Ensure Women are Hit Hardest by Burgeoning Food Crisis," really strikes me.  And not just because I’ve been there and have seen it firsthand.